Big Easy Temptation (The Perfect Gentlemen #3)(9)
She wanted more for herself.
Yes, she was stronger now. More mature. She’d had more experience with the opposite sex. Could she handle him? Ready or not, it seemed she was going to find out.
TWO
Dax tried not to stare at Holland as she set a steaming plate in front of him. He was so hungry. Not for the food. Oh, it smelled delicious and he wasn’t surprised that, despite being a tough NCIS investigator, she could also produce what looked like a gourmet meal. Holland Kirk was the kind of woman who would master anything she put her mind to.
Yeah, he wanted the food, but he craved her far more. She was still the most beautiful woman to him. Her blond hair cascaded around her shoulders in waves. When he’d seen her earlier, she’d had it tucked up in a tidy bun that matched her neat but utilitarian clothes. But when she’d opened the door to him not fifteen minutes earlier, she’d looked so pretty and feminine in jeans and a pink shirt that hugged her slender curves.
Years, miles, war, and death stood between their kiss in the library and now. He’d never gotten this woman out of his head.
“This looks amazing. Thank you. You have no idea how long it’s been since someone cooked for me. Well, someone who didn’t learn his skills from the Navy,” Dax admitted. Captaining his own ship had its privileges, but made-from-scratch Cajun food wasn’t one of them.
She sat across from him and lifted her wineglass with an elegant hand. “My mother was a good cook, but after she passed, my dad was still at sea. So I ended up here in New Orleans with my uncle. Now, that man can cook. This is his gumbo recipe. Sorry it’s nothing more exciting.”
“This is the most excitement I’ve had in a while, Holland.” He took a spoonful. The dish was perfectly made with just the right bite of heat. “It’s excellent. And I really do thank you for hearing me out.”
He was going to do his damnedest to be polite with her. He needed her on his side. If this investigation wasn’t between them, he would have walked into her office and finished what they’d started almost seven years before.
The only times he’d seen her since that kiss had all been at funerals. First Zack’s mother had perished in a car accident about a year after the wedding. He’d glimpsed Holland there from a distance. She’d certainly been at Joy’s funeral, but that had been a clusterfuck. So many reporters, so many people mourning the woman who would have been first lady. Then Holland had attended his father’s services. Even though Dax had viewed the whole thing through a filter of disbelief and rage, the one sweet moment had been when he’d scanned the sparsely attended event and seen her sitting in the back pew, silently honoring his father.
Besides his family and best friends, she’d been the only person he knew to show up. Everyone else had run from the scandal and abandoned the Spencer family during their time of tragedy.
Now she was his only hope of seeing any kind of justice done. He’d spent the last week before his return to New Orleans plotting and planning ways to persuade her to do what he needed. He couldn’t get emotional no matter how much she moved him.
“You can’t behave the way you did before,” Holland said, her mouth turned down. “My coworkers gave you a pass because they knew you were hurting. They won’t do it again.”
He’d been a righteous prick and a pain in the ass. He’d battled with anyone who got in his way. NCIS had definitely seemed like one obstacle after another. “I understand. I was running on emotion at the time. I’ve cooled off and I’m coming at the problem logically now.”
Well, with as much logic as he could. It wasn’t easy watching others sling mud and tarnish his father’s reputation. Hell, they’d ripped a dead man to shreds and fed what had been left of his good name to the dogs of the press.
“You’ve been conducting your own investigation?” Holland asked, passing him the cornbread.
He accepted it gratefully. He hadn’t been joking about his last decent meal. It had been months ago, right before Joy Hayes had died. He and the other Perfect Gentlemen had come together for Labor Day in the Hamptons. They’d had a cookout and laughed and joked around about what perverted things they would all do in the White House once Zack was elected.
That had been less than a year ago. Why did he feel a decade older now?
“I hired a couple of private investigators and had some friends look into a few things for me.” It didn’t hurt that his best friend was an analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency. Though Gabe and Mad thought Connor was in deeper than that. Dax often wondered if they were right. “They found some information I thought was disturbing.”
“Do you think Jim and Bill didn’t do their jobs?”
She asked the question politely, her voice soft, but Dax knew a landmine when he heard one.
He shook his head. “I think NCIS did the best they could with the information and resources available at the time. No one was ready for the way the story exploded in the press.”
“No, we weren’t. Any media relations training we have is cursory. I think even the feds would have had trouble with a story of that magnitude,” she admitted. “Normally it would have lasted one news cycle and been over.”
“My father wasn’t news for what he did but because I’m his son and I have powerful friends.” Guilt still twisted his gut over that fact.