DONOVAN (Gray Wolf Security, #1)(110)

“Do you want to come in with me? Help me pick something out for him?”

She nodded, turning to climb out of the car before I even had a chance to get my seat belt off. We walked into the store side by side, both of us overdressed for the store’s normal clientele. There was a guy in torn jeans buying cigarettes at the front counter who whistled under his breath as she walked by. Penelope blushed, ducking into one of the aisles to avoid having to make eye contact with him.

“You should be used to that sort of thing,” I said, moving up close enough behind her to kiss the back of her neck. “I bet it happens a lot.”

“Not recently.”

“Then you’ve been going to all the wrong places.”

She turned suddenly, her nose just a breath from my chest. But I didn’t move back. I liked being this close to her, liked to be enveloped in her smell. She pressed a hand to my chest, a little unsteady on her feet. But when she looked up at me, she didn’t seem unhappy about our proximity.

“How do you know he wasn’t whistling at you?”

That caught me off guard. I almost stammered when I asked, “Would you be jealous?”

“Are you jealous?”

“Should I be?”

She lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. It depends on whether you think you have any claim over me.”

“I’m not the jealous type.”

And that was clearly not the right thing to say. She ducked around me and walked off, headed toward the back of the store. I rushed after her, sliding a hand around her waist when I caught up.

“Where are you going?”

“JT likes rocky road,” she said, her voice low and controlled.

I didn’t know what she was talking about at first. But then she opened the freezer door and pulled out a quart of ice cream and shoved it into my hand.

“I’m going to wait outside.”




I didn’t see Penelope after we got back to the house. She went inside without waiting to help with JT. And she wasn’t up when we were ready to leave the next morning.

I went over the conversation we had in the convenience store again and again, trying to figure out what it was I should have said. I thought we were teasing each other. I thought it was funny, what I’d said. But apparently she took it a little more seriously. After everything that had happened these last few weeks, after everything we’d gone through, I thought it was refreshing that we could finally joke with each other. But maybe it was too much, too soon.

“How did you meet her?”

I looked up, so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t realize JT had been talking to me until just that second.

“Meet who?”

“My biological mother.”

“Julia.” I dragged my fingers through my hair, glancing out the window of the jet to watch the clouds rush by. “We met in New York.”

“When? Why were you there?”

I looked over at JT, at Julia’s eyes staring at me from a face that was so much like my own. I’d only recently begun to wonder what it would be like to have a child of my own, of what that child might look like. The company was running smoothly these days, requiring less and less of the attention it once needed, so I had more and more time on my hands. And it just seemed time for me to settle down, think about a family of my own. I was tired of watching my friends and colleagues—my sister—settled down to their own families while I remained the bachelor, the odd one out at dinner parties and get-togethers. I had just begun to think that I might like to get married and have a few children when I ran into Julia and learned about JT. To look at him was still so surreal.

“I was in college,” I said slowly, the memory so distant it almost felt like another person’s life all of a sudden. “It was the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. A group of friends thought it would be fun to spend our free time in New York, and I was up for anything that meant I wouldn’t have to come home and work in my father’s furniture factory.

“New York was an adventure. We spent the first couple of weeks just walking the streets like a bunch of idiots. And then we wandered into this deli one night while we were senselessly drunk. She was our waitress.”

“And it was love at first sight, right?”

I smiled. “It was definitely lust at first sight. I think love came a few weeks later when she came to stay with us at the little fleabag hotel where we were holed up.”

JT smiled even as this faraway look came into his eyes. “Then you loved her?”

“Very much.” I leaned forward a little, resting my elbows on my knees. “Julia was smart and beautiful and everything a stupid nineteen year old kid could want in a mate. We were together constantly—annoying the shit out of my friends. I didn’t want to go home. I tried to convince her to come to California with us, but she was set to start at NYU that fall and her parents weren’t about to let her lose that opportunity.”

“So you just left her.”

“I left her. But she promised to call daily.”

“Did she?”

I shook my head. “At the time, I didn’t get any messages from her. But she told me a few months ago she called me over and over again, but whoever was taking the calls never got the messages to me.” I sat up again, leaning back into my chair to stretch my back. “I don’t know. It was a long time ago. I think I might have given her the number to my parents’ house because I was supposed to spend a couple of weeks there before I went back to school. But then I got into this internship that started early, so I ended up going straight back to Stanford.”