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“I had to do it, Ben,” Charlie said, reading his expression. “When I came in yesterday, she was sleeping in her car in the parking lot. I couldn’t let her stay there until she had enough paychecks to get a place. Besides, she agreed to work extra shifts in exchange for no rent.”
“You check references, get her background?” Ben asked casually, walking toward the kitchen.
“Do I look like an idiot?” Charlie asked.
“Nope, but I know you and beautiful women, my friend,” Ben said with a smile. “She could be the worst waitress on the planet or a convicted felon, but looking like that …”
“Don’t worry, I checked her out. Joanna Wallace. Nothing significant, the usual history of dead-end retail and restaurant jobs. No convictions, clean driver’s license. Nice enough. Seems to have made a few bad choices about the men she takes up with, though she didn’t share too many details.”
Ben nodded, glancing through a stack of mail he picked up from the counter. It was easy enough to create a history, set up references, but he was also being paranoid. He’d put a sign out front and someone had come by to apply for the job. Why not her?
Besides, if the mob wanted to take him out, Ben doubted they would send someone like that, he mused. Still, he’d check her out through his own sources as soon as he could.
“Thanks, Charlie. I appreciate you taking that task off my shoulders,” Ben said.
“No problem. Lisa likes her, too, if that helps. I let her interview her as well before we made a final decision.”
Ben nodded. “That was smart.”
Lisa was his one full-time waitress, but her husband had recently left her with their two kids. While she took extra shifts, they needed someone else to cover gaps and help out during the busiest times. Lisa was worth her weight in gold, and it was important that she could work with whomever they hired.
“I’m missing a leg, not a brain,” his friend reprised jokingly, as he often did about the limb he was missing after repeated tours in Iraq. The last tour had seen his leg blown off in a roadside explosion. Yet Charlie never complained, more often using humor to make others comfortable.
“I didn’t balance the books this week. You know I suck at math, so I thought I’d leave that to you,” Charlie added.
“I knew I should have stayed away a few more days,” Ben said with a rueful shake of his head, making both of them laugh as Charlie returned to the grill.
Ben planned to hire a bookkeeper one of these days. For now, he was learning something new every day about running the business, and knowing the financials was as important as anything else. So, he did the books, the ordering, and everything else that came with running a roadhouse, and he was slowly learning the tricks of the trade. He’d hung out here all the time as a kid, helping his grandfather, and then as a teen, meeting here with his friends. The Lucky Break was a large part of his life, though he needed to upgrade some things. He now also appreciated all of the work it took to run a successful establishment.
It was a challenge he could dig into, focus on, and he owed his grandfather the best job he could do. To Ben’s amazement, as the months passed, he enjoyed it more and more. There was always something to keep him busy, and when he wasn’t doing something here, he was fixing up the house, working at his parents’ ranch down the road, or practicing for the next rodeo.
While he’d loved being a SEAL, real life definitely had its attractions, he thought as he walked out from the kitchen to the bar. Washing his hands, his gaze landed on the new waitress again.
Lisa, also working the lunch shift, winked at him and waved. Ben nodded back, slipping behind the bar to pitch in with the increasing lunch crowd.
Joanna approached the bar with an order. Close up, she was even more stunning. He almost wouldn’t have blamed Charlie if he had hired her for her looks.
“Two drafts and one cola,” she said, her brown eyes meeting his as she shot her hand over the bar in greeting. “Hi, I’m Joanna. Lisa tells me you’re the boss.”
He nodded, his eyes drifting to her lips. She wore no lipstick, just some gloss, and her skin was also unadorned, no cosmetics marring her clear, tanned complexion.
“Ben, Ben Callahan,” he offered calmly enough, though her touch and her eyes had almost turned him hard with immediate lust, right here behind his bar. She had a strong grip for a woman, those long, slim fingers closing around his, but her skin was like satin.
Ben cleared his throat, letting go of her hand and turning to pull down some glasses for the beer and the soda, loading them up on a tray and handing them back to her. He wasn’t used to losing control, certainly not from one touch.
“Thanks,” she said, starting to turn away.
“Joanna,” he said, stopping her, his mind clearing.
“Yes?”
“Make some time to talk for a few minutes after your shift? Maybe catch a bite? I like to touch base with new employees, you understand,” he said.
She nodded, seeming unfazed. “Sure, no problem.”
Watching her walk away, the little alarm in his brain just wouldn’t settle down. He couldn’t quite figure out why, but there was something about her that didn’t scream down-on-her-luck. She also didn’t seem like a woman to take up with the wrong kind of guy. Self-confidence and intelligence practically crackled in the air around her as she moved.
She exuded an earthy sexuality that had likely brought more than one man to his knees. The vision of what he’d like to do on his knees before Joanna Wallace made him shake his head, and he got back to work, turning to greet and take the lunch orders from a couple of local ranch hands who pulled up to the bar.
He supposed his physical reaction to a beautiful woman wasn’t out of the usual. Ben hadn’t been with anyone in a while. Life had been too crazy.
He’d had a one-nighter on his last military leave, and that was well over a year ago. Since then, things had just not lined up in the right way. Not that he hadn’t had some offers since he’d come home, but he didn’t want to make things more complicated in his own backyard. And truthfully, none of the women he’d met had inspired him that way.
Joanna Wallace definitely inspired him. Still, lust was mingling with caution in a very uncomfortable way.
As he conducted his work at the bar, he watched her interact with a table of customers who seemed captivated by her. She joked with them, smiling broadly, her laugh rising over the din of the room. Her eyes met his across the space again, as if she’d felt him watching her. She was aware of him, too.
Interesting.
Her posture, the slight apprehension in the way she held her shoulders when she looked at him, told him what he wanted to know. Part of it, anyway. She was hiding something, and by the end of the afternoon, he intended to know what it was.
JOANNA DIDN’T REMEMBER ever being so nervous that her palms were as sweaty as they were when she walked into the employee lounge to meet Ben Callahan.
She’d had to fight her instinct to cover up the generous amount of skin exposed by the halter top she was wearing. Definitely not her usual style. Lacey, her brother Jarod’s wife, had insisted it was perfect for a job at a roadhouse. In truth, Joanna had felt pretty comfortable in the get-up until Ben Callahan had looked at her. Then she had been distinctly uncomfortable in a couple of different ways.
Getting by Charlie and Lisa had been easy, but when Ben looked at her, she had the feeling he knew right away that she wasn’t who she said she was. Not a waitress, not Joanna Wallace. She half expected him to call her out on it right then and there, but her background cover was solid, even if they checked.
Now she was going to meet with him privately, and she had to convince him she was the real deal. Tom’s words about her career hanging on her success rang in her head and as she closed the door, walked toward the thick wooden table where he sat with two of the cheeseburger specials that she’d been serving all during lunch. Her stomach growled. She was hungry. Waitressing, something she hadn’t done since college, was hard physical work.
“Hi, hope you don’t mind a burger,” Ben said congenially, though his eyes were telling her a different story. He wasn’t sure of her yet, and he was suspicious.
That was good. Of course, given his military background, she assumed he would be cautious. He knew the score, knew that what he’d seen put him in a certain amount of danger. He’d be particularly careful about anyone he didn’t know. She’d expected that.
“This is great, thanks,” she said with a smile and took the chair across from him.
“Eat, then we can talk,” he said, grabbing his own sandwich.
She had no argument with that.
Polishing off his burger, he sat back and waited for her. She didn’t rush, and also sat back with a contented sigh when she finished.
“I don’t know what Charlie does to these burgers, but he deserves some kind of medal,” she said to break the ice.
“He does have talent at the grill,” Callahan agreed, and didn’t break eye contact as the tone shifted between them. “So, tell me a little about yourself. I know Charlie crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s, but I like to know who’s working for me.”
She shrugged. “What do you want to know?”
“You’re clearly from Texas, but not local. Where’d you grow up?”
“Just outside Corpus Christi, though I’ve lived in San Diego for the last eight years. Came back to El Paso with my boyfriend, Lenny. It didn’t work out.”
The best lies were couched in as much truth as possible, and while she had been living in San Diego when she was shot, and she did have a former boyfriend named Lenny, everything else was pure fiction. She waited for him to respond.
Taking another sip of her drink, her throat was suddenly dry for no reason other than he was one of the best-looking men she’d ever seen. Six-foot-plus of lean, incredible Texas male.
She had been raised by two strong men, her dad and her older brother, Jarod, who were both Texas Rangers and were also all the family she’d ever known after her mom had taken off when Joanna was seven. For this reason, she had always been very comfortable around men.
She worked with lots of very good-looking men in her job—ones easily as good-looking as Ben Callahan—but they were marshals, and she never thought of them romantically. Even back in high school, she’d found the boys easier to get along with, and had had more male than female friends.
For that reason, Joanna dated very rarely. She’d been halfway through college before she’d lost her virginity, and even that was with a guy she considered more of a friend than a lover. He was an Assistant District Attorney in Houston now, married, with four kids.
None of that was ever part of Joanna’s plan. She was all about the job, just like her brother and her father.
Except that Jarod was married now, and even her father had met someone.
That was nice. She was happy for them, and she loved her sister-in-law Lacey. But she wasn’t about to follow suit.
For all these reasons, it was mortifying that her breath caught when Ben Callahan leaned in closer over the table. She snapped her mouth shut, realizing she had actually licked her lip.
Make it work for you, you’re supposed to be nervous. Play the part.
He had to believe she was just a waitress, a girl down on her luck who’d made some bad choices and who needed the job. If she couldn’t pull that off, her supervisors would think she had really lost her touch.
A dark-blond lock fell forward on his forehead, and he pushed it back, every muscle in his arm showing off in the process. She could almost make out the movement of his abs under the white T-shirt he wore.
She’d memorized his file, of course, though none of the pictures there did him justice. He’d been out of the SEALs for less than a year, retired with an honorable discharge. She wondered what had happened. In her experience, those guys never left until they were forced to. Whatever it was, he still stayed in fighting form.
She dropped her eyes to his hands where they rested on the table. It crossed her mind that she could have gotten laid sometime in the last four or five weeks.
Joanna liked sex, but had always thought of it more like a sport, something to do that scratched an itch more than anything else, though there hadn’t been much chance for that recently. In fact, it had been the last thing on her mind until about two minutes ago. Ben Callahan was sex personified, and her previously dormant hormones were picking a hell of a time to wake up.
He was talking to her, and she was so busy processing her lust that she wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying, yanking herself back to the present moment.
“Charlie said you were sleeping in your car, and he rented you the room upstairs?”
“Yeah, he’s a great guy,” she said.
“So there’s no family to help out, no other place you could go?”
She shifted in her seat. She had to give him something he would believe.
“Well, I do have a brother, but to be honest, he’s not too interested in having me around. I’m also trying to stay off the radar. I don’t want Lenny trying to find me. Not that he would, but you know, it can’t hurt to be careful.”
“Why?” His tone lowered, and his eyes narrowed slightly.
“Well, I thought I was giving him money to get his truck fixed and it turns out it was for drug deals. I swear, I had no idea,” she said quickly, appearing as desperate as she could. “I had no idea he was buying stuff and reselling it until he got really angry when he came up short, got in some trouble, and I refused to help.”
“And?”
“Well, he got a bit rough, and I knew I was in trouble if I stayed, so I sort of stole his truck to get out of there. He owed me, you know? I had given him hundreds of dollars.”
“And you had no idea he was into drugs?”
“Not really. He had used a few times, but that’s a long way from dealing. And I don’t have anything to do with that stuff,” she said convincingly. “I thought he was a nice guy, but I thought wrong.”
He watched her carefully for a few minutes, and she closed her hands into fists on the table top, a not completely false show of tension.
“So where’s the truck?”
“I traded it for my car at a used car place—you know, roadside, the guy didn’t ask many questions since the truck was worth more than the car I got. I paid him extra not to tell anyone. Then I was out of funds and I was sick of living in my car, so I looked for a job.”
She saw Callahan’s spine straighten. “I see. So you’re afraid this guy will come after you? Lenny?”
“He probably won’t, but if he does, he’d never think that I would stay here,” she said, smiling slightly, as if pleased with herself. “He’ll think I went back to San Diego.”
Ben didn’t smile back.
“But he might. I don’t appreciate trouble like this being brought to my door and not being told about it. You weren’t exactly straight with Charlie.”
She frowned and leaned in, too, getting closer. His pupils dilated slightly, and from that, and how he had looked at her earlier, she knew he was attracted to her. That gave her some leverage.
“I know, I’m so sorry,” she said, licking her lip again in a gesture of nervousness. “But I had to get away, and I did what I had to do. I just want to get back to my life. I honestly don’t think Lenny will come after me. He’s not that ambitious. I’m sure he’s found someone new to sponge off by now.”
There was no Lenny, of course, so she was one-hundred-percent sure that no one would be showing up here after her.
Ben considered, and then nodded slowly. “He didn’t report you for stealing his truck?”
She snorted. “He would have to risk me telling them about the drugs.”
“That’s true,” he said, nodding. “Well, I’m glad you got out. And you’re doing a good job here, so I have no problem with you staying on. But if he does show up, or if there’s any kind of trouble—”
“I’ll leave,” she finished for him.
“No. You’ll tell one of us—me or Charlie—directly.”
He really was a white knight, she thought. It made being here for him better, and lying to him harder.
“Oh, okay. I’ll do that,” she promised.
“Good. Anything else I should know?”
“I’m a really good waitress. I’ll work hard, keep my hands out of the till. I never stole a dime until taking that truck, so you don’t have to worry. I just need to get back on my feet,” she said, hoping she’d hit the sweet spot between being someone he would want to help, who’d had trouble but who wasn’t going to be trouble.
Ben nodded and sat back. “What about your brother?”
“He wrote me off years ago. Never really cared much about what happened to me after our parents were gone.”
Sorry, Jarod, she offered the mental mea culpa to her brother, who was the best of the best. She loved him madly, and he’d always been there for her and always would be, but she knew plenty of people whose families weren’t. Thinking of her mom, Joanna never failed to be surprised at how easy it was for some people to walk away from the ones they were supposed to love most.
