by Caro Carson
“We went to school together,” Chloe offered. Her hair was still wet but not dripping. She’d tied Thane’s towel around herself, high under her arms. It made her look like she’d just stepped out of a shower. It was a very, very good look.
Judging from the way their gazes kept straying to the knot in the towel that rested just above her breasts, Bill and Marcus thought so, too. Bill turned away pretty quickly to set down his beer and pick up the mustard for his hot dog. If he cared more about mustard than hanging on to Chloe’s every word, then he probably had something else going on with a different woman.
“Hey, are you still serious with that girl from Mount Saint Mary’s?” Chloe asked Bill.
Thane wondered if she’d read his mind. Nah—Chloe wasn’t vain enough to assume every single man ought to be interested in her. Except every single man around here was—just not Bill.
Chloe pointed to Bill’s plate. “You only put mustard on your hot dog. That reminded me about her.”
“Mustard made you think of Susie?” Bill asked.
“Don’t you remember the hot dog test? Mustard means a man wants to settle down.”
“Oh, that dorky thing. I remember.” He looked at his hot dog and started to laugh. “You aren’t going to believe this, but Susie and I got engaged when I finished Airborne School.”
The other dude dropped the mustard like it had burned him. “Which topping was for the good-looking men who like to show women a good time?”
“Marcus the man-whore,” Bill muttered under his breath.
“I can’t tell you,” Chloe said. “That would invalidate the whole hot dog test.”
Thane listened with one ear as he covered one hot dog with relish. Across the pool deck, he spotted one little table left in the shade. He’d ask Chloe if she wanted to go over there. Hopefully, the pack wouldn’t follow. They weren’t bad guys; they just weren’t a beautiful woman wrapped in his towel, which was the only person Thane cared to talk to. He picked up the ketchup bottle and squeezed a hearty red line over the relish dog.
“The opposite of married is bachelor, which is what I am,” Marcus said. “Suave and devastating bachelor. The opposite of mustard is ketchup, so it must be ketchup.”
“That’s right,” Chloe said, and then a little silence followed as everyone looked at Thane.
He held the ketchup bottle in the air a second longer, then set it down.
“So, you’re a playboy bachelor?” Chloe asked with a tilt of her head and a teasing voice.
He looked her in the eye as he silently picked up the mustard and squeezed that on his second hot dog.
Her friends loved it. Marcus nudged her with his arm. “So, what’s that mean, Chloe?”
“I’m not done yet.” Thane picked up a forkful of sauerkraut and plopped that on the mustard dog. The men hammed it up, their whoa and watch out sounding like they were watching a cage match.
Chloe didn’t say a word. She just looked at him with that tilt of her head and a raised eyebrow, a smile threatening to break through her mock-serious expression.
Thane held up his plate. One dog with ketchup and relish, one dog with mustard and sauerkraut. That was genuinely how he liked them, so he raised an eyebrow, too. “Well? What does this mean?”
“It means,” she said, her smile breaking through as her voice dropped into a quiet purr, “that you are a very interesting man.”
“Watch out, everybody.” Bill held up his beer and plate and took a step back. “Get out of Chloe’s way.”
Thane kept his focus on Chloe. “Let’s see how you dress your hot dog.”
“Can’t do that.” She held up her plate with her still-plain hot dog. “You see, I prefer mine...naked.”
Marcus took a step back. “That’s it, I’m outta here. Retreat.”
Thane let Chloe lead the way to the little iron-lattice patio table in the shade. When they’d been sitting on the edge of the pool, feet swishing the water and accidentally touching now and then, she’d asked most of the questions. He’d lived at Two Rivers since it opened two years ago, he was from South Carolina, yeah, still a touch of the accent, and no, he hadn’t been home since last Thanksgiving, a little less than a year now. It was a fifteen-, sixteen-hour drive so you really needed to fly and flying sucked lately, and yes, Austin was less than an hour’s drive from here. Great city.
It was his turn. “Do you live here at Two Rivers or did your friends invite you over?”
“I live here.”
“You must have just moved in.”
“One whole week ago. What made you guess that?”
Thane polished off his first hot dog. “There’s no way I wouldn’t have noticed you already if you’d been living here for more than a week.”
She went a little still at that. He hadn’t said it like a cheesy pick-up line. He’d stated it as the fact that it was. Maybe that had been too direct. Maybe he was too accustomed to speaking bluntly during military operations. It was the truth, though, and she seemed like the kind of person who could handle a straightforward comment. She dealt with a pack of lieutenants like they were her brothers, when he suspected they were really angling for more. Surely, she could handle him.
“You’re just flattering me now.” She popped the last bite of her naked hot dog into her mouth. “I like it.”
Yep. She could handle him.
“You’re in the army, aren’t you?” he guessed.
She nodded her head as she chewed, but for the first time, her expression dimmed a little. She was watching him closely for his reaction.
Were there men out there dumb enough to pass up a chance to spend time with her because she was in the military? Yeah, he knew a few guys like that. Old-school chauvinists. Insecure cavemen. Their loss.
She swallowed her last bite. “Is that a bad thing?”
“I hope not, since I’m in the army, too.” He winked at her.
She laughed.
She was too young to be one of the NCOs who lived here, but just to be safe, he pointed to the center of his chest, where his rank would be if he wore ACUs. “First lieutenant.”
She tapped the knot of the towel. “Second lieutenant.”
Perfect.
Thane pushed his plate out of the way and leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “It’s not a bad thing that we’re both in the service. It just makes it a little more challenging to coordinate our schedules if we wanted to do something like go to a movie. I’m willing to try it, though, if you’d like to go see a movie.” Maybe he was holding his breath, maybe he was praying she wouldn’t turn him down.
She leaned forward, too, and put her arms on the table. “That sounds like fun. Since you’ve been here a few years, you can show me which theaters are the nicest.”
“I’ll take you to the best one.” He meant it. The pickings were generally slim in army towns, but Fort Hood was the largest post in America, so Killeen had become a good-sized city with it. Dinner, movie, drinks—he’d take her to only the best places. He had the crazy thought that he’d be doing those places a favor, letting them be graced by a woman who radiated such happiness. Dinner and a movie in Killeen would be just the start. He’d love to take her into Austin.
“What made you guess that I was in the army?” she asked. “I thought I was being a pretty normal civilian. I haven’t been speaking in acronyms, have I?”
He chuckled and leaned back in his chair. “You asked how far it was to Austin, so you’re obviously new to the area. The main reason new people pour into Killeen is because the army sent them here.” He nodded toward the apartment buildings. “And the main reason people live here is because it’s conveniently priced for a junior officer’s housing allowance.”
She chuckled, too, and leaned back in her chair.
This couldn’t be going better. God, I’m glad I came.
“I thought my friends gave it away with their regulation haircuts. I didn’t even know they were going to be stationed at Hood. I just ran into Ke
ith at the PX yesterday, so I knew he was at Hood, but I didn’t know he lived here in Two Rivers. Keith’s the one who went swimming.”
“It’s a small world, five of you here from one college.”
As soon as he said it, he knew. She had to be from West Point. They all were.
The vast majority of officers came from ROTC programs, but even if there were sixteen ROTC officers in a unit, they would most likely be from sixteen different universities. There might be only three West Point officers in comparison, but they always seemed to know each other. For her to have found four college friends in this one apartment complex? Yeah. They had to be ring-knockers.
“We all went to West Point,” she offered, oblivious to what was obvious.
Thane had checked her left hand earlier. No engagement ring. No wedding band. Now he looked at her right hand. No West Point ring.
She caught his look and held up her right hand, wiggling her bare fingers. “I don’t wear the ring all the time. It’s not a requirement, you know. You’re not wearing your class ring today, either. I’ll have to guess where you went to college. Let’s see, South Carolina...maybe Clemson? Wait—not the Citadel? Tell me you’re from anywhere but the Citadel.” She made a horrified face.
She did it so comically, it made him laugh. The Citadel was a private college that ran itself like a military academy. Thane had never had the money to go to a private college, which was one of the reasons he’d enlisted in the army at eighteen. “Nothing that bad.”
“I know. I was joking.” She dropped her horrified face and beamed at him, looking relaxed in his towel and ready for a long chat. “You’d definitely be wearing a big, honking ring if you were. Everyone calls us ring-knockers, but have you seen a Citadel ring? You’d think they won the Super Bowl or something. So, where did you go to school?”
“Duke University.” He’d been able to start there at age twenty, after two years of enlisted service had helped him win an ROTC scholarship.
“North Carolina. Tricky of you. And your ring?”
“I don’t ever wear a college ring. I didn’t buy one.”
“Why not? Duke’s such a prestigious school.”
“Now you’re just flattering me. I like it.”
She laughed, but she was still looking at him expectantly.
“I don’t know why I didn’t buy one. It’s not really a big deal there.”
She studied him. “That’s interesting, that rings aren’t a big deal at a big school like Duke. I try to imagine what life would have been like if I’d gone to regular college. Is it really like Animal House?”
“Not even close.”
“Ever been to a toga party?”
He started to say no, but caught himself. “Actually, I have.”
She wanted to know all about it. They talked, they told each other the little stories that made up their college lives. She was so enthusiastic about everything he told her, not like a standoffish, elite academy snob at all. It was surprising, the amount of college experiences she hadn’t had. No fraternities or sororities. No weekend jobs at a local pizza place. No one already so drunk at two in the afternoon that they fell asleep in a dorm elevator. Hell—she hadn’t lived in a dorm. She told him stories about daring Friday nights spent cleaning the barracks after taps in absolute darkness, so they’d pass Saturday Morning Inspections.
But she was so damned happy. Her buddies were really enjoying themselves, too, as if free beer and an apartment pool party were a vacation in the Bahamas. As usual, every West Pointer here seemed to know each other automatically, something that was at least mildly annoying to the rest of the army’s officer corps. But talking to Chloe, Thane could see that there wasn’t any mysterious network of ring-knockers. The West Pointers always seemed to already know each other because they did already know each other. They’d had no one else to get to know for four solid years.
Now that four years of a rather stringent life was over, it sounded like Chloe was ready to do and see everything there was to do and see here in Killeen and Austin—and life. Thane was going to love being the man who did and saw everything with her.
There was no doubt in his mind that this was a woman who was worth dating, worth spending all his time with—hell, a woman worth courting. An hour talking with her in the shade felt like they were catching each other up on their lives before this day. From this day on, they would go out and experience things together. Chloe was terrific, all of her, inside and out, body and sharp mind and outgoing personality, this charming lieutenant from West Point.
It gave him hope for the new fourth platoon leader at work. Maybe the rookie West Pointer they were getting at the 584th wouldn’t be so bad, either, the new female lieutenant his platoon sergeant had told him was...
Thane kept smiling as Chloe talked, but he took a long drink of his beer. Swallowed.
How many women went to West Point? Not many. If the army was roughly 15 percent female, then he’d bet West Point was about the same. Chloe would probably know the new platoon leader. So would Bill and Marcus and the other two guys. Right?
Another sip of beer. Another hard swallow.
For the first time, he wondered which branch Chloe was in. Somehow, he’d been thinking she must be in the same branch as her friends. A cluster of five new Signal Corps officers, or a new slate of field artillery officers, all reporting to duty at Fort Hood at the same time. Right?
Not likely. They didn’t know each other from going to one branch’s Basic Officer Leadership Course. They knew each other from earlier than that. They’d probably been surprised to see each other today because they’d graduated last May and then scattered to five different courses in five different branches of the army.
He pushed it to the back of his mind. Chloe’s branch and his branch would come up in conversation. There was no rush. They weren’t doing anything wrong. There were no regulations against eating a hot dog at an apartment pool with anybody.
“Here, I’m dry enough. Let me spread out your towel so it will dry.” Chloe stood up and untucked the towel knot. In one easy move, she peeled off the damp towel and swirled it like a cape to lay across the back of the chair.
Thane stopped thinking. She was all but nude on the other side of the table, not two feet away from him, flat stomach and sexy belly button at his eye level. He must look like a cartoon character, eyes bugging out of his head, mouth hanging open, tongue hanging out. Or else he looked like a stoic army officer, face devoid of expression. He hoped the latter. Cartoon on the inside, stoic on the outside. Overwhelmed.
Had she dropped that towel to overwhelm him intentionally? He managed to look up to her face, but no. She was oblivious, bending over in those bikini bottoms—holy hell, what a body—to grab her chair by its arms and drag it out from under the shade, chatting away the whole time. “It’ll dry faster in the sun.” She looked up to the sky to judge where the sun was and turned the chair so that it was sideways to his, then she flopped back into it.
“Ahh,” she sighed, as she stretched out shapely legs and leaned her head back, closing her eyes as she tilted her face up to the sun. “I love this weather.”
Was he supposed to speak? He cleared his throat. “You won’t love it in July.” She had her eyes closed; he could keep his eyes on her. “It hits one hundred and ten. Even higher.”
She opened one eye to look at him. “Aren’t you supposed to say, ‘But it’s a dry heat’?”
He grinned at her droll comment. “It’s like living in an oven. Ovens don’t have humidity, but they can roast a turkey.”
She laughed. “I guess I’ll find out myself in July. But today is perfect.”
Yes, it is.
“It’s so much better here than Leonard Wood.”
He stayed perfectly still. He didn’t even take a breath as the bottom dropped out of his world. Fort Leonard Wood. Home of the Military Police Corps. The one post that trained every damned MP in the whole damned army. Damn it, she was an MP.
She mig
ht be assigned to a different company. As long as we aren’t in the same company...
They couldn’t date if they were in the same unit. There were three MP companies in his battalion. As long as she wasn’t in his battalion, then...
“It got below forty the night before I left Leonard Wood. I had enough of frozen winters at West Point. I picked Fort Hood because it wouldn’t snow here. I didn’t expect it to still be warm enough to sit by a pool, though. Life is good.”
There was no other MP battalion here for her to belong to. The next level up was the 89th MP Brigade, headquartered here at Hood. Maybe she was assigned to brigade headquarters, maybe...
Maybe he was kidding himself.
Fourth platoon was getting a female West Pointer on Monday. West Pointers were a small percentage of all army officers; women from West Point were even more rare. There would be no other female West Point officers leaving Fort Leonard Wood and arriving at Fort Hood this week. Not another one this year. The woman Thane wanted to take to the movies just for the pleasure of having her company, the woman he was staring at, lusting over right this second, had to be Second Lieutenant—
“Michaels!” A man barked out the name from the other side of the pool deck’s fence like an angry drill sergeant.
Chloe jerked upright and whipped around in her chair, blinking in the sun, her face a solid mix of anger and bewilderment. Thane stood up, ready to step in. Who the hell did this guy think he was?
Then Chloe made a little happy yelp of a noise and jumped to her feet. She nearly ran the few feet to the chest-high fence, but when Thane expected her to throw her arms around the man she obviously knew and was obviously happy to see, she came to a stop just before him and clasped her hands behind her back.
“It’s so good to see you, sir. I didn’t know you were at Hood.”
“Come here. You’re not a cadet. You can call me Greg.” The man reached over the fence and yanked Chloe into his arms.
Thane realized he was clenching his jaw. All these old friends sure didn’t miss the chance to hug her in her bikini. How many old friends could a woman have who’d lived here only a week?
