Joker Joker (The Deuces Wild Series Book 2)

by Irish Winters

  Tate dipped his head and planted a kiss in the center of Winslow’s forehead.

  Home. He was finally home.

  This is what heaven feels like, Winslow thought as she lay sweaty and panting in Tate’s arms. Heaven was a lot like flying—make that soaring—to unimaginable heights. Upward into the stars like a crazy rocket. Or fireworks, the kinds that spiral up and out of sight before they blossom into dazzling, scorching fireballs that clenching him with aftershocks as if her body didn’t want him to leave. That’s what coming with Tate was. Fireworks, flying, and falling all at the same time. What a rush.

  She opened her eyes to find the handsome-as-sin face an inch from her nose. Hazy brown eyes gleamed down at her. With a soft thud, he bumped foreheads. “I love you Winslow/Brooklyn/Bdub Lockette, soon to be Winslow/Brooklyn/Bdub Higgins.”

  Ah, he made her giggle. Imagine all those names on their marriage license.

  “I think I love you more,” she murmured, loving his minty breath in her face, and the way his freshly shaved chin abraded hers. “Kiss me,” she urged. Again and again and again. Never let me go.

  He obliged, locking his mouth over hers. If this was heaven, she was never leaving. He kissed her thoroughly, nipping at her lips, then suckling as if he was still hungry.

  She was. With her fingers threaded in his thick hair, she gave as good as she got, her energy level off the charts.

  “Shower?” he asked as he ended the kiss, his voice guttural and so damned sexy. “We’re late for dinner.”

  “I’ve got what I’m hungry for,” she told him, “but okay. I guess you’re right.”

  After another heart stopping kiss, he untangled from her arms and legs. She knew he was being gentlemanly and disposing of the condom, but what a sight, his tanned shoulders so wide at the top, his back bunched with coiled musculature that ended at the most glorious backside. Taut and solid, not an ounce of jiggle. His cheeks hollowed at every step, but the best part of that butt? It’s all mine.

  The shower was quick, and Tate was efficient, spending extra time on his knees in front of her as if he couldn’t look at her bare body enough. He gazed up, his eyes big and black, water streaming over his face and through his hair. “You’re perfect,” he murmured, tipping forward to plant one kiss on her—there.

  Her body clenched at the daring contact. Did lovers kiss each other—there? Oh my.

  His rugged face shone, his lips wet and crystal drops clinging to his brows and eyelashes. “Just you wait.”

  Her heart pounded at that tantalizing promise. How did he do that? Turn her legs to jelly with just three words? She knew how the biology worked, but practice. She wanted more practice!

  Tate straightened. Melting against his chest, Winslow linked her arms around his waist, and let the warm shower drizzle on their joined bodies. Her bear of a man was a good armful. Her fingers barely came together at the small of his back. She smiled, so happy that tears stung. What had begun as a burdensome blind date was ending perfectly.

  She thought back to that day on the water tower when she’d been so depressed, she’d been tempted to step off the edge, to quit. The only thing that stopped her was the love of the little dog waiting for her to come home, the same little dragon now snuggled in her bedroom, probably on her pillow.

  Tate was right. Even at the worst of times, there was still hope.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Tate took a deep breath, scratched his left brow, then took that all important step around the corner and into the Lockette family dining room with Winslow tucked under his arm. Where she belonged, damn it. Ready to face the music.

  Cue the evil eye. Make that eyes. Emma looked up, but her lips didn’t crack the barest hint of a smile. Oh, shit…

  Booker shot him a sharp green bullet. “Took you long enough. Dinner’s cold.”

  Double shit. It was suddenly hard to swallow. Black operator or not, Tate felt as unprepared as he’d ever been. This was Winslow’s father, and Booker had every right to knock Tate on his ass for what he’d just been doing to his daughter—in his home no less. Tate met those offended greens head-on. Winslow was worth fighting for. Here it comes. Let it rain.

  Emma made a funny sound, not so much a cough as a twitter, right before she burst out grinning. “You two. You should see the looks on your faces.” She waved them to the table, smiling now. “Quick. Come eat before Marietta takes the platters away.”

  Tate waited to seat Winslow, and didn’t his heart flush with male pride when she took the seat next to his designated chair, putting herself in the sizzling line of fire between him and Booker. When Tate sank to her side, she grabbed his hand and rested them on the table between their place settings, her fingers intertwined with his.

  Booker scraped his chair back, a toothpick in his mouth, his expression shrewd and grim. “You got something to say to me, son?”

  Tate nodded, but damn. This was a different kind of bear trap than what he was used to. “Sir.” He tipped his head to Emma. “Ma’am. I’d like permission to marry your daughter.”

  Emma’s fingers fluttered to her lips with a soft, “Oh.” Were those tears glimmering in her eyes?

  Winslow shoved her chair closer to Tate’s as if staking her claim. He risked a sideways glance. Here she was, still fighting for her man.

  Booker snapped his fingers, fire in his eyes. “You come in here pretending to be a friend, then you sneak around behind my back to take my daughter?” His words hit Tate’s heart as deadly as the calm before the storm. “I just got her back, damn it. Who do you think you are?”

  “Dad, I—”

  Tate cut Winslow off, not going to fight her father. “That’s okay. He’s right. Let him speak.”

  She huffed, but Tate could feel her holding her breath. And her temper. Who knew?

  Booker slouched back in his chair, the fight gone. “Like I said. Took you long enough.”

  “Excuse me, sir, umm, err—” What the hell just happened?

  Emma giggled. “Tate, don’t look so surprised. We’re not blind. It’s easy to see you have strong feelings for each other. Your dad and I know we can’t keep you from living, Winslow. You’re not a little girl anymore. You’re my lost angel, but you have a right to choose your way forward and who you want to stand by your side.”

  Emma had just called her daughter Winslow. Another telling word. Emma Lockette was just as smart as Booker.

  Winslow seemed not to have heard it though. She lifted Tate’s clasped hand with hers. “Him. This man right here. I chose him on the water tower the first night we met, and I choose him now.”

  Emma’s eyes widened. “A water tower? I can’t wait to hear that story.”

  “Now wait just a guldurned minute.” Booker again, still a man to be reckoned with.

  This meal was fast turning into a tennis match. Tate’s gaze scrolled back to the father of the bride. Booker’s gaze flicked to Winslow. “Do you know that’s the first time you called me Dad, young lady?”

  Just that fast, she dropped Tate’s hand and barreled into her father’s arms. “I love him,” she cried, “but I love you and Mom too, and I’m not leaving you, Dad. Not yet. Not really.”

  Booker’s mean-as-sin eyes brimmed with his baby girl in his arms. “It’s all right,” he mumbled against her head, his voice raw and his fingers threaded in the short locks at the back of her head. “Your mom and I’ll be okay. We’ll be here when you decide to come home. Just don’t forget us.”

  An anguished “Daddy” ripped out of Winslow, and Tate dropped his gaze to his plate, his heart pounding. This had to stop. “Sir. If I may.”

  Winslow twisted in her father’s arms to look at Tate even as her father situated her on his lap and wrapped his arms around her waist like he meant to keep her. The sight of her tears spilling onto her cheeks wrecked Tate’s heart. She’d pressed that cheek to Booker’s, and wasn’t that a picture? Rhett and Gunn, her brothers, were brown-eyed like their mother, but father and daughter were matc
hing bookends, one’s eyes as green as the other’s. Their chins stuck forward at precisely the same angle. Their lips were as full. All Winslow needed was a little more hair, weight, and height, and she’d be Booker all over again. It did Tate’s heart good to know she was her daddy’s girl.

  “I’d like to propose a solution if it’s agreeable to you. To both of you.” Tate looked into Winslow’s eyes, needing her agreement more than her father’s. This was her life now. He wouldn’t take her independence away, not even for Booker or Emma. “I travel extensively on my job, at least, the one I have now. It’s up to Winslow, but it’d be better if she stayed here with you while I’m gone—” He had to get this out fast. “—where I know she’d be safe and where she could go to school and learn to ride that mare you gave her, and—”

  Winslow’s eyes flashed. Her back stiffened. “You’re leaving me?”

  “No, Bdub, I’m asking for your father’s permission to marry you and to live here with you afterward. For a while.” Asking something like this went against every male bone in his independent body, but this was Winslow’s family. This was where she needed to be, not stuck in some apartment all by herself back East, while he was who-knew-where in the world. What kind of man would give her back to her parents only to rip her out of their lives two weeks later? He couldn’t do that to her. Or them.

  “I’m strong, sir,” he heard his dumb mouth say. “I can commute, and I’ll work for my keep. Whatever you need done, I can do while I’m here between missions.”

  Emma breathed an audible sigh, her fingers drumming the table. “Well…”

  Booker’s eyes slanted, piercing Tate to his soul. To be honest, it’d been a long time since he’d been a part of any family other than the Deuces Wild Team at work. At the end of the day, that didn’t count for much, not when a guy went home alone to four bare walls and the ghosts of his past, while his teammates went home to wives and husbands. Children.

  It happened slowly, the sly smile that crept over Booker’s face. He turned to his baby girl and cupped her chin, turning her to face him. “Are you sure you like this guy? I mean look at him. He’s strong as an ox but he never smiles.”

  Another precious sight, the glow in her eyes as she smiled at Tate through her tears, her head bobbing as she told Booker, “I love him, Dad. I think somehow I always have.”

  There was that word again. Dad. Winslow might not know it, but she was the best secret weapon in Tate’s arsenal. Hmmm. Maybe they were a pair of jokers.

  Emma spoke up. “I was four years younger than you are right now when I married your father, Winslow. We had nothing when we started out, nothing but love.”

  “You were sixteen?”

  Emma nodded at her daughter, her gaze shifting to Tate. “We were head-over-heels in love, and yes, we thought we knew it all back then. At least you two are older, more mature, though I doubt it.” She zeroed in on Tate. “There’s nothing in the world like young love, young man. Be good to my daughter. Give me a grandchild?”

  What could he say? There was every possibility he’d already fulfilled that order. That condom he’d used was older than dirt. “Yes, ma’am,” he said obediently.

  Booker tipped his head back and laughed, his arm still around Winslow. “I guess this means I need to get on the horn and get this party started.”

  Emma’s chair nearly toppled to the floor when she jumped to her feet. “I’ll order wedding invitations.”

  “The mayor will want to be here,” Booker added. “Don’t forget Ross and Howie or the rest of the guys down at the feed store.”

  “And flowers. Marietta!” Emma was on her feet, ticking off things to do on her fingers. “The priest. A caterer. Music. And chairs, I’ll need several hundred more chairs. We can clear the barn for the dance, and, Marietta! We need to plan a wedding buffet!” Off she went, talking to herself all the way.

  Booker lifted to his feet and released Winslow. “I’d better make sure she remembers which beer to order and how much. Can’t have a decent wedding without inviting the best spirits along for the ride.” He pressed his lips to the top of Winslow’s head before he let her go. “Yes, you can keep him, darlin’,” he said on his way to the kitchen. “Don’t you go making any decisions without me, woman!”

  Winslow sank onto Tate’s lap, her fingers threading through his hair and her lips to his ear. “Dance with me again?”

  Oh, how they danced...

  Epilogue

  Three months later…

  The Boeing 747 dropped out of the west at dusk and cut a wide slow circle over the Potomac, coming into Reagan International from an eastern approach. Washington D.C.’s monuments stood majestic and proud in the golden afterglow of another hard day. Tate liked Jefferson’s memorial best. Late evenings like today, its Danbury marble dome and columns glowed like beacons in the dark. Its reflection in the Tidal basin was legendary. In a few hours, the bright spotlights surrounding the memorial would make it look like ivory. Jefferson certainly knew how to roll out the welcome mat.

  But Tate was tired. After two back-to-back trips to assist Ky Winchester in California, and another scheduled for the south of Florida come morning, Tate regretted leaving Winslow at the Lockette Ranch. His place in Occoquan, North Virginia, was too damned far from Amarillo, Texas. He missed coming home to her. He missed Pepe too.

  The airport was crowded, and it took forever for Ky and Tate to get their luggage. Once he grabbed his duffle off the carousel, Ky fast-tracked for the door. He slapped Tate’s shoulder on his way out. “See you later.”

  “Yeah. Later,” Tate shot at his friend’s broad back. Ky was in a hurry. Eden and Kyler were waiting for him in airport parking. The only one waiting for Tate was his Jeep.

  Disgruntled, he slung his duffel over one shoulder and headed for long-term parking. The drive home and away from the city used to be a good time to decompress. He’d used the half-hour drive to put distance between him and his job, but now each mile was just another nail in his coffin. As much as he enjoyed working with Ky, Eden, Isaiah, and yes, even Tucker, working out of the D.C. office while Winslow attended school in Amarillo was killing him.

  Like always, the lonely ride home ended at his assigned parking stall, and didn’t that just suck? Tate dreaded walking into his empty loft. This shit had gotten old old. Long distance relationships were for somebody else, not him. He stayed in his Jeep, remembering the day he’d married Winslow. It seemed a long time ago.

  By the end of that special day, he’d met more cowboys and ranchers, Lockette family relatives and friends, than he could’ve imagined. The wedding was Texas-style big. Once Booker opened his barn, Emma and her troupe of wedding planners decorated it. There wasn’t one rafter not bedazzled with twinkling lights, nor one board on the wide wooden floor not covered in a clean layer of boot-stomping straw. Ribbons and lace decked the stalls.

  A local DJ stood ready to play all western and country favorites until the last steer came home or until every last cowboy was too drunk to walk a straight line. Didn’t matter which came first as long as everyone had a good time.

  Booker had two barrel-sized smokers going, one for beef, the other for pork. Texans loved a good barbeque as much as they loved their trucks and their guns. By all reports on the society page, the wedding was the talk of the entire state.

  But the look on Booker’s face when he gave his one and only baby girl away? Heartstoppingly priceless.

  Booker didn’t just hand her over to Tate at the altar. No, that would’ve been easy. Instead, he hooked a callused hand to the back of Winslow’s neck, another to the back of Tate’s. He pulled them together for a good talking to. If that didn’t make Tate feel like a schoolboy about to get taught a lesson, nothing did.

  The audience, all five hundred and twenty-one of them, stilled. You could’ve heard Tate’s heart pounding, it was that kind of quiet in the barn and the surrounding yard full of chairs and onlookers. But Booker’s words weren’t meant for the people, only for Tate an
d Winslow.

  “Kids,” he said, his whispered voice gruff and unusually tight. “Marriage is guldurned hard. It’s a twisting bronco, is what it is. It’s a stiff Texas wind that blows out of nowhere, and it can strip the meat off your bones faster than a mama javelina when you mess with her piglets. Trust me, I know. It’s a job, not some romantic love story full of lingering gazes and all that bullshit you see in the movies. It’s work, plain and simple. Git that through your hard heads right now before you lie and say ‘I do’, because I’m here to tell you, you kids don’t.”

  This was not exactly the time or the place to argue, but Tate shifted his boots, willing to listen to the only fatherly advice he’d get that day. Winslow ducked her neck into her bare shoulders, at least as much as she could. Booker had a good hold on her, but she sent Tate a smile that made listening to this sage advice bearable. For her, he could do anything.

  Booker tilted his forehead to hers first. “Here’s the thing, darlin’. If you put that man of yours first every single day, you and Tate are gonna make it. I can promise you that. Mark my words.”

  His neck twisted as he turned a baleful eye on Tate then. “And you…” Tate did a little more boot shifting. “Love her tomorrow like you love her today, Mr. Higgins. Spoil my baby girl. Kiss her every chance you get, because a man never knows how much time he’s got left in this world. Don’t do anything without telling her about it first, you hear? Don’t go anywhere and don’t backtalk her, neither. She’s the only one who counts, and what she says goes.”

  Tate nodded even as he told Booker, “Yes, sir.” Winslow already was his moon, stars, and every last rainbow. She already owned his soul.

  Booker’s voice dropped a pitch lower, his eyes on the floor. “Besides your mother, Winslow, you kids are all I’ve got in this world, you two, Rhett, and Gunn.” When he lifted his head, those steely green lasers pinned Tate to the barn door. “I count you as my son now, Tate, not just a son-in-law, so stop trying so damned hard to fit in. Relax. I’m not going to whup your ass, though I could.”