The Patriot A Small Town Romance - Jennifer Millikin Page 0,14

Dakota,” I hear my dad say. I focus my gaze on Beau. My face stretches into a smile, small and polite, and I refuse to look anywhere but at him. Certainly not to the other man in the room.

The man I spent one night with five years ago.

“This is my son, Wes,” Beau says, introducing him to my dad, then to me. I nod politely, training my eyes on the wall behind Wes so I don’t actually have to look at him.

My dad, Beau, and Wes come to the table and sit down. Mechanically, I do the same. How the hell am I going to get through this meeting? I can barely grasp on to a coherent thought, let alone speak one.

I force my gaze up.

Up from the pattern of wood grain in the table.

Past his gray button-up covered chest.

Landing on his angular jawline, his cheeks pulled taut, his brown eyes that still hold secrets and pain.

And absolutely zero recognition of me.

5

Wes

Dakota.

Dakota Wright. Five years later and I’m finally learning her last name.

How the fuck am I supposed to concentrate with her sitting across from me? After that night in Colorado, I never thought I’d see her again. How is it even possible that she works with the development company looking to buy the land we put up for sale? How, on God’s green earth, can this seriously be happening right now?

I’ve done everything I can to forget about that night. Not because of her. Because of me.

I cried in front of her. Fucking cried. It was my first night back in the states after I was discharged from the Army. I’d stopped in Denver on my way home to Arizona and visited a buddy who’d gotten out the year before me. He was having a party at his lakeside place and wanted me to stay with him.

I’d been so ready to let loose, to start life as a civilian. Until I went home and eventually took the rightful title of owner of HCC, I was a free man. And I took advantage of my freedom that night. I stayed on the edge of the party, watching the girl in the middle of it all wearing the sorority shirt. It was cropped and showed her tan, flat stomach. She danced around under the white lights strung from the trees, laughing with her friends. Then she walked away from them, her gaze found mine, and everything happening around us was put on pause. She came toward me, hips swaying and a look on her face that told me she felt as knocked off her axis as me. On her walk over, she snatched a bottle of whiskey off a nearby table and took a swig. She stopped just out of my reach, and it nearly killed me because I wanted her in my arms with a ferocity I’d never felt, and haven’t since.

After that, there wasn’t a person at that party who thought we weren’t going home together. Anybody looking at us would’ve called us soul mates. And we made the most of the hours we spent together. But then I went and cried. I motherfucking cried in front of the most beautiful, fun-loving, smartest woman I’d ever met. All she did was ask me what the Middle East was like, but it brought tears out of me when all I wanted was to shove down everything that happened and lock it up tight. Who could blame me for getting the fuck out of there after she fell asleep?

Or for acting like I don’t recognize her right now?

She knew who I was right away, and it took everything in me not to bypass her dad and her vise-grip on the edge of the table and gather her into my arms.

Now I’m averting my gaze and I can feel hers burning holes into me. I don’t blame her. I’d throat-punch any dickhead who did to my sister what I did to Dakota.

“Hi, I’m so sorry I’m late,” someone at the door says, and I turn around to see who’s come in.

“It’s okay, Jericho, please join us.” My dad gestures to the empty seat between me and Mr. Wright.

I’d completely forgotten the realtor my dad hired was coming today. When he’d said Jericho Barnett, I’d pictured an old man with more hair in his ears than on his head, but this is definitely not a man. This is an attractive forty-something woman wearing a tight shirt and an even tighter skirt. She shakes