Page 3 of Wild Card

First that direction was lifting her gaze back toward him with new determination. Then ignoring how he’d never stopped studying her. Watching her with the intensity of a great, gorgeous wolf…

Focus.

“Captain Mackenna?” she finally murmured.

He lifted a new smile. “Yes, Miss Thorne?”

“You’re so full of shit.”

He dropped his hands. Chortled harder. Making him laugh shouldn’t have felt so damn good…

“Well played, a leanbh. Well fuckin’ played.”

But it did—in the exact same way his comeback made her belly tingle, her heart race, and her libido gallop.

A leanbh.

Dear one.

“Damn it.”

She glowered. Sam smirked. The bastard was deliberately buttering her up with the traditional Gaelic endearment—but who did she really have to blame? She’d begged him to teach her phrases in the romantic old language. Sam had been an outsider in a strange land, eager to share his culture.

Jen had always been just an outsider. And always would be.

Besides, the flattery was so casual, it could’ve applied to a six-year-old kid as much as her. It was a damn good thing to remember, especially as Mattie sauntered over and wrapped a hand to Sam’s shoulder. Her nails, painted in a trendy reverse French, tightened on his broad muscle with their shiny ebony tips. In a voice as smooth and glossy, she crooned, “Everything all right here, thorny boo?”

“Sure.” Except for the ride back to the worst parts of sixth grade. Thanks so much, Mat.

Mattie’s laugh was as perfect—and fake—as Marilyn Monroe’s on a press junket. “Oh sweetie, don’t pout. It brings out yucky lines in your face. Besides, I kind of like all those cute memories.”

“Memories?”

Jen barely reined in the urge to smack Sam again. But he was just being polite. He had no idea that his inquisition cranked the dredge deeper into her humiliating past.

“We all grew up together,” Mattie explained. “Jen was always the most adorable thing with her pratfalls. Then when her auntie came to pick her up from school, the woman would kiss all over her ‘boos’. After a while…”

You and Viv turned it into the nickname I hated more than any other.

Sam’s brows tightened more. Jen looked away. He might be the most beautiful man she’d ever known but she knew the start of pity when she saw it, and no way could she bear it on his face. Not even when he growled, sounding wrathful and protective, “Mattie.”

“Hmmm?” The woman didn’t flinch at a note of his tone. She was either really clueless or had the biggest pair of girl balls Jen had ever encountered.

“Cool it.”

“Oh, please. Jen doesn’t mind. If anything, her little stumbles made us all adore her more. She used to send us all into fits, always walking around with her nose in some book. We often joked that the aliens could fly right over from Area Fifty-One, land in the school’s quad, and thorny boo would barely notice—until she took a header into the bushes. Or the wall. Or down the stairs. Even the teachers excused her from being tardy all the time, because—”

“Mattie.” Jen hoped that a hefty loan of Sam’s tone earned her some credence. But when she glanced at him for confirmation, all he returned was the deepened furrow in his forehead. Heavy breaths flared his nostrils. Hell. He was even a little…scary.

In all the right ways.

All the arousing ways…

She couldn’t go there. She wouldn’t. Her stuttered breath, racing pulse rate, and electrified nerve endings had much different ideas. It was insane. It was incredible.

“Honey! Is everything okay?”

Tess to the rescue. Thank God.

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