I picked that up from you right away,” Wes said. “And I told him that.”
“After which you told him you were a Navy SEAL and if he so much as breathed in my direction, you were going to…what?”
Wes scratched his chin. “I may have mentioned something about my diving knife and his never having offspring.”
She laughed again. Thank God. “That must’ve been when he looked like he was going to faint.”
“How is everything?” The waiter was back, but the place was crowded and he didn’t wait for an answer. He deftly removed the empty beer bottles from the table. “Another?”
“Yes, please.” Brittany smiled up at the guy, and Wes said another short prayer of thanks that his knee-jerk treatment of Melero hadn’t made her decide not to like him.
“Sir?”
“Yeah. Wait! Make it a cola.”
“Very good, sir.” The waiter vanished.
“I’m trying to cut back,” Wes felt the need to explain as the warmth of her gaze was focused back on him. “One beer a night. Two becomes six a little too easily these days, you know?”
“I appreciate it,” Brittany said. “Especially since you’re driving.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a sloppy drunk. It’s not pretty. It’s definitely not a good way to make new friends.” Why the hell was he telling her this? He didn’t even talk with Bobby about his fears of becoming an alcoholic, and Bobby Taylor was his friend and swim buddy from way back. “This is a very interesting first date. We talk about your son’s sex life and my potential drinking problem. Shouldn’t we be talking about the weather? Or movies we just saw?”
“It finally stopped raining, thank goodness,” Brittany said. “I just rented Ocean’s Eleven and loved it. When did you quit smoking?”
Damn. “Two days ago. What’d I do? Pat my pocket, searching for my nonexistent pack?”
“Yup.”
Crap. He resisted another urge to reach into his pocket. Not that he could’ve had a cigarette until later. This restaurant was smoke free.
“It must be driving you crazy,” Brittany observed. “To stop smoking and cut back on your drinking all at the same time.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve tried to quit before, I don’t have a whole hell of a lot of faith in myself. I mean, the longest I’ve gone without a cigarette is six weeks.”
“Have you tried the patch?”
“No,” he admitted. “I know I probably should. I don’t know, maybe the idea would appeal to me more if I could get Julia Roberts to glue it to my ass.”
Brittany laughed. “Maybe not smoking would appeal to you more if you had a girlfriend who told you that kissing you after you smoked was similar to licking an ashtray.”
He forced a smile. “Yeah, well…” The woman he wanted to be his girlfriend was married. He didn’t want to think about the one time he did kiss her. As easy as it was to talk to Brittany, he couldn’t talk about Lana. This was a date, after all, not therapy.
Not that he’d managed to talk to the team shrink about Lana, either, though. The only talking he’d done was when he was completely skunked.
The waiter brought their drinks to the table and vanished again. Wes took a sip of his soda and tried to like it, tried not to wish it was another bottle of beer.
“My ex used to smoke,” Brittany told him. “I tried everything to get him to quit, and finally drew a line. I told him that if he was going to smoke, he couldn’t kiss me. And he said okay, if that’s what I wanted.”
Wes knew what was coming from the rueful edge to her smile.
“So he stopped kissing me,” she told him.
The adjectives he used to describe the bastard were blistering—far worse than anything that had come out of Dustin Melero’s mouth that afternoon, but she just laughed as he winced and apologized.
“It’s all right,” she said. “But cut him some slack. He wasn’t entirely to blame. You know, he smoked when I married him, so it was pretty unfair of me to make those kinds of demands. Bottom line, sweetie, is that you’ve got to quit smoking because you want to quit smoking.”
“Or at the very least, I’ve got to want Julia Roberts to glue the patch onto my—”
“Yes,” she said, laughing. “That might do it.”
“He was a fool,” Wes told her, reaching across the table to take her hand. “Your ex.”
The smile she gave him was stunning as she squeezed his fingers. “Thank you. I’ve always thought so, too.”
Brittany took a sip of her coffee. “Melody told me you had leave for a week—”
“Two,” Wes interjected.
“And that you were spending that time here in L.A. as a favor to a friend?”
“Yeah.” Wes Skelly had a nervous tell. Even sitting at the table, he was constantly in motion, kind of like a living pinball. He was always fiddling with something on the table. His spoon. The saltshaker. The tablecloth. His soda straw. But when he got nervous—at least Britt thought it was nerves he was feeling—he stopped. Stopped moving. Stopped fiddling. He got very, very still.
He was doing it right now, but as he started to talk, he started stirring the ice in his soda. “I’m actually here as a favor to the wife of a good friend. Wizard.” He glanced up at her, and she knew it was an act. He was working overtime to pretend to be casual.
“I don’t know if your sister ever talked about him,” he continued. “She may not know him. I don’t know. He’s with SEAL Team Six, and he’s always out of the country, so…Very hard to find. So he’s gone again, and his wife, Lana, she’s, you know, very nice, very…We’ve been friends for years, too, and…Well, she was worried about her sister. Half sister, actually. Her father’s second marriage, and…Anyway, Lana’s half sister is Amber Tierney and—”
“Whoa.” Britt held up her hand. “Wait a sec. Information overload. Your friend Wizard’s wife Lana’s—” Lana, who was very nice, “—half sister is Amber Tierney from High Tide?”
“Yeah.”
“Holy moly.” With her heavy schedule at school and exhausting rotations in the hospital, Brittany didn’t have time to keep up with the various TV and movie stars who made headlines in L.A. But Amber Tierney had been impossible to miss. She’d been TV’s current It Girl ever since her sitcom, High Tide, had first aired last September. “Her sister’s worried…that she’s making too much money…? That Tom Cruise wants to date her…? That—”
“She’s being stalked,” Wes finished for her.
Britt cringed. “Sorry. That is a problem. I shouldn’t
