The Good Luck Sister (Wildstone #1.5)(15)

Dylan picked up the fallen phone and hit Disconnect.

Tilly opened the door and let Leo in before biting her lower lip, torn between horror and laughter. “Oh my God. They heard—”

“I’m sorry,” Dylan said, “but I promise you, they won’t ever say anything to you about it. Not if they want to live.”

Laughter won.

Dylan looked at her with wry amusement. “Still think I’m smooth?”





Chapter 6




Sometimes my great accomplishment is just keeping my mouth shut.

—from “The Mixed-Up Files of Tilly Adams’s Journal”




Ten years prior:



Tilly watched out the window until she saw Dylan show up for work. She’d texted him to come a little early, but he hadn’t. She’d had to be quick to catch him getting out of his car before he entered the café.

“Thought you’d come over and see me,” she said.

“Can’t. I’ve got work. And you have to study for finals this week.”

“I’m taking a day off from studying,” she said.

“No, you’re not.”

She stared at his back as he turned away, hurt to the core that he didn’t want to be with her. “What do you care?”

He turned to face her again, eyes dark, expression dark. Hell, his life was dark. “You think I don’t care?”

She swallowed as he strode back to her and glared down into her eyes. “I spend more time on your schoolwork than mine,” he said. “I check on you every single night that I can get away. I’m working more hours than I have in a day so that after I give most of my pay to my mom to cover her rent, I can put a little bit away for a future that I’m not even sure exists.”

Tilly felt her throat burn. “It does.”

His face softened. “I’m going to go to work, Tee. And you’re going to study. We need the money and the education.”

She held her breath. “We?”

“Yeah.” And then he did something he rarely did—he touched her. He cupped her face in his big, callused hands and dropped his forehead to hers. “It’s all about the we,” he murmured. “Don’t ever think otherwise.”



Tilly redressed herself and watched Dylan do the same, not wanting to miss a thing. The image of his very fine bod was now permanently burned into her brain, where it would most certainly fuel her fantasies for many nights to come. But then she froze.

Because his knees. Both were marked up with multiple harsh-looking scars that looked terrifyingly real. “Ouch,” she said softly.

He shrugged and once again stepped into a pair of jeans, pulling them up. “Guess some things have changed,” he admitted. “And yeah, it was a bitch.” He dug past some things in the bag and came up with a T-shirt.

“You don’t even limp,” she marveled.

He shrugged on the shirt. “Rehab was brutal,” he admitted. “Thought I was tough going in, but I wasn’t. Not even close.”

“How did you get through?”

He turned to face her. “Penn and Ric. They pretty much bullied me into it.”

She nodded like she was all calm, but she wasn’t. Wasn’t feeling anywhere near calm. “So,” she said, trying to sound reasonable when she felt anything but. “You bailed on me, having made the decision for me that I deserved more than you could give me. You gave up your dreams and went into the military, all to get away from me.”

“I didn’t give up on anything,” he said. “The military was a way to keep my astronaut dream alive.”

Okay, she could understand that. “Until you got hurt,” she guessed.

He gave a brief nod of agreement. “I’d qualified and gone through flight school.”

“And then . . . you were hurt,” she guessed. “What happened?”

“On a recon mission, we were given bad intel.” He shrugged. “We took on fire as we were heading back to base.”

“How bad?” she whispered.

“Not as bad as Penn made it sound. I took a spray of bullets across my knees. Not life threatening.”

“Penn said—”

“—I nearly bled out before help arrived. Would have, if Ric hadn’t been there to yell at me that if I died, he’d follow me to hell, and that then his mother would come haunt the both of us for all of eternity.”

“Him yelling at you kept you alive?”

He gave her a small smile. “That, and the fact that he literally hooked us up to each other with fuel tubing he ripped out of the tank and used to give me his blood. Good thing we shared a blood type, huh?”

Dear God. Picturing the circumstances, the utter chaos they’d been in, and the unbelievably heroic actions of the people who served overseas had her throat tightening. “He’s a good friend.”

“Yeah. They both are.”

And they’d been there for him when she hadn’t. Couldn’t. Because he’d shut her out. “You were discharged.”

“Had both knees replaced, which meant no getting into the astronaut program and in fact, no more flying for me. Not for the military and not as an astronaut.”