by Paige Tyler
Lacey straightened, a wry look on her face. “This is my sister, Kelsey. Due to a horrible misfortune of genetics, she was born without the normal filter between her brain and her mouth. She says the first thing that pops into her head, even when she shouldn’t.”
Kelsey grinned. “Just saying what I know my big sis is thinking.”
Lacey rolled her eyes but laughed. Alex let out a chuckle of his own as he stood up.
“So, where are you two crazy kids heading off to tonight?” Kelsey asked.
Lacey glanced at him. “That’s a good question.”
He considered keeping their destination a secret just to tease her, but something told him that Lacey wasn’t the kind of woman to play those types of games. “I got us a reservation at a nice Italian place over on Oak Lawn Avenue. If that’s okay?”
Lacey’s eyes sparkled. “Italian works for me.”
“Me too,” Kelsey chimed in. “Bring Leo and me a doggie bag.”
Lacey promised they would just as a bell chimed, sending Kelsey scrambling into the kitchen. She came back out a moment later, her brow creased in a frown as she furiously typed something on her cell phone.
“Everything okay?” Lacey asked.
Kelsey finished the text she was working on, then shoved the phone in the back pocket of her shorts with a sigh. “It’s my friend Sara. She’s missing, and we’re all freaking out. We’ve been checking in with each other all day, hoping somebody hears something.”
Lacey looked at Alex in alarm. It didn’t take a genius to know what she was thinking. The local news channels had the Abigail Elliott story on 24–7, especially since Councilman McDonald had just announced a sizable reward for information on the location of the missing girl. It was natural for Lacey to assume the worst.
“What exactly do you mean when you say your friend is missing?” Alex asked Kelsey. “Has her family contacted the police yet?”
“Sara doesn’t have any family. She grew up in the foster system.” Kelsey played with the end of her ponytail. “Maybe missing is the wrong word. All we know for sure is that she sent an email to the registrar’s office on Friday telling them that she was dropping all her classes and taking a break from school and that she plans to come back next semester.”
Beside him, Lacey relaxed visibly. Alex felt the tension leave his shoulders too. There was a big difference between missing and bailing on school for a while.
Lacey walked over and gave Kelsey a hug. “I know you’re worried, honey, but it sounds like Sara is just stressed out and decided to take a little break. It’s not that uncommon in college; you know that.”
Kelsey didn’t look convinced. “Sara is an English lit major with a solid 4.0 GPA. My other friends and I are like her family. If she was so stressed out, why wouldn’t she have told one of us? She didn’t even clean out her dorm room when she left. Now she’s not updating her status on Facebook or returning any of our calls or texts.”
“She will,” Lacey promised. “Just give her a little time to get herself together.”
Lacey brushed back a stray strand of hair that had come loose from her sister’s ponytail before hugging Kelsey again. After a moment, Kelsey pulled back and gave a Lacey a small smile.
“Enough about my friends and me. You guys need to leave if you’re going to make your reservation.” When Lacey looked like she wanted to argue, her sister spun her around and shoved her at the door. “Go. I’m leaving in a little while anyway. I’m sure you’re right about Sara just needing a break, but my friends and I are heading out to a few of our usual hangouts to see if anyone else has heard from her.”
Lacey gave in with a laugh, grabbing her purse off the couch. “Okay, okay. Just don’t stay out too late. You have class tomorrow.”
“I won’t,” Kelsey promised. “I don’t have any classes until the afternoon, so some of my friends and I are going to hit the campus quad and soak up some sun while we check out hot guys. Sara was going to join us, but I guess that’s not going to happen now.” Kelsey threw Alex a look, then winked at Lacey. “Maybe you should play hooky and bring Alex with you. I’m sure my girlfriends would appreciate the view. Hell, some of my guy friends would too.”
Lacey’s face turned red, but Alex laughed it off as he opened the door for her. Kelsey definitely knew how to push her sister’s buttons.
* * *
Even though it was Sunday night, the restaurant was crowded. The aroma coming from the huge open kitchen probably had a lot to do with that, Lacey supposed. The smell of food was enough to make her drool. Then again, maybe Alex was the one making her do that. He certainly looked good enough to eat.
When she’d opened her apartment door an hour ago and seen him standing there in a suit with that perfect amount of scruff still covering his jawline, she’d just about gasped out loud. Did he clean up nice or what? She wasn’t the only woman who thought so, either. Most of the female patrons had almost snapped their necks as the hostess led them to their table.
Even though she’d never admit it out loud to anyone, the best part was that Alex hadn’t looked at a single one of those women the whole time. Heck, he’d barely looked at their waitress as they ordered drinks and appetizers. Instead, he’d gazed warmly into Lacey’s eyes as they sat there across from each other.
“Do you mind if I ask you something personal?” he said after the waitress had brought the bottle of wine they’d ordered.
Lacey tensed, unable to help it. She’d never been a big fan of getting too personal with any guy, especially one she’d just met. She forced herself to relax. If Alex asked her anything she wasn’t comfortable talking about, she had the feeling he wouldn’t get upset if she told him just that.
She nodded. “Sure. Within reason, I guess.”
He smiled. “I couldn’t help noticing how close you and Kelsey are. Something tells me that you’ve been looking out for your sister for a long time. How old were you when your parents disappeared from of the picture?”
The question was so unexpected—and perceptive—that Lacey was speechless. Alex must have taken her silence to mean she was upset, because he held up his hand.
“You don’t have to answer that,” he said. “I apologize if I touched on a sensitive subject.”
Lacey shook her head. “No, it’s okay. It’s not something I talk about very often, but it’s not some big secret.”
The fact that she’d just said those words was as shocking as Alex’s question. She never talked about this part of her past with guys—or anyone, really. Other than Wendy, no one else knew about any of it. But something about Alex made her want to share stuff she normally didn’t.
“Our dad bailed when I was twelve,” she said quietly. “Kelsey was only five, so she doesn’t really remember him. Mom didn’t handle his leaving very well, and I ended up being the one who had to take care of my sister. It wasn’t a big deal really. I just made sure she got to school, ate her veggies, did her homework—stuff like that.”
Across from her, Alex sipped his wine. Lacey mimicked him without thinking. The Cabernet was dark with just the hint of blackberry, dry but still easy to drink.
“It sounds like a big deal to me.” He set down his glass. “What about your mom? Is she around these days?”
Lacey debated telling Alex the truth but decided against it. He might be easy to talk to, but telling him exactly why their mom wasn’t around anymore was a surefire way to ruin the night’s mood.
“No. She left right after I graduated high school,” Lacey said simply, leaving out the details—and the unpleasant parts. “Kelsey and I moved in with an aunt who lived in Weatherford, just a few miles from where we grew up. She was involved with the rodeo circuit though, so we rarely saw her either.”
“Wow. It sounds like you and Kelsey were dealt a pretty crappy hand. It’s impressive that you were able to make it through all that and still go to college to beco
me a vet.”
Lacey snorted. “You want impressive, you should see my student loan balances. I’ll be paying for those until I’m forty, if I’m lucky.”
“That doesn’t diminish the fact that you got yourself and your sister out of a really bad situation,” Alex insisted. “You have a good job and a nice place to live. And let me guess, you’re paying her way through school so she won’t be strapped with the same student loans you’re stuck with, right?”
She was paying for her sister’s education. Why wouldn’t she? Kelsey meant the world to her. But the way Alex said it—not to mention the look of admiration on his face—made Lacey’s face heat. Dang, he actually had her blushing.
She grabbed her wine and took a quick sip, hoping the dim lighting and flickering candles on the table hid her reaction, but when she glanced up from under her lashes, Alex was smiling at her. Yeah, he’d seen.
“Enough about me and my student loans,” she said. “I’m just a simple Texas girl. How about you? From that slight accent of yours, I’m guessing you didn’t grow up around here.”
He gave her a confused look. “Accent? What accent?”
The way he deliberately put extra emphasis on the w-h-a part of the sentence made her laugh.
“That one!” she said, pointing at him across the table. “Where’d you grow up? Somewhere in the Northeast, right?”
He grinned, and Lacey felt a little tremor roll through her. Okay, that was different. Getting turned on by a guy’s smile was definitely a first. But dang, that grin of his could make a girl’s knees weak.
“Rochester, New York,” he said, dropping back into that sexy voice of his, the one that had barely a hint of inflection that she’d first picked up on. “It’s upstate, so we don’t have the usual heavy accent that everyone seems to associate with New Yorkers. I’m surprised you even noticed it.”
“Oh, I noticed.” She smiled. “It’s slight, but it’s there. Especially compared to the Texas twang I’m used to hearing around here. So, what’s the story? How’d an upstate New York kid end up in Dallas?”
He waited as the waitress placed their first course on the table. The woman had said the entrées were big, so Alex had agreed to share the deep-fried ravioli appetizer with her. She hadn’t wanted to pass up a chance to try the crunchy pasta treat, especially since the waitress had said they were amazing.
It turned out that the woman was right. The cheese-filled goodies were delicious. Lacey didn’t realize just how much she was enjoying them until she looked up and saw Alex regarding her with an amused look on his face. She quickly lifted her hand to cover her mouth, sure she’d dribbled marinara sauce down her chin. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. But she didn’t feel anything.
“What?” she asked.
“You were moaning,” he said.
She blinked. “I wasn’t moaning. I was just making appreciative sounds because the ravioli tastes so good.”
His mouth twitched. “I see. And aren’t appreciative sounds just another word for moaning?”
Lacey considered arguing the point, but then dropped her face into her hands. “I can’t believe I did that. Kelsey teases me about doing it at home, but I never realized I did it in public. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said softly. “You have a nice moan. Feel free to do it as often as you like.”
Lacey dropped her hands to see Alex looking at her with a glint in his dark eyes. The way the candlelight was reflecting off them, it almost seemed like they were glowing. It was enough to send a little shiver through her and quickly had her forgetting why she’d been so embarrassed a moment ago.
They stared at each other for what might have been five minutes or five seconds. Either way, Lacey felt heat coalesce between her legs. She squeezed her thighs together under the table.
“Weren’t we talking about how you ended up in Dallas?” she asked.
She needed to get her mind on something other than the suddenly rising temperature in the restaurant.
“Were we?” His mouth edged up. “I thought we were talking about you moaning.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s what we were talking about before the waitress brought our appetizer,” she reminded him. “You mentioned you were from Rochester.”
For a moment, he looked as if he’d rather not change the subject, but then he broke eye contact and concentrated on using his fork to cut into his ravioli. “I grew up in Rochester, but then I left after graduating from high school to serve four years in the Marine Corps.”
She sipped her wine, forcing herself to pay close attention to his story. It was either that or think about exactly what Alex had meant when he said she had a nice moan.
“After I got out, I went back home to Rochester and became a police officer,” he continued. “A couple of years later, I ran into Sergeant Gage Dixon—the commander of the Dallas SWAT team. He offered me a job, and I took it. That was over four years ago, and I never looked back.”
Leave it to a guy to distill such an amazing amount of life down to a few sentences. Considering the fact that she’d never gotten the chance to leave Texas, she needed more details.
“Wait a minute.” She gestured with her fork. “Go back to the first part. What did you do in the Marines? Did you get to go anywhere overseas?”
He took another bite of ravioli before answering. “I was a sniper in the 1st Recon Battalion. And yes, I got to see the world. Not exactly the parts I would have preferred to see—mostly Iraq and Afghanistan. But I guess if I wanted to see vacation destinations, I should have gone to work for a cruise line.”
She didn’t know what a Recon Battalion was, but she understood the sniper part. That seemed like a difficult job.
“Did you ever have to…?” Lacey hesitated, abruptly realizing it probably wasn’t something she had a right to even bring up.
“Did I ever have to shoot anyone?” he finished softly, then nodded. “Yeah, I did. I try not to spend too much time thinking about the people who were in my scope, though. I prefer to focus on the people I saved by pulling that trigger. My fellow marines, soldiers, coalition forces, civilians who were just trying to get on with their lives—they lived because of the things I did.”
The words brought tears to her eyes, and she blinked them back. In a few simple sentences, Alex had admitted to taking on a responsibility that few people in the world would ever be asked to bear. Yet he’d seemed more impressed with her getting through college and taking care of her sister. He probably didn’t even see the disparity.
She cleared her throat. “Since you went back to Rochester, I’m assuming you have family there. Why’d you leave?”
He shrugged, pushing his empty appetizer plate away. That was when she realized he’d eaten the three big raviolis she’d left for him while she’d barely put a dent in the one she had.
“I’m not really close with my family,” he said. “I needed a change, and Dallas was it.”
Okay, that was a non-answer if she’d ever heard one. And she had, because she used them herself anytime people asked her about subjects she didn’t want to get into. Something serious had definitely happened in Rochester to get him to move halfway across the country. But Lacey didn’t push. She knew what it was like to carry a lot of baggage.
The waitress appeared with heaping plates of spaghetti and meatballs then, and as they started in on their entrees, Lacey asked Alex what he’d been doing since moving to Dallas. While she knew he was a SWAT cop, truthfully, she didn’t know what that entailed. Alex didn’t seem to mind talking about the subject, though she noticed he talked more about his teammates than about himself. No big shock there.
“So you’re a sniper and a paramedic in SWAT?” she asked. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but isn’t that a little strange?”
He casually shrugged as he twirled spaghetti around his fork. She couldn’t eat pas
ta that way. It would end up all over her lap.
“Not really,” he said. “When I was deployed, being able to help a marine who’d been shot or injured by an IED—improvised explosive device—was a crucial skill. That’s why I went through combat lifesaver training. It’s like being an EMT on the battlefield. When I joined SWAT, I was amazed at how many times I was the first person on the scene after someone had been injured. It just wasn’t in me to stand there and do nothing, but my combat lifesaving training wasn’t enough. I was just going to get my EMT basic certification, but my boss encouraged me to get my paramedic license. There are two of us on the team now, one on each squad.”
When he put it that way, it made sense.
Alex continued to entertain her with stories of the kind of work he did with SWAT, focusing more on the fun things he and his team did, not as much on the scary stuff that she doubted she wanted to know about anyway. It quickly became apparent that Alex loved his job as well as the other members of the team.
“They’re my family,” he said simply.
They were halfway through their meal when Alex turned the conversation back to her. They talked mostly about how much she loved animals, especially dogs, and why she became a veterinarian. She told him the stories of playing vet with all the neighborhood dogs when she was a kid, both of them laughing as she described how she’d wrapped all of them up like little mummies only to have to chase them around to get the bandages off once they got tired of the game. She admitted that she dreamed about running her own clinic one day.
“If I were rich, that’s what I’d do with my money,” she admitted. “I’d open up a no-kill shelter for dogs. I’d save them all if I could.”
The next thing Lacey knew, she was describing her dream shelter with a huge place for the dogs to run and play, dozens of treatment rooms, and hundreds of kennels. Alex never laughed at her crazy dream. In fact, he helped her plan it out while they ate. Clearly, he loved dogs as much as she did.
As she nibbled on a piece of garlic bread, she marveled at how good he was at getting her to open up. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be telling him all kinds of secrets. Like that insanity from last night when she’d climbed a ten-foot-tall fence because she thought she could help the police catch a man involved in dogfighting. That probably wouldn’t be a good subject to bring up, especially to a cop.