“Gonna help the boys.”
Not missing a beat, or an opportunity, she moved into him, leaned into him, pressing her breasts against hands flattened on his chest, gazing up at him with sparkling hazel eyes, and breathing, “You do that, pookie-loo.”
If she was his, all of that would earn her a spanking.
Mo filed that away as he controlled his body’s reaction to her that close, the feel of her, how much he liked that look in her eyes, the smell of her perfume with hints of her shampoo, and he moved away to supervise the carrying in of groceries.
“Why didn’t you just go in?” he heard Lottie ask her sister.
“I keep forgetting your security code,” Jet answered.
“You’re a dork.”
“You keep track of three boys, their laundry, their mess, their mouths that demand food, football practice, a house, a husband who likes your body a whole lot more after you gave him three sons, and he liked it a lot before you did that, and a full-time job working with Tex and Duke, most of the time with those two together and bickering at each other, and remember your sister’s security code,” Jet retorted.
“You could text me…”
Mo lost track of the conversation as he hit the truck and they went inside.
His job became mostly controlling squabbling brothers who all (even the youngest) thought they could carry in six bags apiece, and they didn’t even have that many, and making sure the youngest didn’t fall flat on his face grunting and groaning with the two bags he demanded to carry while they got the shit into the house.
They put the bags on the kitchen floor, an odd choice, one Mo got when he realized this was a relatively practiced dance and the boys couldn’t reach the counters, and they all went into unpacking mode. They unpacked, but it was only Jet and Lottie, under Lottie’s strict placement plan, who put away.
“So, are you a professional wrestler?” Alex asked him.
“No,” Mo answered.
“A soldier?” Dante asked, his eyes on the gun on Mo’s belt that was in its holster looped through Mo’s cargo pants.
“No,” Mo repeated.
“He’s a commando,” Lottie announced.
Alex froze solid and stared with his mouth open at Mo.
“What’s a commando?” Dante asked.
“The coolest of the cool,” Alex whispered, then shouted, “Even cooler than Uncle Luke!”
Dante’s face smushed up and he told his brother, “No one’s cooler than Uncle Luke.”
“Muchacho,” Alex threw a hand Mo’s way, “look at him.”
Dante looked at Mo.
His face conceded the point, but his mouth didn’t.
Mo nearly burst out laughing.
He was helped in controlling this when the youngest one slapped him on the thigh.
Mo looked down at the kid. “I wanna be a ’mando!”
“Give it time, bub,” he said.
“Oh my God, someone kill me,” Jet begged. “Last week, Carissa was over, Joker showed to take her home, and Cesar wanted to be a biker.”
“Well…I mean, he is Joker,” Lottie muttered while obsessively lining up cans of La Croix in her fridge.
“I’m gonna be just like Uncle Luke,” Dante declared stubbornly.
“I’m gonna be like Uncle Lee, except the commando kind, ’cause Auntie Indy is fine, and I want me a hot babe just like her,” Alex announced.
“I love Annie Sadie!” Cesar shrieked.
“Nobody is killing me,” Jet pointed out.
“What are you doing here?” Lottie asked her sister.
Dante shoved a bunch of bananas in Mo’s gut.
Mo took the cue and the bananas and put them in Lottie’s fruit bowl.
“One, to ascertain I still have a living, breathing sister,” Jet answered.
Mo had to hand it to her, Lottie didn’t even cut a glance his direction on that.
“And two, to tell you Mom and Tex want us over for dinner next Sunday,” Jet finished. “The whole family.”
Jet’s attention came to him.
“Cool. Mo and I’ll be there,” Lottie shared.
His eyes went to her and his hands itched with the urge to toss her over his shoulder, carry her upstairs and tan her tight ass.
“You’re…uh, there?” Jet asked quietly.
“You can talk in front of Mo. We’re tight,” Lottie told her.
That bought her five more swats.
“Oooooh…kay,” Jet whispered, giving her sister big eyes.
Lottie just smiled at her.
Jet’s eyes narrowed, and she started to look pissed.
Ah, hell.
“Dude, how do you become a commando?” Alex asked him before Jet could get into it with her sister about how she suddenly had a boyfriend that Jet had never heard about who Lottie was tight enough with, he was coming to dinner with the family.
“This dude is Uncle Mo,” Lottie corrected.
Now he was “Uncle Mo.”
And now he wanted someone to kill him.
“Righteous,” Alex said to his aunt, then back to Mo. “Uncle Mo, how do you become a commando?”
He opened his mouth to tell the kid he wasn’t a commando.
Though, with some of the missions Hawk took, he absolutely was.
But Lottie got there before him.
“He was in the Army.”
“Righteous!” Alex yelled. “Just like Uncle Lee!” His gaze dipped to Mo’s weapon. “Why do you carry a gun?”
“I’m on duty,” Mo told him.
“Cooooooool,” he breathed. He recovered from that awesomeness and asked, “Do you know how to put on camo makeup?”
“Yeah,” Mo said.
“Do you know how to use a rocket launcher?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you flown in a helicopter?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you jumped out of a plane?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you been to Afghanistan?”
Mo’s body grew tight and so did his repeat of, “Yeah.”
He felt Lottie and Jet’s attention.
Alex opened his mouth again but didn’t get anything out before Lottie said softly, “Alex, honey, find the ice cream and get your brothers and yourself a bar. ’Kay?”
“Sure, Auntie Lottie,” Alex said, then started digging through the remaining canvas bags.
Mo avoided her eyes as he bent and picked up the spent bags, folding them in half, like Lottie kept them, and stacking them on the counter.
He heard ripping ice cream bar plastic and felt Jet move his way. He turned his attention to her and saw she was carrying noodles, Tostitos and boxes of granola.
When she got close, she said low, “Thank you for your service, Mo.”
She meant it.
They all meant it, but she thought he was involved with her sister so it hit closer to home, thus she meant it.
“Not a problem,” he muttered as she passed him to get to the pantry.
He couldn’t avoid Lottie anymore, not with strength of warmth coming from her direction, so he shifted his gaze to hers.
Yeah, that was why he did it right there. That look on her face.
He’d known he was going to be a man who was going to be a soldier for a long time before he became one. That was about a lot of things that were too numerous to boil down to just that look on Lottie’s face. It included his mother and his sisters and the sense of duty and loyalty he had to them since they had no other man in their life. They were not wallflowers or doormats. Not one of them. It didn’t matter. It was the man he was from early on that dictated the man he was going to be.
But that look on Lottie’s face and her wrestling without hesitation with her nephews on her front lawn and her throwdown with a woman she identified as possible competition to claim him morphing into a throwdown to avenge him were why he got in.
And in a different world, one where she really was his, they would be how he could live with what he’d seen, what he�
��d done and what he’d lost in the dust, dirt and sand.
To be the kind of man who earned that look.
Who deserved it.
And who could claim the woman who wore it.
“It isn’t a big deal,” he lied.
“You’re absolutely wrong and you know it so shut up, pookie-loo,” she returned.
A good ten swats.
Bare ass.
Mo cut ties with her eyes and bent down to pick up the last bag, forgotten in the ice cream rush, not surprisingly carrying the fresh fruits and vegetables.
He put it on the counter and unpacked it.
* * * *
“So…Afghanistan?”
She’d barely shut the door on her sister and nephews.
He was standing in her living room where he’d retreated, really fucking quick, after he hovered close at her back when she was saying goodbye to her family.
She was standing in the arched entryway that led off her foyer into her living room.
“Lottie—”
“And,” she cut him off, “to go back to our discussion at the grocery store, you may have lived with that woman for two years, but I am a woman, so I know the plays she was making, and they were not what you think they were.”
Mo shook his head. “We’re not doing this.”
She started to move forward. “We are so totally doing this.”
He took a step back and she stopped.
“We’re not, because we can’t,” he declared.
“We can, we are, and I’ll get us started. Backtracking in a belated effort at being an adult, you should know, anyone else, no way I’d be in a nightie making breakfast.”
He clenched his teeth because he had an idea he knew what was coming next.
“I was in a nightie making breakfast with you because you’re hot and I wanted you to jump me,” she kept at him.
That was what he thought was coming.
He still knew better.
“The minute you opened the door to me, you took a step back,” he bit out.
“That’s because you’re enormous, Mo. There’s a lot of you.”
On that, she advanced again.
Mo took another step back.
She stopped.
But she didn’t stop talking.
“Now let me share my first reaction to seeing your face through the peephole, something you didn’t witness, and the exact time I decided I was pretty sure I was gonna want you to jump me. Okay, I’ll admit, the amount of you took me by surprise, but in no way was I withdrawing because I didn’t like what I saw, or I feared it. It was just surprise followed closely with the desire to climb you all the way to the top.”
Shit, fuck, he couldn’t listen to her talking this way.
“Lottie—”
She took another step forward.
He took a step back, hit her coffee table and began to skirt it.
She stopped so he stopped.
“You were a dick to me, Mo.”
Fuck.
He knew they’d get there.
He just didn’t want to be there because she was right.
He’d been a dick.
“I thought you were playing games,” he explained.
“You didn’t keep that secret,” she reminded him.
“I also needed you to back off.”
“You didn’t keep that secret either.”
“So how about you remember I need you to back off?” he suggested.
“No way in hell,” she returned.
“Lottie, listen—”
She advanced again, he retreated, and she didn’t stop until his calves hit couch and there was nowhere to go.
Which meant she got in his space but didn’t touch him.
But her in his space was bad enough.
Christ.
“Let me make myself perfectly clear. I like you, Mo.” She leaned closer. “A lot.”
“We’re not going there,” he grunted.
“We so are.”
“We’re not.”
She put a hand to his chest and her eyes warmed as her voice went soft and sweet. “We are, baby.”
“We’re not because there is no way I’m gonna be in the position of being inside you and my attention all about you something that would give some whackjob the opportunity to get the drop on us and put a bullet in the back of my head.”
Her face went slack and her hand curled into a fist on his chest.
But he wasn’t done with her.
“After that, he’ll drag you out from under my dead body, and no one will get the warning you’ve been taken because I’m dead in your bed and he’s got you somewhere, making you wish you were as dead as me.”
She pressed her fist into his chest but said nothing.
“Lottie, you get this is serious, but what you gotta really get is that I need to be focused and not on how badly I wanna make love to you, but on how badly I wanna keep you safe and healthy, physically, but more, mentally.”
“Okay,” she whispered, understanding the intelligence of that right away, and that was his girl. “We’ll wait until it’s over.”
Goddammit.
“We won’t do it then either.”
She showed her shock then her hurt before she said, her voice rising, “Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t cut me up too much, the likes of Tammy dumping me, but I start something with the likes of you and you get the urge to move on, then do it, where do you think that’ll leave me?”
“Have you thought about the fact that I might not get that urge?” she asked.
“They move on, Lottie. They all move on.”
“I’m not them.”
“You can do better than me and both of us know it.”
They did.
They both did.
And he knew she did when she dropped her head, took her hand from him and stepped away.
Now that…
That cut him up.
Until she tilted her head back and speared him with her gaze.
“What’s better than you, Mo?” she snapped.
“More money. Better lookin’. Trips to Tiffany’s.”
“You think I give one real shit about all that?”
Mo fully clicked into a conversation he thought he’d already been fully clicked into and he did that by realizing somewhere along the line he’d made her angry.
Very angry.
“Lo—” he began.
“First,” she bit off, “you’re hot. Not a little hot, a lot. You might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but neither am I or anyone else. But trust me, Mo, I wanted to climb you like a tree the first time I laid eyes on you and Tammy would have gotten down on her knees to beg you to have her back. And that has a lot to do with you just being you, but the kind of woman she is, it also has to do with you looking the way you do and also the fact it’s pretty clear by her behavior you know how to use your cock.”
He’d had no complaints on that, as far as he knew, but he was not going to share that with Lottie.
Even if he was, he wouldn’t get the shot because she kept going.
“So you’re hot, and that’s my call to make, you can’t make it, so I don’t wanna hear another word about it,” she clipped. “Second, my dad promised us everything from trips to the Riviera to castles in the sky. He didn’t deliver on one single promise he made, but more, he wasn’t even enough of a man to fight the urge to hit a table in order to see to his woman and his girls. You’re man enough to fight the urge to fuck me in order to make me safe. What else would I get if you let me have the rest? I don’t know, you do, and I want a shot at that.”
“Lottie—”
“And I don’t want Tiffany’s, Mo. If I did, I’d earn the money to buy something there. I doubt you’re on food stamps working for Hawk, but I also make a good living and if a woman’s about the living a man can earn, she’s not much of a woman. I need a man with ambition and drive and a belief in what he’s doing. I don’t need a man to driv
e me to Tiffany’s. I got my own damned car.”
“Baby—” he whispered, with all she said, unable to stop that word from leaking out of his mouth.
But that was all he got out.
“I don’t know what those bitches did to you, since my guess is Tammy wasn’t the only one. And I don’t know what happened to you in Afghanistan. I don’t even really know you. All I know, and I know it good, Mo, is that I wanna find out.”
“This isn’t smart,” he said gently.
“Now? Or ever?” she demanded to know.
“Now.”
And possibly ever.
But he wasn’t going to get into that with her right then.
“Call Hawk and tell him to find this guy, Mo.”
“They’re workin’ on it.”
“Tell them to work faster.”
He said nothing because all his attention was set on stopping himself from smiling.
Christ, she really was something.
“Do you have a problem with me stripping?” she asked.
Mo now had no trouble not smiling.
“I don’t like men watching you take your clothes off,” he told her honestly.
“This is an issue because that’s what I do to pay the bills and I like doing it.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“Can you get over it?”
He didn’t know how he’d feel if he wasn’t there every night, watching the crowd watching her take her clothes off.
Maybe.
But doubtfully.
He gave her more honesty.
“It’s an issue, Lottie.”
“I’m not getting any younger,” she announced.
Outside his time in the Army and on Hawk’s crew, most his life he’d spent with women.
So on that, he kept his mouth shut.
“And I want kids,” she went on.
He kept his mouth shut on that one too, even if he knew it already with how she was with her nephews, and he liked it a lot.
“Do you want kids?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“How many?”
“Two or three.”
“I’m not getting any younger, Mo.”
Well, hell.
Now he was fighting smiling again.
“You aren’t either,” she pointed out.
“Right,” he murmured.
“We’ll work it out,” she declared.
He drew an audible breath into his nostrils.
“We’re gonna work it out, Mo,” she assured him.
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