by Stacy Gail
Then again, that didn’t mean much.
“So.” Shit, this was awkward. Maybe there was some greeting card for a situation like this. “Heading home from work?”
“Work? You mean that madhouse that keeps me chained to an oven all day?”
Sully grinned. One thing he’d noticed about Lucy—she was never at a loss for words. “Yeah, that.”
“Pauline’s is like an acid-trippy three-ring circus during the holiday season, so I’m lucky if I can get out of there on time. I’m probably going to dream about being buried in cupcakes tonight.”
“I can think of worse dreams.”
“Believe me, so can I.” There didn’t seem to be any gas left in that conversation, so she busied herself with retying the scarf, this time tucking the ends into her jacket collar. “How about you? Any plans now that you’ve received your honorable discharge? Your dad updated me,” she added when he gave her a searching look. “Congrats, by the way. If I had confetti I’d toss it at you.”
“Thank heaven for small favors. And as of the New Year I’ll be doing what I do best—writing code for a computer security group that my old XO started up when he went into the private sector.”
Those sky eyes lit up. “That’s great, Sullivan. Sounds like you’re not going to have any trouble settling into civilian life.”
“At the moment it doesn’t seem that easy. I just had an hour-long battle at the post office, mailing off presents to the family of my best friend who was killed in action last year. I made a promise I’d do what I could for them during the holidays, so...” He shrugged, not sure why he felt the need to share that with her. Maybe he was babbling. “The post office is crazy this time of year.”
“Two words for you next year. Gift. Cards.”
He groaned. “Why didn’t I talk to you before I acted?”
Something in her expression flinched, as if she’d been poked with something sharp. “Well, now. There’s one helluva question if I’ve ever heard one.”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing.” She touched her scarf and offered him a tight smile that looked nothing like the real McCoy. “Thanks for catching this for me. Hope I didn’t hurt you when I full-on body-tackled you.”
“A Ranger’s tougher than that.” Except for the fingerprints he could feel burned onto his ass, he’d already forgotten about it. “That’s a good color on you.”
“You know me and red—my favorite color in the universe.” Then she bit her lips together, hard enough to turn them white. “Sorry. I, uh...I like red.”
“Right.” This was a bad idea, he thought, stepping back on the excuse of not blocking the sidewalk when someone approached. But the real reason was simple—he didn’t want to be in this conversation anymore. She wasn’t a part of his life, so it was a mystery why he’d found himself running to intercept her. Maybe it had been a good idea to get their first face-to-face meeting out of the way, but forcing something that wasn’t there was worse than pointless. It was painful. He was so sick of things that were painful. Simplicity was what he needed now. And simple wasn’t Lucy...Lucy...
His hands curled into frustrated fists when he came up empty. That blankness meant failure, and that was one thing the Ranger in him couldn’t accept.
“You’re not still going by Jax, are you?”
“No.” She gave him a veiled look. “You suggested that, to put all this behind us, I should take back my maiden name. I did.”
“Ah. Good.”
As she turned away she muttered something under her breath that sounded like, nice. “I’d better be going.”
As the vision of her back filled his view, a jolt went through him. A strange, frantic feeling he couldn’t control, while the diner door opened behind him. “Wait. Now you’re Lucy...?”
“Crabtree. Good—”
“Lucy!” His father, Lowell, hustled from the diner to sweep Lucy in a hug that took her off her feet. “How’s my queen of sweets? Since you moved out I never hear from you. Where’ve you been hiding?”
Sully winced at the lack of subtlety. Apparently while he’d been deployed, Lucy had stayed in the garage apartment on his father’s property, the same apartment where Sully now lived. From the moment Sully had walked through that apartment’s door he’d suffered an intense hatred of the place, when he usually didn’t give a crap about his surroundings. It just didn’t feel like home. No place did. He wasn’t even sure what home was supposed to feel like. All he knew was that the apartment wasn’t it.
“Lowell.” Lucy’s voice was muffled against his father’s shoulder as she was dumped back on her feet. “I haven’t been hiding, I’ve been working at Pauline’s and getting the loft transformed from a dirty storage space to a shiny new home.”
“Everyone knows Lucy’s the busiest person in Bitterthorn this time of year, even without having to sink new roots.”
The unfamiliar baritone snapped Sully’s attention to the man he’d seen approaching. The guy was a rough piece of work—unshaven, silver hoops gleaming in his ears, his dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. The new arrival’s attention glanced off him as though he’d sized Sully up as unimportant before he bestowed a thousand-watt grin on Lucy. “If she’s not under Pauline’s whip, she’s filling Pfeffernüsse orders on the side. It’s almost embarrassing, how my garage smells like Mrs. Claus’s kitchen.”
“Oh, Pfeffernüsse.” Lowell made a sound of swoony yearning. “Lucy, is it too late for me to sneak an order in? You know I can’t resist anything you bake, but your secret recipe is something I look forward to every year.”
She patted his father’s cheek, showing a familiarity that made Sully feel more like an outsider than ever. “For you, Lowell, anything.”
“Pfeffernüsse?” That edgy sense of failure growled to life while the foreign-sounding word whispered in his head. “What’s that?”
Silence—that awkward, something’s-not-quite-right silence he should be used to by now—froze them in place before Lucy shrugged. “It’s a traditional German-Dutch cookie, usually made during the holidays. The recipe I use has been handed down from generation to generation for at least two hundred years. Not even Pauline has been able to coax the recipe out of me.”
“Sounds good. I’ve been craving cookies lately.”
The man with the ponytail glanced his way. “So, Lieutenant Jax. I hear the mayor’s made you the guest of honor at the Christmas Ball, to celebrate the return of Bitterthorn’s big Silver Star war hero.”
Sully would have to be deaf to not hear the mockery. “Who are you?”
“Coe Rodas. Name ring any bells, Lieutenant?”
“Coe.” The admonition came from Lucy, and the white-hot fire behind the tone jerked his attention back to her. Strange, she’d never shown any fire around him before now.
Funny thing about fire. He’d always had a crazy kind of thing for it.
The tough guy, Coe, seemed to recognize all that heat meant danger, and backed down like an obedient puppy. “My apologies, Luce. I didn’t mean to mess with someone who’s, you know...fragile.”
Sully’s teeth snapped together. “I went through sixty-one days of hell in Ranger School, renowned as the toughest combat training course in the world, where on average nearly half the class washes out the first week alone. I did it because I wanted to become a part of the army’s most elite infantry, just to see if I was strong enough mentally and physically to handle it. My battalion specialized in personnel extraction behind enemy lines, and we never failed in retrieving our target. We could be deployed anywhere in the world in eighteen hours flat, whether it was desert, jungle, urban or mountainous—we trained for it all. I know more ways to kill you than you can probably count, so the one thing I’m not is fragile. And I may not have everything straight in my head, but I’d be willing to bet you and I always had a real goddamn
problem occupying the same area. Am I right?”
“Pretty much.” But instead of going toe to toe with him like he wanted, Coe once again looked to Lucy with those puppy-dog eyes. It took all of Sully’s strength not to rip his fucking head off. “But that’s ancient history. The present and future are all that matter now.”
The phrase sounded so much like what he’d told Lucy when he’d pushed for a divorce—a merciful act to free them from an unwanted obligation—that he glanced her way. For her part, she glared at Coe as if she believed she could fry him with a look alone.
No thought could have pleased him more.
“It’s great to see you looking so healthy, Sullivan.” With a curt nod in his direction, Lucy turned away. “Welcome home.”
Copyright © 2013 by Stacy Gail Shoeman
Have you fallen in love with Stacy Gail’s contemporary romance? We guarantee a happily-ever-after reading experience with these titles...
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Christmas is the perfect time to start from scratch
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Parker Radclyffe is up against a wall. Thorne Mansion, the mysterious Italianate castle she’s come to Texas to restore, isn’t the problem. No matter how intriguing the relic is, it’s merely an ember compared to the blazing magnetism of its owner, Chandler Thorne.
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Parker is a military brat who never sits still long enough to get burned. Chandler is her opposite, a man with deep roots and deeper family secrets. It won’t be easy to find the common ground it takes to build a home together, but Chandler is a Thorne in every sense. He plans to stick with Parker until she sees that love is more than worth the risk.
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About the Author
A competitive figure skater from the age of eight, Stacy Gail began writing stories in between events to pass the time. By the age of fourteen, she told her parents she was either going to be a figure skating coach who was also a published romance writer, or a romance writer who was also a skating pro. Now with a day job of playing on the ice with her students, and writing everything from steampunk to cyberpunk, contemporary to paranormal at night, both dreams have come true.
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ISBN-13: 9781426899287
Where There’s a Will
Copyright © 2014 by Stacey Gail Shoeman
Edited by Angela James
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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