They both seemed to realize at the same time the insanity of what they were doing in broad daylight on a public street. They jerked apart, Zander letting Erin slide down the length of his body before he could stop himself. She gasped and the relevant part of his anatomy twitched in urgent response.
“Wow, sorry,” Zander said, though he wasn’t at all, not really. Not when Erin looked so dazed, so hot. So hot for him. He liked that more than he would have thought possible. “Are you—”
“No, it’s okay!” she said quickly, her words little more than a squeak. “It’s been a long day, you’re exhausted, you didn’t expect…we didn’t expect…it’s fine.” She nodded again, more firmly this time. “As you said, we had to get that out of our systems.”
“We sure did,” Zander drawled, shifting to give her space as Erin ran her hands compulsively down her dress, through her hair, managing to make herself look even more disheveled. She didn’t hear the sarcasm in his words, so he cut her a break. Sort of. “I should get back,” he said, now stepping away from the car. Erin impulsively reached out before catching herself, then clasped both of her hands together.
“Yes, of course. I’ve already taken so much of your time today.” Her words were too fast, too wobbly, as if she felt that if she just stuffed enough syllables into the empty air between them, that space could never be crossed again. “Thank you, Zander. I really appreciate it.”
“No problem.” He smiled, studying her as he drank in every reaction, every sigh and tremor. “And there’ll be more tomorrow. What time should I come over?”
“Tomorrow?” Erin blinked, a new blush rising up her pale cheeks. “Oh, right. There isn’t any need for that, Zander, seriously. You could just as easily call, or email or—”
“No.” Zander shook his head. “I’m coming over with the information you need. We’ll eat, we’ll talk. Trust me, Erin. You’re going to want what I have to give you.”
He watched as Erin digested that, noting when she recovered, squared her shoulders, and gave him a wide, everything’s-just-fine-here smile. A little late for that, sweetheart. “Okay, then,” she said. “I’ll be home by six?”
“Six works great.” He stepped back then, finally, giving her enough space to get into her car. It only took her two tries to get the keys in the ignition, and damned if he didn’t like that, too. She gave a little wave and was gone, and he double-checked his own reactions. The tug on his heart was definitely still there, but it was different now. It didn’t piss him off as much as jack him up. And his body’s reaction was definitely loud and clear.
Shit, this was a lot more complicated than he expected it would be. That kiss—it was like a drop of water on a hot stove. He wanted more. He needed more. And if driving over to Erin’s house would get it for him, he was on board with that. Setting aside the fact that he wouldn’t just be there to talk her out of her clothes. He needed to talk her out of going anywhere or doing anything that involved her parents. No how, no way. There were trained experts who could handle that sort of shit far better than some wide-eyed girl with a suitcase full of money and no real understanding of danger. What had her parents been thinking, calling her?
Her parents. What the hell? The first time he’d asked about them, she’d told him they were some sort of college professors, so dedicated to their jobs that they dropped her off at her grandmother’s every summer, and that’s why she’d spent the season out on the cape. And then, when he’d kept it up, she’d told him she only had her grandmother, that her parents had died. Died, for God’s sake. She’d made them sound like monks mixed with mental giants, devoting everything to the pursuit of their academic goals right up until they’d crashed their car on one of their trips. He’d bought it, too, hook, line, and sinker. What kind of idiot did that make him?
“Wondered if you’d actually make it back here.”
He’d somehow meandered his way to the front porch, where his sister was holding her little girl. Lexi looked at him with huge, tearstained eyes, as if he was the reason for all the troubles in the world. Women. “What happened to her?” he asked.
Karen shrugged. “She learned for the first time that boys don’t play fair.” She regarded him over the girl’s white-blonde hair. “So what was up with you and Erin, anyway? Mom swears she had no idea why you two broke up, that Erin just went poof after that whole mess with the cops. Dad refused to talk about it, and you were gone, and then nobody ever wanted to bring it up again. She said she didn’t even realize Erin was still on her email list until she spotted her at the funeral.”
“Yeah, I wondered about that.” Zander slung himself down onto the steps, more willing to face his sister’s company than to go back in to all of those people. He felt the little girl’s eyes on him as he did so, but at least the kid didn’t start crying again. “Mom handled it well, though.”
“That’s what Mom does.” Karen watched him for another thirty seconds, but when Zander didn’t speak, she groaned. “You’re kidding me, right? You’re not going to tell me what happened between you two?”
“Dude, that was four years ago. Water way the hell under the bridge.”
“I saw the way she looked at you. That water is nowhere even close to reaching the bridge yet. It doesn’t even know there’s a bridge coming up.”
“Yeah, well.” Zander shook his head. “What about you guys? Mom? Are you going to be okay? Is there anything I should be doing while I’m stateside? I’m not sure when I’ll be back again.”
“Oh, like you’ve spent a ton of time darkening our door over the past four years, right.”
“Hey, I stayed in touch.” And he had, too. He hadn’t wanted to come home, that much was true. But he’d done all the rest of it. Skyped, wrote, even texted when he could. People had a need to talk, and he’d listened to them. Listened and learned, figuring out what was being said and what wasn’t, what people needed to share and what they wanted to hide. Listening was a tactical skill not much discussed in army manuals, but it’d become one of Zander’s best abilities, and it was one he’d honed to good effect. He hadn’t expected to need it here, back in his own home, surrounded by his own family, but he did. There was just too much coming at him at once, stuff that he knew he’d want to remember. He’d store up all the words and play them back later, when he had nothing but empty sky above him and a few thin layers of cloth between himself and the hard earth.
Man, he missed all of that, too. Hell of a thing that he felt more comfortable lying on some rocky strip of desert than he did sitting here on his own front porch, with the knowledge that a hot shower, a warm bed, and all the food he could ever want was his, the moment that he asked for them. But there you had it.
And then there was his father. Zander shifted his position, staring out at the yard he’d had to mow twice a week, every week, with neat, military precision. Those same lines were in evidence today, and he wondered for the first time who’d taken over that job.
He wasn’t ready to process his father’s death quite yet, he knew that. It would come, he was sure, long after the theater of the funeral and the burial had passed, the people and the cheese trays and the chatter. Then he and his dad would go at it one last time, probably under that same empty sky somewhere, when he was lying on some cold-ass patch of dirt.
He was okay with that. He’d waited his whole life to come to terms with his dad. He could wait a little longer.
“He was proud of you, Zander.”
As usual, Karen knew how to cut to the heart of the matter, and as usual, she did so with the finesse of a tank. “Yeah, well.” Zander stood up again, stretched. “Guess we’ll never know the truth about that.” He passed by Karen, pausing to run his fingers over Lexi’s riotously curly blonde hair. “You keep your eye on those boys, Lexi,” he said. “The only reason they don’t play fair is because they never know what you’re going to do next.”
Chapter 6
“So, let me get this straight.” Dani Michaels reclined her long, lean body in on
e of Erin’s kitchen chairs, the eminently 1970s American orange plastic and chrome a sharp contrast to her quasi-Italian, quasi-Spanish, wholly unknown heritage. Sitting there in her tank top and yoga pants, Dani looked both exotic and hard at the same time, and now she focused her large, dark eyes on Erin with supreme skepticism. “This guy you have never told me about but who is your ex-boyfriend-turned-freaking-Army Ranger is coming over here for dinner. Tonight. And you don’t know how to play this.”
“Well, we ended on such bad terms, I never thought I’d ever see him again,” Erin said. “But yesterday, he was right there at the funeral, and—”
Dani passed a hand over her face. “I’m sorry, did Erin Connelly get kidnapped by a pod person? What funeral? How did I not know about a funeral?”
“You were busy, Dani. It’s not like you tell me where you go every day.”
“But—,” Dani said, then shrugged. “Okay, fair enough. But maybe you should start at the beginning. Like why your ex was at a funeral.” She waggled her brows. “And about how he’s an Army Ranger and stuff.”
Erin eyed her balefully, suddenly wishing she hadn’t told Dani anything about tonight. But it just seemed too…big for her to manage by herself, right now. Too important. And she couldn’t even tell Dani the critical parts, or her streetwise, grim-eyed housemate would call in every favor she was owed to protect Erin. It was just who she was. Dani Michaels might tell you she had a list of flaws as long as her tattooed arm, but she was loyal. And she was fierce.
And now she was fiercely staring at Erin. “You know I’m not going to give up until you spill. I’ve got all day, and you clearly took off work to have this little powwow with me. So start powing.”
Erin sighed. “The beginning beginning, or the this-week beginning?”
“Hit me with the funeral first,” Dani said. “Who died?”
“Zander—my ex-boyfriend—his father died. He was a colonel.”
She lifted her brows. “He died in combat?”
Erin shook her head ruefully. “No, no. A heart attack. He’s been teaching at the Army War College, or that’s what I read in his obit. I wouldn’t have wanted him as a professor, though. He was mean as a snake. Cold-eyed, stony-faced, total control freak.” She shook her head. “He and Zander were like night and day.”
“Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would call his kid Zander, either.”
Erin smiled, a tiny bit of the tightness in her chest easing. “Oh, he didn’t. Zander’s full name is Alexander. For Alexander the Great.”
“The conqueror, got it,” Dani said. “Only that’s a hell of a mouthful for a little boy, and—”
“And Zander insisted on being called Zander. From, like, four on, according to family lore. That was just the beginning, too. As clamped-down as his dad was, Zander was every bit as loose, easy. Always taking risks, always getting into trouble. Never too much trouble, of course. He never wanted to make his dad look bad. But in the early days, I guess they were moving around from base to base anyway, so any trouble would have been cut off almost before it could begin, regardless.”
Dani nodded. “Okay, so now Zander’s in the army, too? On his own way to becoming a colonel?”
“No,” Erin said stiffly. “A colonel is an officer rank. Zander is enlisted, not an officer. He’s currently a staff sergeant.”
“Meaning what? He went in at eighteen instead of going to college first? That’s how that works, right?”
“Right.” Erin nodded. “And that’s the way-back part of the story. Because four years ago, Zander and I were dating and…we broke up really ugly. Then he went to the army, I went to school, and we pretty much never talked again.”
“Whoa. Never?” Dani brought her chair down onto the linoleum floor with a thunk. “This isn’t World War Two, yo. They have this thing called the Internet. And cell phones.”
“We broke up really ugly,” Erin said again. Why is it no one seemed to understand this?
“Ugly, like how?” Dani said, pushing. “What could possibly have happened that was so freaking awful that A, you’ve never talked again and B, you’re still this messed up about it four years later? I mean, come on, Erin. How bad could it have been?”
“I…I pretty much destroyed him.” Erin could barely get the words out, never mind that Dani was staring at her and all she could do was stare right back, wanting to say more, needing to say more, but her throat closed up and tears pounded against the back of her eyes and her chest got tight and her hands clenched. And just like that, she found herself slipping back to a place that she’d sworn she’d never, ever go again….
—
“C’mon, Zander, I mean it. You don’t need to be that guy tonight. We’re just having fun.” Erin tried to keep her voice light, easy, but she’d seen the look in Zander’s eyes when Kevin Clark and his asshole best friend had driven up onto the Point. They’d been hanging out all evening with their usual group of friends, partying, laughing, enjoying the warm summer night well past everyone’s curfew. Well past Erin’s, too, but that was never a problem, of course. Gran trusted her with Zander, and had since the moment they’d started dating last summer. Zander’s family was all army, all the way, and that meant he was capital-S Safe.
But Zander wasn’t safe. He’d never really been safe. He lived to feel the rush, to take the risk, not ever knowing when to back down, to shut up, to retreat to fight another day. And now that he’d turned eighteen and was talking about West Point and the army and all the things—all the wild, insane, straight-out-of-video-games things he would do when he got a chance to really show off—well, he almost scared her sometimes. He seemed so ready to burst at the seams, so much like a firecracker set to blow at any second, that she hardly even knew him anymore. And whenever she tried to bring it up to him, he’d just joke and laugh it off.
Like he laughed off so many things, recently, including any talk of their future together. She supposed he was every bit as nervous as she was at the whole idea of being apart—meeting new people, going different places. But that was why people talked, right? Even if she and Zander never took the time to talk, as caught up as they were in the moment, in each other, in—
Zander’s bright laugh cut across her thoughts.
“Whatya mean? We’re all still having fun,” he said, a little too loudly, looking over to where Kevin and his buddy were lounging against their cars, drinking beer. Everyone was drinking beer, even Zander, though she suspected—hoped—his longneck bottle was more for show.
But now she wanted him away from here, wanted all of this to stop. She smiled up at him with a look she knew he’d recognize, her eyes full of promise. “Hey, how ’bout you and me leave, then,” she said coyly. “We can go down to the water, see what kind of trouble we can get into down there.”
Zander’s brows lifted, and his grin got even bigger. “That sounds about perfect.” He nodded. “But lemme do this first.” He raised his voice, loud enough for it to carry over the open space, the large rocks of the Point serving as a natural amplifier before the wind swept his words out to sea. “I’m just saying I pretty much think my Dodge can beat anything on the road right now, is all.”
“Yeah? Well, I think you’re full of shit.” The words Kevin shouted back across the Point were a sneer, and his buddy laughed as if this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life.
That was all Zander needed. “You think so?” He jumped up, all energy and fire, tossing his keys and snatching them back out of the air, one of his favorite moves. Erin frowned, watching Kevin stagger a bit as he turned back toward his car. She tried to catch Zander’s arm, but he shook her off. With his natural charisma and go-go force, everything started happening too fast then, their friends up on their feet as they realized another race was on.
It’d been like this all summer, Zander daring anyone to catch him, dust and gravel flying as their cars streaked down the access road, then doubled back up to the Point, in full view of everyone. The road was rough a
nd narrow, with rocky embankments on both sides in some places, hemming the cars in, but that just added to the fun, right?
“Zander, don’t do this,” Erin said again, her voice sounding panicked even to her own ears. “Kevin looks like he’s had way too much to drink, and he’s out of control at the best of times. Just let it go.”
“I got this, babe. Just chill.” Zander looked out over their friends and grinned, reveling in the moment. “You guys ready for a race?” he yelled.
Wild cheering broke out and Zander was revved now, amped up on speed and adrenaline. “Excellent!” He grinned over at Kevin. “In fact, I got five hundred dollars saying I can take you down.”
“Hope you got that money on you, dipfuck.” Kevin leered and tossed his bottle to the ground, yanking open the door of his Mustang, as his buddy pounded on its hood. “Because you’d better say good-bye to it.”
And then they were in their cars and off. Erin braced herself for the tight hysteria that always came with these damned races, with Zander’s need for everything to be pushed faster and faster. She almost closed her eyes as they screamed out of the Point—but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. She’d trained herself to take back what control she could when Zander—when anyone—went off half-cocked like this, and she took her phone out, readying to call 911. That number was sort of her talisman, her safety net. If she called 911, then help would come, no matter what happened or how. She’d never had to do it—didn’t want to do it—but, by God, she was ready to take the precautions that no one else in the screaming crowd was even thinking about.
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