Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,80

run, Luke had never heard her complain, not once. She rolled with the punches and took what came at her. That was his understanding of the world. That’s the way his parents rolled, facing difficulties head on, without complaint. And as a Ranger, he and his teammates had bitched in funny filthy language all the time about the sand, the food, the showers, but never complained about the real hardships of going on patrol, going into danger day after fucking day. No one complained about that. They’d all been naturally brave and stoic.

Hope was like that.

She resonated with him. She’d struck a match that just lit him up, opened him up.

Including his stomach. Yeah, strange but true. Luke hadn’t felt hunger since, well since the Sigma Phi Five. Food held no appeal and he had to force himself to eat. With Hope, he was hungry. Ravenous, in fact. Hungry for food, for sex, for her company. For life. For her.

And for the first time in a very long time he thought about the future. His, specifically. And in a positive way. During combat operations, you don’t think about the future and you don’t think about the past, you are fully focused on surviving the present moment. Survival took up his entire hard disk. Trying his damndest to keep his men alive and himself, too, while he was at it.

The future was this massive unknowable dark mountain far away in the distance that he couldn’t climb because there was the mountain of survival right in front of him. Even back at the FOBs, no one thought of the future. The most you could think of was planning the next mission, the next patrol.

Right now, the future stretched out before him like an upland meadow in spring. Full of unicorns and flowers and butterflies.

He smiled to himself at the turn his own brain was taking. Well, not unicorns and flowers and butterflies, no. But he could think about a future where Hope was in his life. Maybe — if he played his cards right — living with him. Maybe even … married to him. That would be great, but a stretch. He wasn’t that big a catch. He was an ex-soldier, ex-cop who would forever be linked to a huge scandal. Someday in the future people would only remember his name, a murder and vicious kids, but it wouldn’t be clear who did what and what role he played. He was the good guy but that was sometimes lost. The parents of the killers had spent a lot of money to muddy the waters and make him out to be an incompetent cop. That kind of mud stuck.

He had no money.

True, he was about to join ASI, a really good, solid company full of friends. But it would take a while for him to get back on a solid financial footing.

Luckily, it appeared Hope didn’t care about that. About any of it. She had what the Reynolds family had always had, an ability to see to the heart of things and not be distracted by appearances.

So … there seemed to be a real possibility that she would be in his life, maybe living with him. Working with him in the Pearl, at ASI. Yeah.

Oh, man.

His stomach rumbled. But first food.

“I heard that,” she said dreamily, eyes closed. Luke looked down at her, at the delicate profile, the fine features, the creamy skin. A view that could be his for the rest of his life. Would be his if he had anything to say about it.

He laughed. Another new thing in his life. Laughter. “Yeah? You up for some food?”

She drew in a deep breath and then her stomach rumbled, too. A cute little girly growl. “I guess I am.”

Her eyes popped open and their gazes locked. A smile spread across his face. It took a moment for him to recognize what his face was doing, it felt so alien. He’d been doing a lot of that lately, straining some muscles in his face.

“There’s pancake mix and real maple syrup. I can make pancakes if there’s a mix involved.”

She frowned, a little line appearing between her dark eyebrows. “I have no idea what time it is but I think it’s late. I think it might be … dinner time and not breakfast time?”

“Hmm.” The reliable clock in Luke’s head said 8.15 pm. 20.15 in military time. “You’ve never eaten breakfast food for dinner?”

Hope smiled. “All the time. Especially if I’m on a work