Jake (California Dreamy) - By Rian Kelley Page 0,6

part a little breathlessly before she spoke.

“Why not?” Her voice was heavy with skepticism. “Isn’t that every soldier’s hot spot?”

“There you go again,” he said. “Talking like that.”

He laughed when her cheeks filled with color.

“I just meant in terms of destination.”

She tried to look down her nose at him, but he was a good six inches taller than her.

“Exactly.” But he let her off the hook. “My ‘hot spot’ is the complete opposite of Vegas and other similar places. I don’t take a lot of time off, but when I do I prefer to spend it away from civilization.”

“So why Vegas?”

“It was an order,” he admitted reluctantly. He stepped back, leaned against the roof of her car, and watched her face adjust to that news. Surprise made her wide lips open and pause on the edge of laughter.

“You were ordered to go to Vegas?”

“Exactly. Four days of R and R.”

The laughter came then, full and throaty and Jake felt that ache build again, pull along his shaft. God, she played him and she wasn’t even aware of it.

“You say that like it’s a prison sentence. Four days of show girls and all-you-can-eat—isn’t that a soldier’s dream come true?”

“Not this soldier,” he assured her.

“So you’re looking for an excuse to turn around?”

“I was told not to help little old ladies.” The General had said nothing about young, gorgeous, sin in every line of her body woman.

“I’m not old.”

“Exactly,” he agreed. “I think I might squeak through.”

“You’re disobeying a direct order,” Ivy said.

“It’s complicated.” He felt and heard the tightness in his voice. His throat ached every time he thought about Arturo, the one he lost. His first. God willing, his last.

“You can’t go back,” the General had reminded him. “You can’t change the outcome for

one. You remember you made the world better for many. You remember that sometimes there are sacrifices. McAllister’s life and death were meaningful. That’s what we all want. You let him rest with that.”

And Jake believed that. If it came down to losing his own life, that’s exactly the way he wanted it. It’s the way they all wanted it—for their lives to add up to greater than one.

Still, Jake had lost a man. A good man. A man with a wife and two children. It’d been three months since the fire shower, the missiles exploding and shaking the earth, hard and close and knocking them to their knees, but the memory had only begun to fade around the edges. They had reached their target—an Israeli operative and two U.S. contractors—and brought them to safety. The human cost—two shot, but none left behind enemy lines.

“The first loss is always the toughest. But I’ll tell you this, son, the fact that you’ve been doing this for eight years now, with two tours through the Middle East and forays into Benghazi and Uganda—scuttling into enemy territory, rife with booby traps and land mines—and you just now suffered a casualty tells me a lot about the kind of leader you are. Born into it, you were.”

And that might be true.

“I’m capable of higher order thinking,” Ivy said now. When Jake refocused on the present he noticed that her face had softened, and not with the warmth of attraction. She had changed, in response to Jake’s shift in mood. He felt the tension in his shoulders and knew he’d worn his feelings. “And I have a good ear.”

You’d think his shift into the past would wipe out his state of semi-arousal. Not so. But in addition to responding to her on a physical level, he felt pulled to her softness in spirit.

“I’ve made my confessions,” Jake said. He tried to make his words easy but they sounded anything but.

Ivy shrugged. “I have, too,” she returned, “but talk is good for the soul.”

Jake had done his time with the resident shrink. It was a requirement of every field officer who lost a man in battle. And the truth was, it had been good for him. Still, Ivy was getting too close, too fast. Jake didn’t let anyone even tiptoe into that area and here she was driving a bus through it.

“If you have a soul,” Jake returned.

Chapter Three

Ivy pulled on the shoulder harness of her seat belt and eased it back into place. She was turned so that her back was against the door and she could watch Jake drive. He had a strong profile and when he smiled, which didn’t happen often, the stiff cast of his face relaxed. She noticed