Tempted by the Soldier (A Falling for You Novel) (Entangled Brazen) (4 page)

Chapter Four

Beyond the driver’s-side window, the cluttered city had disappeared, giving way to long stretches of wheat and tobacco fields. If Nate had been alone, he’d have taken the time to appreciate just how beautiful the state he’d called home for the past two years was. But focusing on anything other than the woman torturing him from the other side of the cab was damn near impossible. Only a half hour outside Charlotte, and Nate was already going crazy. Without Lilly even uttering one damn word.

Unfortunately, she had other weapons at her disposal…and she was using them. Any second now, his head was going to explode. Or possibly, other parts of his anatomy.

She’d ditched the high heels and now her bare feet were propped up on his freshly Armor All-waxed dash, her perfectly manicured pink toes tapping out the rhythm to a silent tune. The hem of her dress seemed to slide another inch up her thigh every time the truck rolled over a fucking pebble in the road.

If only he could find a speed bump to fly over or a curb to check. Maybe then he’d finally get to see what color her panties were, and his cock would stop punishing him for wondering.

Half an hour in the car and he could already smell her on his clothes, bringing back memories that needed to stay buried if he wanted to have a chance in hell of keeping his dick in his pants on this trip.

He pushed his Ray-Bans up his nose and forced his attention back to the road.

He’d meant what he’d said. If she kept giving him shit, kept teasing him, he
would
retaliate with that kiss. His dick was literally begging for her to smart off, just to give him an excuse to taste her.

Would she taste the same? God, he hoped so. Her taste had ruined him. He still couldn’t eat a strawberry without sporting a damn hard-on. She might push him past his breaking point and irritate the hell out of him, but damned if he could fight back against the desire she sparked in him.

He
needed
to fight it, though. He really fucking needed to, if he knew what was good for him…and for her. He had too many battles to fight in his life, and this was one he didn’t have the energy for. Or the will. Even now, the darkness and anger inside him were beating on his skull, demanding he allow his emotions to implode. They were always there—reminding him of the people he’d failed. And the mistakes he’d made.

Hale. Clemmons. Keller. Puckett. Rivera. Hanson. Lopez
.

Nate gritted his teeth and rubbed his dog tags between his fingers, trying to focus on the road and not the ghosts fighting for space in his head.

But it was no use. As the only survivor of that hellish day, as the one who had brought that helo down, he owed it to the dead. What he wanted didn’t matter.
They
mattered—the men who had counted on him to save their lives. The men he’d failed. And making their deaths mean something by going back to continue what they no longer could.
That
mattered.

Getting caught in the tangle of emotions that Lilly stirred up would only distract him from his mission. Would only make him want something he couldn’t have. And put even more strain on the thin line of self-control he teetered on day to day.

He couldn’t go there with her. Which meant it was time to banish the ongoing film reel of fantasies in his head starring him, Lilly, and a year’s worth of sexual tension set free.

“Could you get your feet off of the dash?” He scrubbed his fingers through his hair with his free hand, forcing patience into his voice. “I just waxed it.”

“What a coincidence,” she innocently mused. “I just waxed, too.”

Kill me. Kill me now
.

He clenched his jaw so tight it popped. He forced a mental block to beat back the images of smooth, pink skin hidden under her barely there panties. But his dick wasn’t taking no for an answer. It rose to attention, making him shift in his seat.

“Are you going to take your feet down or not?” he snapped.

“I’m quite comfortable like this. But thanks for your concern.”

She leaned over and flipped the radio on, severing the tense silence between them. She scanned the presets, then went rogue and landed on a pop station. She sank back into her seat with a smirk on her face and Nate cringed, losing his train of thought in the barrage of shitty music rattling his dash. Was that…Britney Spears?

Oh
, hell
no.

“I don’t think so.” He punched a preset and the twang of good country music filled the cab. He preferred silence, but anything was better than the teenybopper crap Lilly was trying to force on him.

“Hey! I was listening to that.” She switched the station again and cranked up the volume.

The pain throbbing behind his temple flared back to life and he gritted his teeth. Why the hell couldn’t
anything
with this woman be easy? Was she deliberately trying to make his life hell?
As if he needed anyone to help him with that
. He managed to find himself there every night all on his own.

He looked over at the smart-mouthed temptress taking up the other half of his bench seat. Of course she was. She wouldn’t be Lilly if she wasn’t being a colossal pain in his ass.

“My truck. My music.” He punched the preset again, reviving George Strait’s voice, and Lilly made a frustrated sound. When she reached out again he grabbed her wrist before her fingers could reach the button.

Immediately, he regretted the decision. After all her teasing, that little bit of skin-on-skin contact was all it took to send a hot shiver of desire down his spine, lighting a fire under his cock so hot, he didn’t think he could ever snuff it out.

“What are you going to do?” She smirked. “
Retaliate
?”

He could think of a hundred ways he’d like to retaliate for all of the torture she’d unleashed on him over the past year. Shaking her earth-shattering ass in those tiny dresses at the club while he was forced to stand behind the bar and watch. Twisting him up inside with her smart mouth until he didn’t know the difference between anger and lust. He released her wrist, ignoring the heat in her eyes, and returned his attention to where it belonged.

The road
.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” he said like it wasn’t a question.

“Fine,” she shot back. “Listen to your honky-tonk torture. But if my ears start bleeding, I’m blaming you.”

“Can’t be any worse than the sound of your voice, Princess, and you live with that every day.”

“Asshole,” she muttered, dropping her feet back into the floorboard and folding her arms across her chest.

He frowned over at her. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Lilly stiffened and stared out the window. “My mother’s dead.”

Ah, hell
. Nate flickered his gaze across the seat, wishing he could take the words back and make her forget he’d said them.

He knew what it was like to lose a parent. Hell, he’d lost both of his. That shit wasn’t something to be taken lightly. He and Lilly may take jabs at each other for a lot of things, but even he knew he’d crossed a line. The haunted look in her eyes told him he’d just dredged up a memory that cut deep.

Maybe they were more alike than he wanted to admit…

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was a shitty thing to say.”

Her expression turned surprised a second before she answered. “Whatever. You didn’t know.”

He tapped his fingers against the wheel, knowing damn good and well the last thing he should do was dig deeper. Deeper with Lilly wasn’t going to lead to anything good. They were good at pissing each other off, right up to the point of wanting to tear each other’s clothes off. And they were experts at avoiding anything below the surface. They
weren’t
good at…deeper.

He stole another glance in her direction and caught the sadness in her reflection in the window. The sorrow in her eyes made him feel as though someone had punched him square in the chest. If she knew he’d seen that, she would hate it. She would hate him for getting even a tiny glimpse of the vulnerability she always kept locked up tight.

Before he could stop himself, he found himself asking, “How did she die?”

“She slit her wrists in our bathtub when I was fifteen,” Lilly said matter-of-factly. “How did your mom die?”

He swallowed the thick sensation coating his throat. “Cancer.”

Saying it out loud like that tore down the dam holding back the sea of guilt and grief inside him. Lilly’s mother may have given up, but not Maggie Jennings. She’d fought, and fought hard.

And what had he done? He’d run away. Put an ocean between himself and her life-and-death struggle. It had been too easy to forget that the woman he’d loved more than life was withering away when he was flying loads of bloodied, destroyed soldiers to safety every day. He’d almost been able to justify not being there to help Jace take care of her.

Almost.

Until the day he couldn’t even do that right. After the helicopter crash, and leaving his dead men behind, suddenly none of it felt worth it. He’d sacrificed his chance at saying good-bye to his mother, his chance to take care of her, all for nothing.
Worse
than nothing.

He swallowed hard and let the chain of his dog tags slide through his fingers, rubbing the thin slivers of metal between his fingers to ground himself.

“Still feel like sharing?” Lilly asked, watching him guardedly from across the seat.

“No.”

After a brief hesitation, she said, “Good,” then closed her eyes and rested her head against the seat back. “Neither do I.”

Chapter Five

Lilly watched the odometer turn over another mile. Virginia seemed to be a never-ending state. A never-ending state filled with windy roads, nightmarish tunnels, and scarily spectacular views. She tensed and squeezed her eyes shut as Nate rounded a curve and the road dropped off into nothing on the passenger side. Beautiful? Yes. Terrifying for someone afraid of heights? Double yes.

Just a few more hours, and they’d be back on level ground where they belonged. She checked the map on her phone just to make sure. Yes. Flat land was where this girl belonged.

The fact that she’d desperately had to pee for at least thirty miles wasn’t helping matters. Her bladder screamed at her to open her stubborn mouth.

She peeked at the clock on the dash. Already past two. They’d left North Carolina and made the turn onto I-81 ages ago. How long did Nate plan to drive before stopping for a bathroom break? She’d watched the man consume two bottles of water and a full cup of coffee. Surely his body had needs.

She wiggled in her seat and peeked over at him. He’d been even more tense and on edge than usual since she’d shut down their little heart-to-heart. So they both had dead mothers. It wasn’t as if they needed to bond over it. She’d already experienced firsthand what happened when you opened up to Nate Jennings, and she didn’t intend to make the same mistake twice. Trusting him would be asking for heartache.

“I have to pee,” she finally said when her bladder reached the point of no return and she spotted an exit up ahead.

“You just went a couple of hours ago,” he said.

“What are you, the pee police?” she retorted. “I wasn’t aware you were keeping a chart of my bladder function. Are you tracking my fluid intake as well?”

His knuckles blanched white around the steering wheel and he blew out a frustrated breath, flipping on his blinker at the next exit. “This is why I travel alone,” he muttered.

She rolled her eyes. “Please. You travel alone because no one is desperate enough to sit in a confined space with your surly ass for an extended period of time.”

“Nobody but you, right, Princess?” He whipped into a truck stop before she could respond—or object—and threw the truck into park at a gas pump. He looked at her expectantly as she took in her surroundings.

“You have got to be kidding me.” She watched a trucker in a flannel lumberjack shirt walk past her window carrying a ginormous soda cup. This was not one of the usual neat and clean freeway rest stops. This was a grungy and oily off-brand service station attached to a questionable diner with yellowing windows that hadn’t been washed in decades, on a no-name exit in the middle of nowhere.

They hadn’t even opened the truck doors yet and the cab was already inundated with the disgusting aroma of diesel fumes and fryer grease. Crinkling her nose, she held a hand over her nose to block the stench. There was no telling what kinds of poor defenseless animals were being slaughtered and fried in that place. Visions of
Deliverance
danced through her mind.

Nate unbuckled his seat belt and raised a brow. “You said you needed to use the bathroom. I provided you one.”

“I said I wanted a bathroom, not a place where I have to wear a biohazard suit just to touch a door handle,” she said, eyes wide with horror.

He popped his door open and climbed out, stretching his arms above his head. A sliver of tanned, scarred skin peeked out where his shirt rode up, and she averted her gaze.

“You’ll survive,” he said, dropping his hands to his sides.

He slammed the door shut, and Lilly watched his perfect backside, encased in snug denim, waltz into the truck stop.

Damn that ass.
No
. Damn her and her weak willpower for being unable to stop salivating over it.

She whacked the visor back into place and groaned. She had to stop letting him get to her. She was allowing him to win. That wasn’t an option.

She hopped out onto the parking lot and hurried into the store, ignoring the leering looks from a couple of creeps she passed on the way.
Sweet Jesus
. If possible, the smell was even worse inside. She hurried to the counter and wanted to weep at the menu hanging from the ceiling.
Frog legs. Double bacon cheeseburger. Shredded pork sliders
. Her stomach rolled and she clutched her abdomen, trying not to envision Babe being fried up and served on a paper plate. She loved living in the South, but some things a vegetarian just never got used to.

“Can I help you, darlin’?”

She turned to the cashier, who had a gravelly smoker’s voice and a name tag that read
Doris
. “Yes, where is your restroom, please?”

Doris dug for something under the counter and came back up holding a key…with a dingy, chipped, toilet seat attached to it with a chain.

“
What
is that?”

“The key.” Doris dropped the toilet seat–key combo onto the counter and sighed. “Bathroom’s outside, around the side of the building.”

Lilly stared at the toilet seat in disgust. “Can you take the toilet seat off?”

“It’s a safety measure,” Doris said evenly. “Take it or leave it.”

“Do I look like someone who would steal your disgusting bathroom key?”

The cashier shrugged, and Nate reached over Lilly’s shoulder, grabbing the key. “She’ll take it. Thanks.”

Lilly spun around, nearly colliding with his broad chest, and glared up at him. He dangled the key in front of her and scowled.

She snatched it out of his hand and scowled right back. “I was handling it.”

“You were being a prissy brat,” he reprimanded her. “Haven’t you ever been in a truck stop?”

She stepped out of the line of people who were starting to stare at them. “No.”

He followed her out the door into the misting rain. “How is that possible?”

“I’ve never traveled,” she said. “Didn’t do a lot of family road trips when I was a kid.”

She rounded the corner of the dilapidated building and groaned when she spotted the bathroom. Was he really going to follow her all the way to the door? She turned on him and he stopped, a curious expression on his face.

“You’re telling me you’ve never been out of the state of North Carolina before?” he asked. “Not even once?”

“Not even once, Soldier Boy.”

He slammed his hand against the door to keep her from shutting it, and his nostrils flared.

“Isn’t there anything else you could call me other than that stupid, fucking nickname?”

She reached up and patted his cheek when he scowled. “Oh, honey. You really don’t want to hear the other names I have for you.”

She removed his hand, then slammed the bathroom door in his face and turned to catalog the tiny room. Questionable-looking toilet, broken mirror, out-of-order condom machine, and an empty paper towel holder.
Dear God
. It was even worse than she’d expected. She inspected the menagerie of phone numbers and perverse messages scrawled across the walls and an idea began to form.

If Nate wanted to play dirty, she was game. This was war, after all. She dug a pen out of her purse and scrawled Nate’s number across the wall under her carefully composed ad.

Burly truckers looking for a fine piece of man meat and a good time call Nate
.

Satisfied with her handiwork, she conducted the rest of her business and escaped the bathroom as quickly as possible. She went back inside the diner and tossed the key onto the counter.

“See? The toilet seat worked,” Doris drawled. “You didn’t steal it.”

“It was tempting,” Lilly deadpanned. “Thanks.”

She hurried back to the truck and climbed into the euphoric scent of sun-warmed leather and Nate. He raised a brow, watching her slather her hands with antibacterial gel from her purse, then took a bite of the hot dog dripping ketchup all over his hand. He pulled away from the gas pumps one-handed, and found a parking spot that overlooked the freeway to finish his meal.

“You hungry?” he asked.

She cringed at the smell of the mystery meat on a bun. “I can’t eat that.”

He set a paper bag in her lap and took another bite. “Which is why I got you that.”

She dug through the bag and pulled out a plastic fruit cup, a packaged salad, and a bottle of water. She looked up at him, surprised. “How did you know I was a vegetarian?”

“Jace’s Super Bowl party last year,” he said.

She blinked. “You remember that?”

He uncapped his bottle of water. “You brought your own hummus dip and called the pigs in a blanket barbaric. Kind of hard to forget.”

She managed a smile and popped open her salad, which looked surprisingly fresh for coming out of a place where you could purchase gasoline and a
Duck Dynasty
T-shirt with your meal. “You’re obviously a meat man.”

“Yes. I eat meat. I’ve even been known to dream about a good steak. Are you disgusted?”

“No. Not disgusted,” she admitted. “I know my culinary preference is not for everyone.”

“And why is it for you?”

She thought back to her childhood and the countless hurt and homeless animals she and her brother had carted home. How many times had a little ball of fur been the only comfort they’d had in their screwed-up world of dysfunctional love? That was the thing with animals. Their love was pure and unconditional.

Unfortunately, some of the humans in her life still didn’t have that one figured out quite yet. She poked at her salad. Make that
most
of the humans in her life.

She avoided Nate’s probing gaze. “I’ve always loved animals. I just can’t bring myself to eat something with a face, even if it is the logical thing to do,” she admitted, giving her full attention to the cherry tomato she’d speared with her fork. Tomatoes were far easier than memories. “My brother, Sawyer, and I used to adopt all the strays in the neighborhood. Dogs, cats, raccoons. We even brought a skunk home one time, thinking if we gave it a bath it wouldn’t stink so badly.”

Nate choked on his drink, but he was grinning. “Why in God’s name would you do that?”

She shrugged. “Poor thing looked so lonely sitting on the side of the road all by himself.” Her lips tugged up at the memory. “I had a hard time talking Sawyer into that one, but by that time we were nine, and I had him all figured out. All I had to do was cry, and he’d knock down walls to makes the tears stop. It also helped that we were twins. We usually stuck together. If one of us got into trouble, the other usually wasn’t far behind.”

Nate regarded her, a dozen indecipherable emotions warring on his face. In the end, amusement won out. “So what happened next? I can’t imagine this story has a boring ending.”

She laughed, thinking Sawyer would not find this story half as funny as she did. She could picture the pissed-off scowl on his face even now as he’d walked out of that emergency room. “Well, as soon as we got it into the tub and turned on the water, it bit Sawyer and sprayed us both. He had to get rabies shots, and we both had to take baths in every concoction known to man. It took weeks to get that smell out of our house.”

Nate shook his head, laughing out loud with her. “Your brother sounds like he loves you a lot.”

“I think it took him a while to remember just how much, after getting seventeen rabies shots because of me.”

“What about your parents?” Nate asked.

Clearly, the man was unaware of the dangerous waters he was treading in.

When she didn’t respond, he said, “I can’t even imagine the forms of punishment my mom would have come up with for a stunt like that. Hell, she made Jace and me mow every lawn in the neighborhood for a month just for busting a window with a baseball.”

Lilly swallowed the sudden lump in her throat, wondering what it would have been like to have a parent who cared about you that much. Her heart hurt so badly in that moment she wished she could cut it out. Life would be so much easier without the pain such a small but vital organ caused.

“My mother wasn’t around much.” She pressed her lips together, instantly wishing she hadn’t said it. She didn’t want to let Nate in, and yet she felt even in what had started out as an innocent conversation, he was unintentionally worming his way under her skin.

“Are you okay?” He touched her hand across the seat and heat sizzled over her skin where his fingers made contact, causing her breath to catch.

She nodded and pulled away. “I’m fine. Sorry. Just…ignore me.”

He refused to look away no matter how hard she willed him to; the intensity in his eyes was hot enough to burn her. “Not possible.”

“You haven’t had a problem ignoring me for the past year,” she blurted out before she could stop herself. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep her mouth shut and looked away from the pissed-off man behind the wheel. For a moment, she thought he might actually drop the subject, but instead he leaned across the seat to invade her space with his heat and his smell and…
oh, God.

“I wasn’t ignoring you to hurt you, Lilly,” he said, his voice low and gruff. “You didn’t…you
don’t
want me in your life. Trust me. I did you a favor by walking away when I did. I’m not a good guy. I’m not the guy you need.”

She swallowed, remembering what Nate had tasted like the last time they’d kissed.
Lemons and mint
. Even a year later the taste of him lingered on her tongue.

He held her gaze and inhaled sharply. His fingers brushed her hand resting next to her thigh. A jolt passed through her at that one tender touch of skin on skin. That, and the heated look in his eyes, made her want to run like hell.

Or maybe meet him halfway and crush her lips against his…

Would he still taste the same?

His phone buzzed, breaking the spell, and he leaned back to grab it. His brow furrowed as he read the text message. “Who the hell is Earl and why is he responding to my offer on the bathroom wall of the Flying Pig Truck Stop?”

It took a second for the implication to sink in.

Oh. Shit
.

He glanced up at her, and she nearly choked on the tomato she’d just popped into her mouth. He narrowed his eyes and held up the phone. “Really?”