his flat belly. His lean hips. The hard, muscled thighs she’d traced so often with her hands and her mouth and her...
“You sure you don’t want more than coffee?” he asked, gesturing to the illuminated menu. “I’ll be happy to stand you to a Number 3.”
The fact that he remembered her preference for a Big Breakfast with Hotcakes made her throat ache. “This is good,” she murmured, sliding into the booth he’d staked out.
The silence that followed was short but awkward. And obviously painful, as they both rushed to break it.
“What are you...?”
“So sorry about...”
They both broke off, and he gestured for her to go on.
“So sorry to hear about Aunt Pat. What happened?”
“An aortic aneurism. She died in her sleep. One of her spin-class buddies found her the next morning.”
Swish wasn’t surprised that the feisty seventy-six-year-old had been into spinning along with all her other fitness pursuits. She and Pat had once run side by side in a 5k Race for the Cure with the older woman decked out in flashing sneakers, cotton-candy-pink leggings and a cropped tank that announced she was One Fast Oldie.
“How’s your mom taking her sister’s death?”
“Hard. She flew out for the funeral but couldn’t stay to help settle the estate. Her hip’s been giving her trouble.”
The reply plucked at Swish’s hurt again. She’d been so close to his family. His dad before he died, his mom, his sisters. To cover the ache, she switched subjects.
“My mom told me about the election. Ninety-four percent of the vote. Pretty impressive for a high school history teacher-slash-tennis coach.”
“Yeah, well...”
The grin that had haunted her dreams for too many months slipped out. As self-deprecating and sexy as she remembered. She felt its all-too-familiar impact wrap around her heart.
“Hard to bask in the glow of victory when my cousins constitute at least half the electorate.”
Swish had to laugh. “I know most of those cousins. They’re as stubborn and hardheaded as you are, Mr. Mayor. They wouldn’t have voted for you unless they believed in you.”
“Maybe. Or it might’ve been because I ran against Dave Forrester.”
Her jaw dropped. “You’re kidding! Freckle-faced Forrester overcame his shyness enough to run for public office?”
“Freckle-faced Forrester now owns the largest oil and gas franchise in the county,” Gabe returned drily. “Lucky for me—but not for my constituents—he’s been slapped with a half-dozen lawsuits for property damage due to fracking. He’s not the most popular guy around Cedar Creek these days.”
Wow! The skinny, gap-toothed kid who’d traded spitballs with her? An oil and gas executive? She was still trying to get her head around that when Gabe broke into her thoughts.
“What about you? What are you doing at Luke?”
She shook off the tendrils of her past and leaped gratefully into the present. “I’m assigned to the 56th Fighter Wing. Would you believe I head up the Base Emergency Engineer Response team?”
“Prime BEEF? Now I’m impressed.”
The designation didn’t begin to describe the scope of her team’s duties. The mission of Luke AFB was to train the men and women who flew and maintained the F-16 Fighting Falcon and the F-35 Lightning, the world’s newest and most sophisticated fighter. The base population included more than ten thousand active duty, reserve and civilian personnel, plus their families. Another seventy thousand retirees lived in the local area. Swish’s job was to make sure the facilities were in place to support all these people in both peacetime and wartime.
“That’s quite a responsibility,” Gabe commented. “It’s what you trained for. What you’ve worked so hard for. And why you were awarded that Bronze Star after your last deployment.”
“You know about the Bronze Star?”
She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice. He couldn’t keep the bite out of his.
“Know that my wife...?” He stopped. Took a breath. Started again. “Know that my former wife and her team risked their lives to repair an abandoned runway outside Mosul? That they opened the airstrip despite heavy enemy fire so US aircraft could use it as a base to repel an ISIS attack? Yeah, I know about it.”
Okay, that gave her a warm buzz. Almost warm enough to mitigate the fact that he hadn’t known she was now assigned to Luke. Not quite warm enough to erase the news Ben had imparted last night, though. She looked down at her now sludgy coffee. Looked up. Took her courage in both hands.
“Cowboy told me you’re getting married again.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Anyone I know?”
He hesitated, shrugged. “Alicia Johnson.”
Dammit all to hell!
Somehow, someway, she managed to keep from crushing her cup and slopping coffee over the table. A bitter realization stayed her hand. As much as she disliked the nauseatingly effervescent pixie, she had no right to castigate Gabe for his choice of partners. God knows, he hadn’t castigated her when she turned to someone else out of desperate loneliness.
“Whatever you decide,” she got out, despite lungs squeezed so tight she could hardly breath, “I hope you find the ‘forever’ we were so sure we had.”
He stretched out a hand, covered hers. “Same goes, Susie Q.”
It was the silly nickname that did it. His pet name for her from the fifth grade on. Forever associated in both of their minds with the package of cream-filled chocolate cupcakes she’d brought to his bedroom when he fell out of a tree and broke his collarbone.
She tried, she really tried, to keep her smile from wobbling. Twisting her hand, she gave his what she intended as a companionable squeeze. His fingers threaded through hers. So strong. So warm. So achingly familiar.
He raised their joined hands. Brought the back of hers to his lips. Brushed a kiss across her knuckles. Once. Twice. Swish didn’t even try to pull away.
Until he gently, slowly, lowered his hand and eased it out of hers.
“I...uh...”
Gabe smothered a curse as his wife—his former wife!—stammered and tried to shrug off the impact of their brief contact.
One touch. One friggin’ touch, and she looked ready to bolt. He should let her. God knew it wouldn’t be the first time. Instead, he soothed
