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“Stubborn,” she said.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” He dove in for another wet, deep kiss that had her clutching at his shirt. His hands slid over her back and then down, to tilt her hips into his. She went on tiptoe again to make the fit more gratifying. “I wasn’t planning on telling you anything,” he said.
She managed a laugh, even though with every unsteady breath, her breasts rubbed against his shirt. “I meant your astrological sign. The goat.”
“It’s not a goat.” He looked offended. “It’s a ram.”
“That’s a kind of truck. Your sign’s a goat. As in old goat. Or Billy Goat Gruff or—”
“Ram,” he said again, with heat, and then caught on. With another groan, he shook his head and then snatched the halo from her hair and sailed it toward the living room couch. “Brat, not angel. I was right the first time we met.”
It gave her a moment to rearrange her sagging armor. She mentally pulled it up around herself, and then scooted back so that her butt met stool again. Dean’s arms dropped, and she discovered she didn’t like the chill that distance afforded.
He didn’t look happy either. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
The skinny satin strap of her costume dropped, but before she could draw it back, he ran his forefinger along the newly naked spot of her skin. “Are you, Marlys?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Uh-huh.” He shook his head again. “You big on denial, angel? Because we’ve got some crazy-ass chemistry going on here, and I, for one, am all for exploring it.”
Well, Marlys wanted to explain it. “I don’t… I’m not…” While no fainting virgin, she didn’t know how to deliver the message that Marlys Weston didn’t fall into strangers’ arms. She didn’t casually sleep around or even have a congenial fuck buddy on speed dial.
She didn’t like men that much.
Or women, either, for that matter.
Marlys Weston took no prisoners and not lovers very often. Her last best friend had been lost to her in seventh grade, and there hadn’t been anyone to fill the gap since. So how could this man so quickly get under her skin? There had to be a logical answer.
“Let’s start over again, Mr. Aries. So you have an April second birth date. Where exactly are you from?”
He hesitated, sliding back into his own stool. Was he playing obstinate man of mystery again? But no, he didn’t look cagey, he looked…confused?
Or unable to answer.
With new eyes, she took in his muscled physique and the close haircut, and then remembered that moment when he’d gone from asleep to alert. Like her father. Like a soldier.
“You grew up military, too,” she said. Military kids couldn’t name a hometown because they’d never had one. Two years here, three years there, they moved from place to place, base to base. “Army then, army now?” she hazarded a guess, and then thought, duh, he was a friend of Noah’s. That crazy-ass chemistry had scrambled her normal deductive skills.
He nodded, a little smile quirking his lips.
Yeah. That crazy-ass chemistry all made sense now, she decided. It must be because Dean was part of her tribe, the one and only group she’d ever belonged to. The one and only group that she’d felt completely comfortable in her skin around—until she’d been yanked from base life and had gone from soldier’s daughter to misfit civilian in one fell swoop.
As another who’d grown up military, he was one of her own. Almost like family—she found she was staring at his mouth, so, okay, not like family. But that was all right. Because he was military that meant he knew the score, too. An organization of the brats had assigned themselves a flower, like governments did. The U.S. national flower was the rose. The state of California had the poppy.
The military brats had adopted the dandelion.
Like them, it was resilient. Like them, it knew how to move on.
Which meant that she and Dean were alike and in their sameness they were safe. When—no, if—she decided to do something about this crazy-ass chemistry, they could go ahead and enjoy the experiment until the inevitable wind blew off its blossom or blew out its flames.
Nikki bumped her elbow into Juliet’s ribs and gestured toward the costumed crowd gathered on the restaurant’s glass-screened deck overlooking the ocean. “What do you think it says about men when a disproportionate number of them came dressed for Halloween as kings?”
“It could be a superiority complex, I suppose,” Juliet said, pitching her voice over the sound of the crashing surf and the rendition of “Monster Mash” from the band in the corner. “But my guess is a big basket of fake crowns right next to the checkout at CVS.”
