Protecting What's Mine(35)

Her dinner partner shrugged, looking morose. “I don’t know. Going on bar crawls and eating tacos at one in the morning?”

Mack laughed. “Anything else?”

Ellen’s face brightened. “You know what I used to love to do?”

“What?”

“Swim.”

“Really? That’s a great sport,” Mack said. “Why did you stop?”

“I started hating how I looked in a bathing suit.”

Honesty. Mack could work with that.

“Here’s what I propose. You take a month. Find a place to swim. Try a little harder on the food. Grab some ‘me time’ for yourself every single day no matter what. And for God’s sake, kick the cigarettes. We’ll meet back up and see how you’re feeling. Then we can go from there.”

“Another girls’ night?” Ellen was so excited that Mack felt an odd mixture of flattered, happy, and inexplicably sad for them both.

Mack shrugged. “Yeah. Sure.”

Ellen bit her lip. “Do you really think I can do this?”

“Of course you can. Look at everything else you already do. You’re raising kids, running a family, working, dealing with a husband and a father-in-law. You’re already doing the hard stuff. This is easier.”

Ellen was nodding. “I never really thought about it like that.”

“You’re just replacing bad coping habits with good ones.”

“Ooh! We can be accountability partners,” Ellen squealed, clapping her hands. “What do you want to work on?”

“Oh. Uh. Meditation? I guess.” Mack congratulated herself on not saying, “Talking myself out of sleeping with Linc.”

“That sounds amazing. Meditation is so, like, enlightened,” Ellen said to the interior of her purse. Her hands and face disappeared.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Aha!” She triumphantly produced a notebook and a pencil decorated with teeth marks. “Okay. We’re writing these down. Oprah says if you’re going to set goals, they have to be measurable and specific.”

Well, if Oprah said so…

Ellen neatly scratched out her goals on the pad and pushed it across the table to Mack.

1. Swim or walk five days a week.





2. Have a salad for lunch every day.





3. Quit pork rinds.





“This doesn’t say anything about smoking,” Mack pointed out.

“That’s the pork rinds. In case Barry or the kids find the list. I fib to them too.”

“Fair enough.”

“Now add yours,” Ellen ordered. “We’ll make it official. Can I have one last cigar—”

“No,” Mack said firmly as she wrote: Meditate 10 minutes a day.

“Party pooper.”

Mack snickered and picked up a buffalo wing. “To accountability,” she said.

Ellen helped herself to another wing and tapped it to Mack’s. “To the sexy firefighter who’s headed this way.”





17





Linc had stopped in for a beer and some wings and instead found his sexy, reticent neighbor enjoying dinner with one of his old girlfriends.

“Ladies,” he said, strolling across the patio. “A little birdie bartender told me you were out here.”

It was getting closer to dusk. A server bustled out behind him to turn on the patio heaters and plug in the overhead string lights.

“We were just talking about you.” Ellen beamed up at him. “Pull up a chair, chief.”

He bent and gave her a peck on the cheek, then did as he was told. “All good, I hope. How are Barry and the kids?”

While Ellen filled him in on all the family news, Mack studiously avoided eye contact with him. But when his knee pressed against hers under the small table, she didn’t make any effort to move away from him.

“How was your day off?” Ellen asked, finally taking a breath.

He pulled his attention away from the feel of Mack’s leg.

“Good. Took Sunshine for a hike. She’s at my sister’s now.” He couldn’t stop looking at Mack. There was something about her that pulled him in. A magnetism, a pull, an orbit.

This wasn’t a normal, easy crush. There was a real hunger here. He’d felt it at the cookout last Friday when he’d seen the longing in her eyes as she observed the Garrison and Moretta clans.

“How was your day, doc?” he asked.

When she finally looked at him, it was both a relief and a rush. Those cool green eyes held secrets he wanted to unravel one by one. He wanted to know how she got the scar under her eye. He wanted to know what her skin felt like under his hands. How he’d feel when he watched her lips part as he slid inside her.

Time slowed down when she looked at him. And his baser instincts were ringing a four-alarm bell.

He shifted in his seat, mindful of the hard-on that roared to life. Unfortunately, that pushed his leg more firmly into hers. If simple under the table leg-rubbing was pushing his buttons, he had a serious control problem.

“Fine,” she said finally.

The way she said it told him it was a deliberate brush-off. What secrets would she share while he worshipped her body?