Chapter Five
T he bartender walked off to put our order in.
Brookelyn almost smiled as she stirred her Coke with the straw. “You ordered a whole pizza, a steak, a pasta entrée and three desserts.”
“What can I say?” I winked at her because I liked the hell out of her reaction the first time I did it. “I’m hungry.”
Her cheeks flushed as she took a sip of her soda. “You must be.”
I watched her lips around the straw and my dick twitched. “Play your cards right and I might share the desserts.”
She laughed. It was barely a chuckle, but it was feminine and reserved and sexy as fuck. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You do that.”
She shifted on her stool and studied her drink, but she didn’t reply.
“It was a joke.” I wanted to use her name, but I couldn’t reconcile the woman next to me right now with a name associated with a New York City borough. The woman who’d scanned the entire parking lot as I opened her door, sure. But this woman, shy and reserved, staring at her soda, she wasn’t the same. “I got the desserts to share,” I confessed.
“I figured.” She used my response from earlier on me. “No offense taken.”
“Ah, you did hear me.” She was so damn quiet, half the time I wasn’t sure if she was listening to me or stuck in her own head.
“I listen to everything you say.” She stirred her Coke again.
I liked that more than I should, but I was gonna be gone in hours. I didn’t need to be thinking about her after I left. Which was already a joke because for some fucking reason, I wanted to know everything about this girl. Not just her name or what the fuck was going on with her, but personal shit. Like why was she so still? No nervous gestures, minus scanning the parking lot at both the motel and the restaurant, she didn’t fidget, she didn’t play with her hair, she didn’t laugh at stupid shit I said. She was just… still. I didn’t know still. Not since I’d enlisted almost twelve years ago.
I changed the subject. “You don’t drink?”
She shook her head.
I took a sip of my beer. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“You don’t think the questions you’ve already asked are personal?”
Her question, her response—that right there was why she was throwing me. A woman on the run who used a fake identity, hid behind baggy clothes and hated being touched wasn’t a woman who threw it back on a man she just met. She was intriguing the hell out of me, but no, my questions hadn’t been that personal.
“No, actually,” I admitted. “We have a name in the military for the type of questions I’ve already asked you.” I looked pointedly at her.
She didn’t shy away. “Which is?”
“Recon.”
She pulled her lips into her mouth and slowly nodded as her eyes drifted away from mine, but she didn’t say anything.
“Short for reconnaissance,” I explained.
She studied her Coke. “I figured.”
“How about I make you a deal?”
She took the bait. “What kind of deal?”
“You tell me your real name, and I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone before.”
“That something could be the most benign thing you’ve ever said, like your favorite color is yellow. And Brookelyn is my real name.”
“I think you’re lying.”
She didn’t even shrug. “I can’t control what you think.”
Damn. “Touché.” This chick was throwing me. “Your conversational evasiveness skills are intimidating. ”
She glanced at me without moving her head. “I highly doubt anything about me intimidates you.”
That’s where she was wrong. “Would you be impressed if I said you were wrong?”
“You’re trying to impress me?”
“Would it matter if I was?”
“No.” She hesitated only a fraction of a second. “But you’re not.”
“Maybe I am.” Fuck, I was.
“Then maybe you need to try harder.”
I smiled. Wide. “Are you encouraging me to flirt with you?”
“Definitely not.”
I dropped the smile and threw a question out that I was perfectly aware gave me no game, but this woman wasn’t about the chase. “Would it make you uncomfortable if I did?”
She was silent for five seconds before she turned in her seat and gave me the full attention of her haunted stare. “I don’t have any personal experience with knowing someone in the service, but I’m not ignorant. I gathered from your conversation with Dax and the few hints you’ve dropped in our conversation that you’re only home for a short period of time. I’m also assuming that this short period of time is bracketed on either end with long months of deployment that I’m guessing are not only extremely dangerous but stressful. I don’t know how many women you’re around during that time, but I can’t imagine there are a whole lot in combat.” She inhaled. “So please, don’t insult me by flirting with me.”
Damn. Damn . My respect for her hit a new plateau. “I would never intentionally insult you.”
“Thank you.” She nodded once and turned back to her soda.
I missed not having her full attention. “It’s not as stressful or as dangerous as you think,” I lied.
“Is that your interpretation or something you’re conditioned to say?”
It was my pathetic attempt at reassurance, like this woman gave two fucks about me or what would happen once I stepped off transport and my boots hit Afghani dirt. Pissed at myself, and maybe at her, I threw down some defensive bullshit. “I’m not conditioned, I’m a Marine.”
“So you’ve said,” she countered, with zero inflection in her tone.
“You got a boyfriend?” I asked abruptly, itching to throw her off guard.
She didn’t hesitate. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Not since high school. It lasted through me enlisting and getting my first deployment. Then the uncertainty of being with a Marine hit her, and she was history.”
“I’m sorry.” Even though her tone didn’t change, she somehow managed to sound sincere.
“I’m not.” And I wasn’t.
A frown marring her pretty face, she looked up at me. “Why not?”
“Are you the same person you were in high school?” I wasn’t. The Marines turned me into a man. “Do you want to spend your life with the person your sixteen-year-old self chose?”
If I wasn’t watching her so intently, if I hadn’t been watching her since I first laid eyes on her, soaking in every little nuance of her body language because of her lack of physical tells, I would have missed it.
But I didn’t.
On an inhale, probably so she could hide it, her shoulders stiffened. Then her lips barely parted and she exhaled through her mouth as her shoulders dropped back down the mere fraction of an inch they’d risen.
Her features schooled, she kept her voice perfectly even. “I suppose not.”
I instantly knew whoever had been in the black Mustang was someone she’d known a long time. Probably since high school. “How old are you?”
“Is that the personal question?” She didn’t miss a beat.
“No.”
She threw it back on me. “How old are you?”
“Thirty.” And feeling every single one of those fucking years like it was a decade .
“Twenty-four.” She sipped her soda.
I took a long swig of my beer, but it wasn’t ice-cold anymore and the bitterness wasn’t sitting well. I pushed the bottle away. “Would you be offended if I said I thought you were older?”
“Would you be offended if I said I have no idea why you followed me?”
“Subtle,” I joked dryly.
She almost shrugged. “I wasn’t trying to be.”
No shit. “I already told you why I followed you.”
“No, you told me you could help me if I was running scared. Not that I ever told you I was running from anything, or said I needed help. Regardless, that doesn’t explain why you followed me.” She turned in her seat to look at me. “And you’re not hitting on me.”
Damn . Schooled again. I smiled. “So you do want me to hit on you.”
She didn’t return the smile. “No, I don’t.” Her gaze went back to her drink. “I know what I look like.”
Taken aback, I frowned. “Which is?”
More brazen than any female in the Corps I’d ever met, she looked me square in the eye.
Then she shocked the hell out of me.
“Not fuckable.”