by Ross, JoAnn
“Have you ever seen one?” she asked.
“Seen what?” the woman, suddenly distracted, asked as she glanced back toward the partygoers.
“A monk seal or a sea turtle?”
“Oh, no.” Blinding teeth flashed. “But it’d be way cool.”
When she patted the artfully tousled hair that even the sea breeze hadn’t been able to move, Julianne decided that there was probably enough superhold hair spray on those waves to punch a new hole in the ozone layer.
“Well, it’s been fun,” she said. “I’d better go before my husband thinks I’m flirting with you.” She waggled her fingers at a scowling jarhead whose Virginia ham- sized arms bulged out of an olive PT shirt. “He tends to get a little possessive. And he’s always a tad grumpy when he’s not out shooting bad guys, or whatever it is Marines do when they’re not home.”
This time the beauty-queen smile didn’t match her words. Julianne found the underlying threat of potential violence more than a little disturbing when mentioned in such a chirpy tone.
“Bye now. And have a good flight tomorrow.”
She turned and headed back.
“Wouldn’t want to make him jealous,” Dallas decided.
“Not if he’s been drinking even half as much as she has,” Julianne agreed. “Then there’s always the fact that he undoubtedly has a gun. And apparently gets grumpy when he’s not using it.”
“There is that.”
“I wonder how she knew we were flying out?” he asked.
“You know as well as I do that there aren’t any secrets at a military base.”
As Julianne watched as the Marine put a huge hand on his wife’s bare back and led her away from the crowd, she hoped the redhead wasn’t going to get into trouble for talking with them. Unfortunately, the military world had many of the same problems as the civilian one, including cases of domestic violence.
“But she didn’t seem to know we weren’t married,” he pointed out. “Or had orders here.”
“She was flirting. It was a normal way to begin a conversation.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. Especially when it was obvious she wanted in your pants.”
He put the question aside to grin as he took another drink of the Mai Tai. “You jealous, Juls?”
“Not in the least,” Julianne said.
Liar.
Although she hated to admit it, even to herself, a twinge of jealousy had reared its ugly green head while the scantily clad Hawaii Barbie had come on to O’Halloran.
Julianne wasn’t used to the feeling.
And she damn well didn’t like it.
18
The festivities slowed as more and more people gathered on the lawn watching the firefighters crawl over the building, inside and out.
“There isn’t any smoke,” Dallas observed.
“I don’t see any. But it still looks as if we might be here awhile.”
“We could leave. Go down to the beach. Sit on a rock and finish our dinner.” Which was now undoubtedly cold, thanks to the interruption of that redhead, who, while Playmate sexy, hadn’t stirred a single chord inside him.
“We left the door unlocked,” she said. “Once they’re done, we’re going to need to get back in the room.”
“Good point.” Damn. Forgetting to lock up was totally unlike him. Sighing, he sat down, and patted the grass beside him. After a pause, she sat down as well.
“I’m not really afraid of fire,” he assured her.
“I didn’t think you were,” she said mildly as she sipped her drink.
She was a liar. But Dallas appreciated the attempt.
“Ever see Raiders of the Lost Ark?”
“Is there anyone on the planet who hasn’t?”
“Well, ever since that day in the Kush, I’ve felt about fire pretty much the same way Indy does about snakes.”
A bit of hair, shining like spun gold in the lowering sun, had sprung loose of its pins. When the soft ocean breeze blew across her cheek, Dallas’s fingers itched with the desire to brush it away.
“But that doesn’t make him any less of a man,” she said.
“Thanks.” He managed, with effort, to keep his hands off her face. But, unable to resist some touching, in a gesture as natural as breathing, he took hold of her hand and laced their fingers together. “I appreciate the confidence boost.”
“We all have things we’re . . .” She paused, obviously seeking some other words than “afraid of.” “Things that make us uneasy,” she said.
“How about scared shitless?” he suggested. “You have the softest hands. They’re more lady hands than lawyer hands.”
“Held a lot of hands with lawyers, have you?” Her tone was dry as she slipped that silken hand from his.
“You’re the first I’ve ever wanted to. All those hours of watching you write those interrogation notes, I was wondering if your hands were as soft as they looked. Now I know.”
“Were you wondering this before or after you wanted to put your fist through the wall?”
“Before.” Deciding that since they were obviously going to be here awhile longer, he might as well relax, he leaned back on his elbows and stretched his legs out. “After.” He glanced over at her. Since she had those shades back on, he couldn’t see her eyes, but he could sense a bit of surprise. “Since.”
“Well.” She blew out a breath. “I don’t understand you.”
“Don’t feel bad.” He shrugged, reached over into the bag, and snagged a fry, which, while cold and soggy, still was better than most he’d had over the years. And definitely beat any MRE he’d been forced to eat. “Sometimes I don’t understand myself, either.”
“I always thought I did,” she admitted quietly. A bit reluctantly. “Understand myself, that is.”
“Until you left the Navy and joined the civilian world,” he guessed.
She pushed the dark glasses up to the top of her head. This time there was no hiding the surprise in those lagoon blue green eyes. “Until I joined the civilian world,” she agreed.
“I figure it’s probably natural. I felt the same way. Especially since, like you, I didn’t have all that much of a choice. Neither of us washed out, but because of matters beyond our control, our options had become limited.”
“Exactly.”
“And, while we both might be surprised as hell to discover we have anything in common, besides having spent the past ten-plus years in the military, neither of us is accustomed to hurdles we can’t either go around, jump over, or, on occasion, when necessary, crash through.”
“Damn.” She shook her head. Although he read the regret he sometimes still felt himself in her gaze, her lips looked as if they just maybe were on the verge of another of those smiles. “I really didn’t want to like you.”
“I know.”
He took her hand again. And squeezed reassuringly. “Which is too bad, because I know it’s going to sound crazy—and, by the way, Zach Tremayne would be the first to declare me certifiable—but I’ve always liked you.”
“Even when I was trying to court-martial your best friends? Tremayne included?”
“You know the old saying, ‘Hate the sin, love the sinner’?”
“I believe I’ve heard of it.”
“Well, just because I hated what you were doing, that didn’t stop me from admiring your spunk.”
“Spunk?”
“Yeah, it means—”
“I know what it means. I just wouldn’t have expected it. Coming from you.”
“Well, like I was saying, along with that, I couldn’t help noticing that you were, hands down, the sexiest JAG officer I’d ever encountered. Especially when we ran into each other again at the Del.”
“You just liked my dress.”
“Darlin’, if I’d liked that dress any more, people would’ve been stepping on my tongue, because it’d have been draggin’ on that Windsor Lawn. But it was the lady who’d poured herself into it I wanted to get
to know better.”
“Well.” She blew out a breath. Pretended a sudden interest in a guy in a shirt covered with tropical fish, who’d begun playing “My Little Grass Shack” on a uke.
Apparently deciding that the lodge wasn’t going to go up in flames anytime soon, people had resumed their aloha luau.
Although he might not possess her JAG patience, Dallas reined his in and waited for what she wasn’t saying.
“I suppose that’ll happen if this case drags on.”
“It won’t drag on,” he corrected mildly. “Because we won’t let it. But yeah, that’ll happen because, for the next twenty-four hours, at least, we’re going to be the only person the other one can fully trust.”
He could see the wheels turning as she considered that.
“And isn’t that ironic,” she said finally.
“That’s one word for it.” He paused and decided that if they were going to have this getting-to-know-you thing going on, he might as well start it off.
“I was adopted,” he said with a great deal more casualness than he was feeling.
He had no idea why the hell he’d started out with the one subject he never, ever talked about. No one, not even Zach or Quinn, who were as close as he’d ever come to having brothers, knew the entire story of his rocky past.
Hell, there were times—weeks, sometimes months—that he forgot it himself.
“It didn’t mention that in your file.” Which, being that he was Spec Ops, Dallas knew was extensive. With a helluva lot of stuff blacked out for security reasons. Stuff he doubted even she could’ve accessed.
“That’s because when you’re adopted, they give you a new birth certificate. Or at least, that was the case in Texas, when my parents took me in.”
“Oh.” She tapped her temple as if a bit embarrassed she hadn’t immediately figured that out.“I never thought of that.”
“No reason for you to have. Since it wasn’t relevant to your case.”
“How old were you? If you don’t mind my asking,” she tacked on quickly, as if not wanting to offend him.
“I was twelve going on thirty-five. And to answer the next question you’re probably too polite to ask, I was abandoned at birth.”
“That’s terrible.”
She looked honestly stricken. Which tugged at a different type of chord inside him. Not the one that wanted to get her naked. But another, deeper, more complex.
And, Dallas feared, more dangerous.
He shrugged off the unbidden feeling, deciding to analyze it later. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. I always knew my birth mother had my best interests at heart.”
“It doesn’t sound like it.”
“Sure she did. Why else would she have dumped me in that rest-stop trash can in a Neiman Marcus shopping bag? I mean, let’s face it, most bastard brats probably get left in a Wal-Mart bag.”
She actually gasped at that. Which was a bit surprising, since Dallas figured there probably hadn’t been much she hadn’t heard during her time in JAG.
“Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”
“You didn’t do it.”
“You’re not merely that hotshot cowboy, are you?” She narrowed her eyes. Studied him for a long time. “And you might be brilliant, but you’re not just some geeky nerd who’d be perfectly happy playing with his computers twenty-four seven, either. The charm offensive is at least partly an act, isn’t it? Especially that devil-may-care babe magnet part.”
“Wow.” She’d nailed him. But he’d known she would as soon as he heard the damn words about having been abandoned coming out of his mouth. “That’s quite a multipart statement. Which part would you like me to address first?”
“Don’t be sarcastic.” Damned if she didn’t ball up that lady hand into a fist and hit him in the shoulder. Hard. “If you hadn’t wanted to discuss it, you shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Good point. But maybe I was so pixilated by being this close to you, and the flowers, and the music, and all that romantic Hawaiian stuff going on that I just wasn’t thinking.”
“Pixilated?”
“It’s from a movie. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. It’s one of those 1930s Frank Capra flicks about an outwardly hard-edged female reporter who falls in love with the handsome, small-town, commonsense hero.” He grinned, enjoying the idea. “Sound like anyone you know?”
“I have a difficult time picturing you in some forward operating base watching 1930s comedies,” she said, ignoring his teasing rhetorical question.
“Didn’t I mention that, along with being a babe, my mom’s a film buff? Monday night was always family movie night in our house.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah. It was.” It was also, he’d belatedly realized, his mother’s ploy to begin creating traditions in order to make him feel more a part of the family.
“Anyway, this guy, Longfellow Deeds, inherits twenty million dollars. When he goes to New York City, he finds himself struggling to maintain his integrity in such a foreign, heartless environment.”
“Naturally.”
“So, when he comes up with this plan to give away his money in a redistribution plan to help poor farmers—”
“I hadn’t realized there were that many farmers in New York City.”
“They aren’t any that I know of. But he gets that idea after an armed farmer breaks into his mansion and accuses him of being a heartless, ultrarich gazillionaire—”
“I may have never seen the movie, but I’m certain ‘gazillionaire’ wasn’t part of the lexicon in the 1930s.”
“You can’t help it, can you?”
“Help what?”
“Arguing every little point.”
“I do not.”
“See.” Although he knew it might tick her off, he grinned, but had enough experience with females to keep to himself the idea that she was cuter than a spotted pup when she got her slender lawyer’s back up. “That’s okay.”
Deciding to risk it, he skimmed the back of his hand down the side of her frowning face. “You really can’t help it,” he repeated. “After all, you’re a lawyer. Arguing’s undoubtedly in your DNA, right along with that pearly skin, those tropical lagoon eyes, and those amazingly hot legs.”
“Right.” She fought the color rising in her cheeks. Julianne wasn’t used to getting compliments about anything other than her work. She especially wasn’t comfortable getting them from this man. “Like that Texas good-old-boy charm is in your DNA?”
“Actually, whatever charm I may have was probably a learned behavior, which was what I was getting to when we got offtrack. . . .
“Getting back to the topic of pixilated, in order to prove he wasn’t like all those other greedy and grasping city folks, Mr. Deeds promises the farmer that he’ll give farms to families if they agree to work the land for several years. Needless to say, there are a bunch of city slickers, including a scheming lawyer and lots of moochers, who aren’t about to let him give away all those bucks, so they try to have Deeds declared mentally incompetent so they can get his power of attorney and control the fortune.”
“Wow, now there’s a surprising plot twist I could’ve never seen coming.”
“You’re not only brainy as all get-out, you’ve also got a smart mouth.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d enjoyed himself as much as he was enjoying just being here, sitting on the grass, enjoying the sunset, the music, the perfume of the tropical flowers, and the company. “I like that about you.”
“And I like people who just cut to the bottom line.”
“I’m Irish. We’re storytellers.”
“You’re adopted. You’ve no idea what you are.” The moment she’d said it, she looked stricken. Her hand actually went up to cover her mouth, too late to keep the words from escaping. “God. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. I grew up—well, at least from age twelve—with talkers. Guess that made me one, too.”
“Still, it was horribly rude of me to say.”
He laughed. “Darlin’, believe me, after all my years in the military, that doesn’t even register on the rude meter.
“But, trying to wrap things up and get to the bottom line, during his sanity hearing, depressed by the betrayal of the woman he’d loved, appropriately named Babe, who’d lied to him about who and what she was so she could write snarky stories about him, he refuses to defend himself. Things are looking really bleak when these eccentric elderly sisters are called in to testify that Deeds is pixilated.
“That pretty much looks like the nail in the poor guy’s coffin, until it’s explained that ‘pixilated’ means the pixies have gotten him. Which, being a whip-smart attorney yourself, you probably can see isn’t exactly a prosecutorial offense.”
“I’d never try to use it,” she agreed.
“It gets better when the sisters admit that everyone in Mandrake Falls, except, natch, themselves, suffers from the same affliction.”
“Thus the accusation crumbles.”
“Got it in one. So, about then is when Babe convinces Longfellow that she truly loves him. Which pulls him out of his depression, since he now has a reason for living, and one by one, he punches holes in the bad guys’ case.”
“Yay, him.”
“Yay, indeed. Then he punches the bad guy in the face, which is when the judge declares him to be ‘the sanest man in the courtroom.’ ”
“And they all—Deeds, Babe, and all those salt-of-the-earth, hardworking farmers who feed our nation, live happily ever after,” she said.
“Gotta believe that,” he agreed. “It really is a great flick. A lot better than the Adam Sandler remake. And getting back to my original point, maybe I’ve fallen under the power of some ancient Hawaiian pixies, but I wanted you to know that sure, some of my riff is an act.
“The truth is that I was dumped by my mother in the garbage right after I was born. Then, although the police found her, I spent twelve years bouncing around from home to home in the Texas Social Services agency because, even though she was sent to prison for child abandonment and never took me to live with her after she got out, she’d always refused to sign the paper allowing me to be adopted.
