Straight to the Heart. Samantha Hunter

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СКАЧАТЬ woman wasn’t out of the usual. Ben hadn’t been with anyone in a while. Life had been too crazy.

      He’d had a one-nighter on his last military leave, and that was well over a year ago. Since then, things had just not lined up in the right way. Not that he hadn’t had some offers since he’d come home, but he didn’t want to make things more complicated in his own backyard. And truthfully, none of the women he’d met had inspired him that way.

      Joanna Wallace definitely inspired him. Still, lust was mingling with caution in a very uncomfortable way.

      As he conducted his work at the bar, he watched her interact with a table of customers who seemed captivated by her. She joked with them, smiling broadly, her laugh rising over the din of the room. Her eyes met his across the space again, as if she’d felt him watching her. She was aware of him, too.

      Interesting.

      Her posture, the slight apprehension in the way she held her shoulders when she looked at him, told him what he wanted to know. Part of it, anyway. She was hiding something, and by the end of the afternoon, he intended to know what it was.

      JOANNA DIDN’T REMEMBER ever being so nervous that her palms were as sweaty as they were when she walked into the employee lounge to meet Ben Callahan.

      She’d had to fight her instinct to cover up the generous amount of skin exposed by the halter top she was wearing. Definitely not her usual style. Lacey, her brother Jarod’s wife, had insisted it was perfect for a job at a roadhouse. In truth, Joanna had felt pretty comfortable in the get-up until Ben Callahan had looked at her. Then she had been distinctly uncomfortable in a couple of different ways.

      Getting by Charlie and Lisa had been easy, but when Ben looked at her, she had the feeling he knew right away that she wasn’t who she said she was. Not a waitress, not Joanna Wallace. She half expected him to call her out on it right then and there, but her background cover was solid, even if they checked.

      Now she was going to meet with him privately, and she had to convince him she was the real deal. Tom’s words about her career hanging on her success rang in her head and as she closed the door, walked toward the thick wooden table where he sat with two of the cheeseburger specials that she’d been serving all during lunch. Her stomach growled. She was hungry. Waitressing, something she hadn’t done since college, was hard physical work.

      “Hi, hope you don’t mind a burger,” Ben said congenially, though his eyes were telling her a different story. He wasn’t sure of her yet, and he was suspicious.

      That was good. Of course, given his military background, she assumed he would be cautious. He knew the score, knew that what he’d seen put him in a certain amount of danger. He’d be particularly careful about anyone he didn’t know. She’d expected that.

      “This is great, thanks,” she said with a smile and took the chair across from him.

      “Eat, then we can talk,” he said, grabbing his own sandwich.

      She had no argument with that.

      Polishing off his burger, he sat back and waited for her. She didn’t rush, and also sat back with a contented sigh when she finished.

      “I don’t know what Charlie does to these burgers, but he deserves some kind of medal,” she said to break the ice.

      “He does have talent at the grill,” Callahan agreed, and didn’t break eye contact as the tone shifted between them. “So, tell me a little about yourself. I know Charlie crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s, but I like to know who’s working for me.”

      She shrugged. “What do you want to know?”

      “You’re clearly from Texas, but not local. Where’d you grow up?”

      “Just outside Corpus Christi, though I’ve lived in San Diego for the last eight years. Came back to El Paso with my boyfriend, Lenny. It didn’t work out.”

      The best lies were couched in as much truth as possible, and while she had been living in San Diego when she was shot, and she did have a former boyfriend named Lenny, everything else was pure fiction. She waited for him to respond.

      Taking another sip of her drink, her throat was suddenly dry for no reason other than he was one of the best-looking men she’d ever seen. Six-foot-plus of lean, incredible Texas male.

      She had been raised by two strong men, her dad and her older brother, Jarod, who were both Texas Rangers and were also all the family she’d ever known after her mom had taken off when Joanna was seven. For this reason, she had always been very comfortable around men.

      She worked with lots of very good-looking men in her job—ones easily as good-looking as Ben Callahan—but they were marshals, and she never thought of them romantically. Even back in high school, she’d found the boys easier to get along with, and had had more male than female friends.

      For that reason, Joanna dated very rarely. She’d been halfway through college before she’d lost her virginity, and even that was with a guy she considered more of a friend than a lover. He was an Assistant District Attorney in Houston now, married, with four kids.

      None of that was ever part of Joanna’s plan. She was all about the job, just like her brother and her father.

      Except that Jarod was married now, and even her father had met someone.

      That was nice. She was happy for them, and she loved her sister-in-law Lacey. But she wasn’t about to follow suit.

      For all these reasons, it was mortifying that her breath caught when Ben Callahan leaned in closer over the table. She snapped her mouth shut, realizing she had actually licked her lip.

       Make it work for you, you’re supposed to be nervous. Play the part.

      He had to believe she was just a waitress, a girl down on her luck who’d made some bad choices and who needed the job. If she couldn’t pull that off, her supervisors would think she had really lost her touch.

      A dark-blond lock fell forward on his forehead, and he pushed it back, every muscle in his arm showing off in the process. She could almost make out the movement of his abs under the white T-shirt he wore.

      She’d memorized his file, of course, though none of the pictures there did him justice. He’d been out of the SEALs for less than a year, retired with an honorable discharge. She wondered what had happened. In her experience, those guys never left until they were forced to. Whatever it was, he still stayed in fighting form.

      She dropped her eyes to his hands where they rested on the table. It crossed her mind that she could have gotten laid sometime in the last four or five weeks.

      Joanna liked sex, but had always thought of it more like a sport, something to do that scratched an itch more than anything else, though there hadn’t been much chance for that recently. In fact, it had been the last thing on her mind until about two minutes ago. Ben Callahan was sex personified, and her previously dormant hormones were picking a hell of a time to wake up.

      He was talking to her, and she was so busy processing her lust that she wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying, yanking herself back to the present moment.

      “Charlie said you were sleeping in your car, and he rented you the room upstairs?”

      “Yeah, СКАЧАТЬ