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But things here were definitely not equal. Not even close. Brittany was Lt. Jones’s sister-in-law, which was probably even worse than if she were his sister. A sister wouldn’t tell a brother about a night of hot sex with a near stranger. Well, probably not. But a sister just might tell a sister. Provided the two sisters were close. Which Brittany and Melody certainly were.
And word would definitely get back to Jones, which wouldn’t be good.
No, this was not going to happen, not tonight, not ever. Which, on that very superficial and completely physical level, was a crying shame. He would have liked, very much, to see Brittany Evans naked.
“What did he say to you?” she asked, looking at him in that way she had—as if she was trying to see inside of his skull and read his mind. Good thing she couldn’t. “Melero, I mean.”
“That kid is a total…” Wes chose a more polite word. “Idiot.”
Brittany smiled at him. “That’s not what you were going to say.”
“I’m working hard to keep it clean.”
“I appreciate that.”
God her smile was a killer. Wes forced himself to stop cataloging everything he wasn’t going to do to her tonight. Enough self-torture already. He brought the conversation back on track. “Melero was just being a jerk. That’s another good word for him—jerk.”
“I’ve met him plenty of times before,” she countered, narrowing her eyes slightly. “I’m well aware that he’s capable of extreme jerkdom. But Andy knows that, too. What exactly did this guy say to Andy to piss him off like that?”
“It was about a girl,” Wes said, unsure just how much to tell her.
“Dani?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“She’s Andy’s girlfriend.”
“I gathered that,” he said.
“What did he say?” she persisted.
Wes paraphrased and summarized. He’d heard quite a bit this afternoon that he didn’t want to repeat. It really was none of his business. “Melero told Andy that he’d, uh, you know, slept with her. Only, he put it a lot less delicately.”
“I’m sure.” Britt let out an exasperated laugh. “And Andy didn’t just walk away? What a lunkhead. That girl is devoted to him—she thinks he makes the sun rise. She’s a nice kid. A little low in the self-esteem department in my opinion, but, okay, she’s still young. Maybe it’ll come. I just hope…” She shook her head. “I’m not sure she’s right for Andy and I’d really hate for her to get pregnant. I preach safe sex pretty much nonstop. He just rolls his eyes.”
“Yeah, well, you can cross that off your list of things to worry about, at least for right now.” Wes finished his beer before remembering he’d planned to make it last all through dinner. Crap. “Apparently Dani is all about taking it really slow.” Ah, hell, why not just tell Brittany all of it? It wasn’t his business, but clearly this wasn’t something Andy would bring up in a conversation with his mother. “She’s a public virgin.”
Brittany put down her fork. “Excuse me?”
“She’s a virgin, and apparently she’s not afraid to tell people—you know, make it public knowledge that she has no intention of messing around before she’s good and ready.”
“Well, you go girl! Good for her. I had no idea she had that much backbone.”
“But now Melero’s telling everyone he popped her cherry and—” Holy God, what was he saying? And to Lt. Jones’s sister-in-law, no less. “Look, he was beyond crude, okay? When I heard what he’d said, I wanted to throw him up against the wall myself.”
“You did.”
She was looking at him so pointedly, so like the way Mrs. Bartlett, his third grade teacher had looked at him, he had to laugh. Man, he hadn’t thought about Mrs. B. in years, God bless her. “Yeah,” he said, “no. I didn’t do that until he said the other thing.”
“Which was…?”
She wasn’t going to like this. “I went into caveman mode,” he apologized first. “I’m sorry I did that in front of your kid. That was the wrong message to send, but when that little cow turd started laughing and saying you were hot, and that you were next on his list…”
Brittany looked surprised for about half a second. Then she laughed. Her eyes actually sparkled. “Sweetie, that was just a schoolyard taunt. And your mother, too…You know? This boy is a total jerk and a bully, but he’s not any kind of a real threat. And even if he was, I could take care of myself. Believe me.”
“Yeah, I picked that up from you right away,” Wes said. “And I told him that.”
“After which you told him you were a Navy SEAL and if he so much as breathed in my direction, you were going to…what?”
Wes scratched his chin. “I may have mentioned something about my diving knife and his never having offspring.”
She laughed again. Thank God. “That must’ve been when he looked like he was going to faint.”
“How is everything?” The waiter was back, but the place was crowded and he didn’t wait for an answer. He deftly removed the empty beer bottles from the table. “Another?”
“Yes, please.” Brittany smiled up at the guy, and Wes said another short prayer of thanks that his knee-jerk treatment of Melero hadn’t made her decide not to like him.
“Sir?”
“Yeah. Wait! Make it a cola.”
“Very good, sir.” The waiter vanished.
“I’m trying to cut back,” Wes felt the need to explain as the warmth of her gaze was focused back on him. “One beer a night. Two becomes six a little too easily these days, you know?”
“I appreciate it,” Brittany said. “Especially since you’re driving.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a sloppy drunk. It’s not pretty. It’s definitely not a good way to make new friends.” Why the hell was he telling her this? He didn’t even talk with Bobby about his fears of becoming an alcoholic, and Bobby Taylor was his friend and swim buddy from way back. “This is a very interesting first date. We talk about your son’s sex life and my potential drinking problem. Shouldn’t we be talking about the weather? Or movies we just saw?”
“It finally stopped raining, thank goodness,” Brittany said. “I just rented Ocean’s Eleven and loved it. When did you quit smoking?”
Damn. “Two days ago. What’d I do? Pat my pocket, searching for my nonexistent pack?”
“Yup.”
Crap. He resisted another urge to reach into his pocket. Not that he could’ve had a cigarette until later. This restaurant was smoke free.
“It must be driving you crazy,” Brittany observed. “To stop smoking and cut back on your drinking all at the same time.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve tried to quit before, I don’t have a whole hell of a lot of faith in myself. I mean, the longest I’ve gone without a cigarette is six weeks.”
“Have you tried the patch?”
“No,” he admitted. “I know I probably should. I don’t know, maybe the idea would appeal to me more if I could get Julia Roberts to glue it to my ass.”
Brittany laughed. “Maybe not smoking would appeal to you more if you had a girlfriend who told you that kissing you after you smoked was similar to licking an ashtray.”
He forced a smile. “Yeah, well…” The woman he wanted to be his girlfriend was married. He didn’t want to think about the one time he did kiss her. As easy as it was to talk to Brittany, he couldn’t talk about Lana. This was a date, after all, not therapy.
Not that he’d managed to talk to the team shrink about Lana, either, though. The only talking he’d done was when he was completely skunked.
The waiter brought their drinks to the table and vanished again. Wes took a sip of his soda and tried to like it, tried not to wish it was another bottle of beer.
“My ex used to smoke,” Brittany told him. “I tried everything to get him to quit, and finally drew a line. I told him that if he was going to smoke, he couldn’t kiss me. And he said okay, if that’s what I wanted.”
Wes knew what was coming from the rueful edge to her smile.
“So he stopped kissing me,” she told him.
The adjectives he used to describe the bastard were blistering—far worse than anything that had come out of Dustin Melero’s mouth that afternoon, but she just laughed as he winced and apologized.
“It’s all right,” she said. “But cut him some slack. He wasn’t entirely to blame. You know, he smoked when I married him, so it was pretty unfair of me to make those kinds of demands. Bottom line, sweetie, is that you’ve got to quit smoking because you want to quit smoking.”
“Or at the very least, I’ve got to want Julia Roberts to glue the patch onto my—”
“Yes,” she said, laughing. “That might do it.”
“He was a fool,” Wes told her, reaching across the table to take her hand. “Your ex.”
The smile she gave him was stunning as she squeezed his fingers. “Thank you. I’ve always thought so, too.”
Brittany took a sip of her coffee. “Melody told me you had leave for a week—”
“Two,” Wes interjected.
“And that you were spending that time here in L.A. as a favor to a friend?”
“Yeah.” Wes Skelly had a nervous tell. Even sitting at the table, he was constantly in motion, kind of like a living pinball. He was always fiddling with something on the table. His spoon. The saltshaker. The tablecloth. His soda straw. But when he got nervous—at least Britt thought it was nerves he was feeling—he stopped. Stopped moving. Stopped fiddling. He got very, very still.
He was doing it right now, but as he started to talk, he started stirring the ice in his soda. “I’m actually here as a favor to the wife of a good friend. Wizard.” He glanced up at her, and she knew it was an act. He was working overtime to pretend to be casual.
“I don’t know if your sister ever talked about him,” he continued. “She may not know him. I don’t know. He’s with SEAL Team Six, and he’s always out of the country, so…Very hard to find. So he’s gone again, and his wife, Lana, she’s, you know, very nice, very…We’ve been friends for years, too, and…Well, she was worried about her sister. Half sister, actually. Her father’s second marriage, and…Anyway, Lana’s half sister is Amber Tierney and—”
“Whoa.” Britt held up her hand. “Wait a sec. Information overload. Your friend Wizard’s wife Lana’s—” Lana, who was very nice, “—half sister is Amber Tierney from High Tide?”
“Yeah.”
“Holy moly.” With her heavy schedule at school and exhausting rotations in the hospital, Brittany didn’t have time to keep up with the various TV and movie stars who made headlines in L.A. But Amber Tierney had been impossible to miss. She’d been TV’s current It Girl ever since her sitcom, High Tide, had first aired last September. “Her sister’s worried…that she’s making too much money…? That Tom Cruise wants to date her…? That—”
“She’s being stalked,” Wes finished for her.
Britt cringed. “Sorry. That is a problem. I shouldn’t have tried to make it into a joke.”
“I’m not sure how real the threat is,” Wes told her. “Lana says Amber’s shrugging it off, says the guy’s harmless, he wouldn’t really hurt her. But see, Lana’s a shrink, and some of this guy’s patterns of behavior are freaking her out. It’s a little too obsessive for her comfort level. So she called me, and…Well, here I am.”
Lana, who was, you know, very nice calls and Wes jumps all the way to L.A.? Oh, Wes, please don’t be having an affair with the wife of a friend. That was just too snarky and sleazy and downright unforgivable. You’re a far better man than that.
Brittany chose her words carefully. “I know Navy SEALs are very good at what they do, but…isn’t this a job for the L.A.P.D.?”
Wes finished his cheesecake, and he wiped his mouth on his napkin before answering. “Amber doesn’t want to involve the police. It would be instantly all over the news—especially the tabloids. Like I said, she thinks this guy’s harmless. So Lana asked me to come to L.A. and quietly check out Amber’s security system, make sure it’s good enough, make sure she’s really safe.”
“And the reason that what’s-his-name—Wizard—can’t do this is…?”
“He’s out of the country. He’s been gone for—I don’t know—ten of the past twelve months.”
“So Lana called you.”
“Yeah.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“You must be really good friends,” Britt said. “I know you don’t get a lot of vacation time, and to spend some of it here, doing this kind of favor…”
“Yeah, well…” Again, no eye contact.
“Although, of course, Amber Tierney…Sheesh. She’s gorgeous. And currently single, according to the National Star. If you play your cards right…”
Wes laughed. “Yeah, right. No, thank you. That’s the dead last thing I need. And Amber—I’m sure she doesn’t need another idiot drooling over her.”
“You don’t think your friend Lana sent you here to set you up with her little sister?”
He looked up at her then, seriously taken aback. “God, what a thought.”
“Sisters do those kinds of things,” Britt said. “They know a single guy who’s really nice, they really like him a lot, they have a sister who’s single, too…”
He was shaking his head. “I don’t know…”
Are you sleeping with her? Brittany didn’t ask. That was definitely a question that required a friendship that was more than a few hours old. And even if she had known Wes for years, it was none of her business. She kept her mouth tightly shut.
Although, what better way to spend a few weeks with a lover? Husband is conveniently out of town ten out of twelve months a year, but the neighbors might notice if one of his best friends starts coming over for slumber parties. Little sister needs a brave Navy SEAL to check out her security system, so Wes toddles off to L.A. Whoops, there’s some kind of a problem, Lana comes to town to “help…” And gee, there they are. Wes and Lana in L.A., away from everyone who knows that she’s married to someone else, for two blissful weeks.
Ick. Britt hoped she was wrong.
The waiter brought the check, saving her from asking nosy questions.
As Wes looked it over, he took out his wallet.
Brittany opened her purse, too. “Let’s just split it right down the middle.”
“Nope,” he said, taking out a credit card, sliding it into the leather folder that held the bill and holding it up so the waiter could grab it on his way past. “This one’s mine.”
“Nuh-uh,” she disagreed. “This wasn’t a date.”
“Yes, it was,” he countered. “And actually, I think it was the nicest date I’ve ever been on.”
What a sweet thing to say. “Wow, you don’t get out much, huh?”
He laughed.
“Seriously, Wes,” she said. “It’s not fair that you should have to pay for my dinner just because my brother-in-law—”
