pregnancy and friends they had in common as they drove to a Santa Monica café, not too far from the house Brittany shared with her kid.
The questions didn’t come until they’d sat down to dinner, until they’d ordered and had started to eat.
“You surprised me back at the fieldhouse,” Brittany introduced the topic. The table was lit by candlelight, and it made her seem warmly, lushly exotic in a way that her little sister would never look. Not in a million years.
Wes used to think that Melody was the prettier of the Evans sisters, and maybe according to conventional standards she was. Britt’s face was slightly angular, her chin too pointed, her nose a little sharp. But catch her at the right moment, from the right angle, and she was breathtakingly beautiful.
Sex was not an option, he reminded himself. Yes, this woman was very attractive, but he wasn’t interested. Remember? He definitely had to deal with all the emotional crap rattling around inside of his own head before he went and got naked with someone who would want a real relationship rather than a happy night or two of the horizontal cha-cha.
The odds of her wanting a night of casual sex with him were pretty low to start with. She so didn’t seem to be the type. But even if he was wrong, those odds would slip down to slim-to-none after he told her the truth—that he couldn’t give her more than a night or two because he was in love with someone else. No, not just someone else. Lana Quinn. The wife of one of his best friends—U.S. Navy SEAL and Chief Petty Officer Matthew Quinn, aka Wizard, aka the Mighty Quinn, aka that lying, cheating, unfaithful sack of dog crap.
Brittany Evans was sitting across the table from Wes, gazing at him with the kind of eyes he loved best on women. Warm eyes. Intelligent eyes. Eyes that told him she liked and respected him—and expected the same respect in return.
Lana had looked at him—at all of the SEALs—like that.
“Yeah,” Wes said, since Brittany seemed to be waiting for some kind of response. “I kind of surprised myself back at the fieldhouse.” He laughed, but she didn’t join in.
She just watched him as she took a sip directly from her bottle of beer and he tried not to look at or even think about her mouth. The bottom line was that he liked her too much as a person to mess around with her as a woman, as hot as he found her. But if she were some random babe that he caught a glimpse of in a bar, he’d make a point to get closer, to see if maybe she might want some mutually superficial sex.
So, okay. He was man enough to admit it. If all things were equal, he’d throw Brittany Evans a bang. No doubt about it. Forget about Lana—because, face it, he had to. She was married, off-limits, verboten, taboo. He couldn’t have her, so he took pleasure and comfort wherever he could find it. And he kept his heart well out of it.
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
