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“Wilde,” he said through his teeth, “she’s right. You’re an idiot.”
Maybe he’d be lucky.
Maybe a simple “I’m sorry, I was wrong,” would be enough.
Right.
And she’d tell him, in explicit terms, precisely what he could do with those words.
Jake flexed his hands on the steering wheel.
This was not going to be fun.
He could imagine how she’d look while he stumbled through an apology.
Her cheeks would be pink with anger, her eyes as bright as molten silver. That I-can-take-on-the-world chin would be lifted to an angle that spelled defiance.
She’d be a veritable portrait of rage.
And sexy as hell.
Just thinking about it made his temperature rise and, hell, that was not what he wanted right now.
He had to concentrate on how to approach her. What to say. He worked on that while the truck ate up the miles, but nothing logical came to him.
He’d have to play it by ear.
And she’d make him jump through hoops.
That was the one certainty.
A muscle knotted in his jaw.
There was a time he’d have looked forward to the challenge. A woman, standing up to him? Except for a couple of tough-as-nails nurses who’d taken him on when he’d tried to refuse meds or therapy, women had always tended to say yes to whatever he wanted.
No surprise there.
If a guy had money, some kind of status, if he had the kind of looks women liked, that was the way things went.
He—for that matter, he and his brothers—had all those things.
For starters, they’d been born to money. Their father’s, sure, but beyond that, their mother had left each of them a hefty trust fund.
Jake had let his sit in the bank. Then he’d wised up and invested it with Travis.
Even now, driving through the night in pursuit of a woman who’d probably love nothing more than to kick him where he lived, remembering how he’d done it made him smile.
He’d cornered his brother the night before he shipped out the first time and handed him a check.
Travis, who’d been just starting up his own financial firm, had looked at the sum, then at Jake. He gave a soft whistle.
“You want me to handle it all?”
“Every dollar.”
“Risk … or no risk?”
Jake’s reply had been a grin. Travis had grinned, too, and the deal was made.
Jake had pretty much forgotten about it after that. When you were busy keeping your ass from getting shot off, money wasn’t much on your mind.
He came home on leave, Travis handed him a statement. That time, Jake was the one who’d whistled.
His seven figures had tripled. God only knew what it had grown to by now, despite the tough economic times.
As for status …
He was the son of a general. That was big, but in Texas, being the son of the man who owned El Sueño was even bigger.
Still, Jake had acquired his own kind of status early on.
At sixteen, he’d been a star high school quarterback. At eighteen, half a dozen top schools had offered him scholarships. At nineteen, pro scouts were already looking at him.
And at twenty, he’d walked away from college and football to enlist in the army, where he’d flown into the heart of battle.
As for his looks …
It was that DNA thing again.
He was tall. Lean. Muscular. His nose had a bump in it, courtesy of a burly defensive lineman, but that didn’t work against him at all.
Women went for the entire package.
His hands tightened on the steering wheel.
He still had the money. The status. The looks …?
He didn’t much care.
He knew his wounds made people uncomfortable. Like tonight. People looked at him, they flinched, they averted their eyes, they showed pity.
Pity was the worst of all.
As for seeing his own face in the mirror every morning—it was still a shock, but not because of vanity. It was a shock because it was a constant reminder of his failure.
“You need to give that up, Captain,” one of the shrinks had told him. “Get a prosthetic eye. Let people—let yourself-—see the real you.”
What reality had to do with popping an artificial eyeball into what was, basically, a hole in his head didn’t make sense even if the shrinks thought it did.
“Have you ever considered that it counteracts the medal you were awarded?” one had said, and Jake had ignored that for the stupid comment it was.
And all of this was pointless to think about, especially—
“Holy hell,” Jake said, and stood on the brakes.
A deer and her yearling stood twenty feet ahead of him, big eyes filled with innocence as they stared at his truck.
He dragged in a breath.
“Go on,” he said. “Get out of the way.”
The animals remained motionless. Then mama flicked her tail and she and the baby ran into the scrub.
Jake started the truck again.
He’d been lucky not to have hit the deer. His fault, entirely. Antelope, deer, coyotes all used the road, especially at night.
His head had been everywhere except where it should have been….
And the glow of Addison McDowell’s taillights was history.
No problem.
She was heading for the Chambers ranch and so was he.
A few minutes later, he bounced over the familiar pothole that signaled the start of Chambers land.
He slowed, took a good look at the gate and saw what he hadn’t seen the first time. It wasn’t locked. Truth was, the thing was barely a gate. Crossbars, posts, a couple of broken hinges. The gate hung open, swaying drunkenly in the breeze, looking more like kindling than anything else.
Jake eased the truck forward, nosed it through the opening, then started up the long gravel drive to the house.
Still no taillights.
If the McDowell woman had already reached the house, what did he do?
Park? Go to the door and knock? Or did he sit in the truck and tap on his horn? He had the feeling turning up, unannounced on her doorstep, might not be the best—
Light blazed through the windshield, blinding him. Jake cursed, flung his arm in front of his face, and for the second time in minutes, stood on the brakes.
The truck came to a hard stop.
What was he looking at? Headlights? The light from a big flashlight? No way could he see past it.
Cautiously, he opened his door.
“Ms. McDowell?”
Nothing. Just the darkness, the silence and the light.
“Addison? Are those your headlights? Turn them off.”
Still nothing. Jake squinted hard. He took a step to the left. The brightest light remained focused on the Tundra but another light followed him.
Headlights and a flashlight. Addison—it had to be her—was using both.
He couldn’t see a thing.
“Hey,” he shouted. “Didn’t you hear me? Turn off those lights.”
Still no response. Jake grunted, moved another few steps from the truck….
The flashlight beam settled on him and held.
The hair on the back of his neck stood up. He’d had enough of being a living target to last him a lifetime.
“Turn that thing away from me,” he said coldly. “Do it now.”
Survival instinct, honed in a place thousands of miles and many centuries away, kicked in.
This wasn’t Texas anymore.
Jake dropped to the ground and rolled, not toward the truck as the enemy might predict, but away from it, into scrub and darkness.
Everything in him focused on that beam of light.
His heart rate slowed. The sounds of the night faded; he could hear his opponent’s breaths.
The beam of light moved. Swept over the truck. Over the ground. It was searching for him.
Jake rolled again. Pressed himself to the earth ten or twelve feet from the road.
Wait, he told himself. Wait for the right instant, for the opportunity that always presented itself if you were ready….
“Show yourself,” a voice called.
Addison McDowell’s voice.
It shot him back to reality. This wasn’t some hell-begotten dirt track in Afghanistan, it was Texas. And the person with the flashlight wasn’t the enemy, it was simply a woman who’d been frightened by the headlights following her home.
He let out a long breath.
“Addison. Hey. It’s Jake Wilde. You don’t have to—”
The beam of light swept over the road, the truck, the scrub. It would find him soon. Jake started to rise.
“Addison? Listen, I understand why you’re upset—”
“All you need to understand is that I have a gun. And I damn well know how to use it.”
