Prologue
Layla
I ’m sitting behind a scuffed wooden table in a Killeen, Texas, library when he s aunters by, and every nerve ending in my body tingles. “He” being Jensen Prescott, the hot blond hunk of a guy who’d graduated a year ahead of me. And try as I might to keep my attention on Allen Moore, the second-year high school quarterback I’m tutoring for his SAT, I fail pitifully. While Allen works through an algebra problem, I remain spellbound by Jensen’s sexy, loose-legged swagger as he crosses to the computer terminals he’s been frequenting the past few weeks. It had been on week two that I’d walked out of the bathroom, rounded the corner, and crashed into a hard body. I’d looked up, intending to apologize, but instead I’d somehow forgotten how to speak. Words would not come out of my mouth. He’d been in his normal jeans and cowboy boots, his T-shirt snug, hugging hard muscles, oh so well.
I’d all but jumped back when I’d realized how inappropriately I’d been pressed against him.
He'd been visibly amused and sweet about it, but the amusement is what had gotten to me. I’d felt silly. My cheeks had heated, and I’d run away as fast as possible. I’d claimed my table just in time for a tutoring session, not daring to look about the library to see if Jensen was near, but I felt him there. I’d known he was watching me.
An hour later, my student had left, and Jensen had appeared at my table to introduce himself and ensure I was okay. It had been a short encounter, but a memorable one, at least for me. I’d become infatuated.
A feeling that didn’t go away as he started making a point of waving when he saw me, even stopping by my table to chat at times. Rarely did he offer me much about himself, but he was extremely interested in me. I think. I don’t know. I’m a little obsessed with the man, so objectivity isn’t easy to pinpoint.
Jensen yanks a chair out from behind a desk, facing this direction, and I quickly cut my gaze back to Allen, who’s struggling through the worksheet I’ve given him. I point out a misstep Allen is making that’s hanging him up, and as he goes back to his work, I dare another glimpse at Jensen to find him looking right back at me. He grins and winks, holding up a Snickers bar. I blush with the realization that he brought it for me after I’d confessed an undying love for the peanut-y goodness just the afternoon before.
“I just don’t get why I need to know algebra on the football field,” Allen grumbles.
This draws my attention back to him, who, at six-foot-two with brown hair and green eyes, is undeniably good-looking but not enough to bypass the fact that his only grand dictionary of knowledge id football.
“Either you meet the required SAT score for the University of Texas,” I remind him, “or you won’t be playing ball, at least not for them.”
He shoves the paper away and scrubs his hand through his hair. “This is bull. I don’t want some fancy NASA-sponsored scholarship like you got, so I don’t see why I have to be some geeky bookworm like you either.”
I stiffen at his harsh remark, and I remind myself that what is an insult to him is a compliment to me. No, I’m not his gorgeous blonde beauty queen of a cheerleader girlfriend. I’m just the basic brunette who lives next door to him, with a military officer as a father and schoolteacher for a mother, who knows discipline as the root of life. And who has a dream of making a difference in the world. As my mother often tells me, what feels important now to most people in my young life won’t matter at all a few years down the road.
Unwilling to allow defeat for me or him, I push the paper in front of him. “Let’s try again.”
“I’m done,” he says. “I’m going to talk to Coach. He has to get me out of the SAT.”
I gape at him. “Get you out of the SAT? You can’t be serious.”
“As a touchdown.” And with that smart remark, he pushes to his feet and heads toward the door.
I toss my pencil on the desk and sigh. Please let the summer end. I can’t get to Houston and my new school soon enough.
The chair in front of me scrapes, and the Snickers bar slides in front of me. “You look like you have an urgent need for chocolate.” Jensen sits down across from me, his teal green eyes a bright contrast to his spiky blond hair. I decide right then that my summer goal is to run my fingers through that hair just one time before I leave for Houston.
And kiss him. I’d really like to know what it’s like to kiss him.
“Per my grandmother,” he adds, “bringing a woman under duress a chocolate bar is the wisest move ever. She swears it’s a better survival technique than anything they learn in basic training.”
I already know from our brief chats that he lives with his grandmother and uses his contract work to take care of her, which is incredibly sweet. As is the fact that I can tell he both loves and respects her. His father was military at some point as well, but he shuts down if I try to talk about him. Of course, we’ve only had casual chats in a “quiet” environment, too. I smile and reach for the candy bar. “Thank you, Jensen. And your grandmother sounds like a smart lady.”
He slides the worksheet Allen had abandoned in front of him and starts working an algebra problem with such ease that, at first, I think he’s just doodling. “Feisty old wench, but yes, a smart one, too. She makes a hell of a chocolate chip cookie, too. She bribes me with them. Do you bake?”
“Not even a little. My mother does. She’d try to claim cookie fame over your grandmother.”
“We should get her and my grandmother together and have a bake-off. We win no matter who loses.”
I laugh and the librarian shhs me.
“I should go,” Jensen says. “I have to pick up some meds for my grandmother.”
“Okay,” I say, not even trying to hide my disappointment. I don’t want him to go.
He doesn’t go. He sits there, staring at me, the air thick with something—I don’t know what—but it sets my stomach aflutter.
“You want to catch a movie or something Friday night?”
My lips curve with the invitation, and the flutters in my belly transform into a dance. “Yes. I’d like to go to a movie.”
“With me, right?”
I barely bite back another laugh, sure to earn me a reprimand. “Yes. With you.”
“Tomorrow night at seven, right here?”
“Perfect,” I say, and we share a smile, the attraction between us sparking for sure.
“See you soon,” he says, and then he’s gone, and I’m sighing with just how over the top into him I am.
I reach for the worksheet he’d doodled on to prepare for my next student, and it’s not doodling at all. He’s worked every problem, and I’m smiling all over again. He’s gotten all the questions right.
Good-looking and smart. I might just fall in love.
Jensen
With a smile on my lips, I whip my battered, black Ford F-150 into the driveway of the equally battered trailer I call home and kill the engine. Easing back into my seat, I arch my back and dig the wad of cash in my pocket out for review. Ten thousand dollars and a date with Layla tomorrow night. I call this one hell of a good day.
I’m going to kiss her and see what honey and sunshine taste like. Fuck yes, I am. And fuck yes, life is good.
“Yeehaw,” I whisper, strumming the cash with my fingers. How many nineteen-year-olds make this kind of dough? I’m liking the heck out of my new job. Hack. Get cash. I snort. “And they say that government databases can’t be hacked. This low-life trailer trash proved them wrong.” That’s what the kids at school call me after my grandmother got herself arrested for public intoxication. Trailer trash. Misfit. “Screw you,” I mumble to the voices I’m making a part of my past. “Screw you all.”
Once I count the money, down to the ten thousandth dollar, I hold out two hundred for my date with Layla and stuff the rest back in my pocket. I scoop up the bundle of flowers on the seat. I was going to hold out the Snickers bar for me to eat before bed, but decide better, snatching it up to hand off with the bouquet.
Candy had worked in my favor with Layla, after all. And I’ll need all the sweetness I can muster to convince Grandmom to head to that fancy alcohol-rehab center I’ve arranged for her to enter up in Temple. It’s close—only twenty miles away—which I hope feels less intimidating to her. She’ll curse me and probably hit me, I expect, steeling myself for what is to come. She’s got a hell of a right hook, but contact doesn’t hurt anymore. Hasn’t for years.
Besides, I know she can’t control herself. I’ve read enough about alcoholism to know it’s an illness, and she needs my love and help to recover. The woman has raised me and considering I’m probably the reason she drinks, I owe her.
I mean, I’m the trigger, because I’m the reason my mother is gone. It sucks, and before I go down that rabbit hole, I need out of this truck.
I open the door and exit the vehicle, slamming the door behind me and whistling my way down the path to the front door. The whistle fades the instant I enter the trailer. Grandmom sits on the couch, wrapped in the same crinkly blue dress that she’d gone to bed wearing, a big bottle of vodka in her hand. Two men dressed in suits sit on either side of her.
“Look what these men brought me,” she says, grinning and holding up the bottle, her prize.
“We know how you like to take care of your grandmother,” one of the men says, his buzz cut flat against his skull.
“Kind of like your father took care of his family,” the other man states, a clone of the first one. They have to be Army or government. Fuck me!
“The resemblance between the two of you is amazing,” the first man says, picking up a picture of my father from the end table. It’s my favorite photo of him, him standing in front of a helicopter, his blond hair longer than the average enlisted dude, because he wasn’t average. He’d been Special Forces, working undercover all over the map. He’d died serving his country when I’d been barely out of diapers. The man sets the picture back down on the coffee table.
“They’re the spitting image of each other,” my Grandmom declares, her gaze lifting to me, her voice with it. “But Jensen ain’t got no clue who his daddy was. Man was never here. Neither was his mama.” She slugs a drink. “They died. Didn’t they, Jensen?”
One of the men focuses on me. “We think you’re a lot like him. For instance, you both showed an interest in official government business.”
Stab me in the fucking gut , I think. I’m busted. Big-time freaking busted and going to jail. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say in full denial mode. I’m not admitting shit. I won’t go down without a fight, not with my Grandmom dependent on me.
“You know,” the second man drawls, “there’s a lot that can be forgiven if you serve your country. Enlistment’s favorable to other options under certain circumstances. I’m Captain Sherman, son.” He offers a sideways nod to the second man. “That’s Captain Moore. We served with your father.”
“What do you want from me?”
Sherman answers. “Your father was part of a Special Forces unit where certain ‘skills,’ say, computer expertise , can be useful.” He wraps his arm around Grandmom’s shoulders. “In exchange for service in this unit, your grandmother will be well taken care of. It’s time you enlist, son. Be all you can be, like your father.”
Grandmom gulps from the bottle, and I become aware of the flowers in my hand—flowers that weren’t going to erase my problems any more than the wad of cash sitting in my pocket.
“And if I say no?” I ask cautiously.
“I don’t remember asking,” Sherman replies.
“I’m not soldier material,” I say, because damn it, I’m just a kid in a trailer park who self-taught myself to hack.
“You’re your father’s son,” Sherman replies. “Mark my words, boy. You have soldier in you. I’ll make sure of it.”
My Grandmom gulps another swallow, her teal green eyes that match my own, the only familiar thing left in her. We aren’t alike. We were never alike, but we are family. But she looks at me now with blame in her eyes. I killed my mother. As if I really did. She thinks I did, and that guts me over and over.
The booze could never quite kill her contempt.
Realization washes over me with an acid burn. I’m literally her problem, and that’s not a flippant side note. The best thing I can do for her is to leave and give her a chance to heal. To get as far away from her as I can and stay there.
My gaze meets Sherman’s. “She’ll be taken care of?”
“You have my word.”
“I’ll expect that in writing.”
A hint of respect flickers in the man’s expression. “As well you should.”
“Don’t suppose you’d wait until after tomorrow night to sign me up and ship me off?” They gave me deadpan looks in reply. “No. I didn’t think so.” My date with Layla’s officially cancelled.