Page 81 of The Woman Left Behind

“So you could hate me?”

“Would have worked out better that way.”

Her statement worked in another way. He moved like lightning striking, snagging her with one arm and dragging her onto his lap. “I like the way things are working out now,” he drawled, one eyebrow lifting.

“They aren’t working out. We’re having sex. That’s all.”

“For now.” He paused. “Because I have trouble giving up, too.”

After that threat—promise?—and not giving her time to mull it over, he dragged her along to the training site. She didn’t want to go, because she couldn’t work out with the team and that loss still ached. “I thought I’d be banned from there, now that I’m not on a team,” she grumbled as she vaulted into his Vadermobile.Vaulted. Unbidden came the memory of the first time she’d ridden in his truck, and how much difficulty she’d had getting in, and despite herself she grinned.

“Nope. There are rules, but we aren’t military. If anyone doesn’t like it they can take it up with me.”

That wasn’t going to happen. Not many team members, tough as they were, wanted to take on Levi. Theywould, each and every one of them, but they wouldn’t want to.

“Why are we going there?”

“I’ve been away for two days. I need to work out.”

Annoyed, incredulous, she demanded, “What am I supposed to do, bounce up and down on the sidelines andcheer?”

He laughed. “I’d like to see that.”

“Well, you aren’t going to. Just give me the keys so I can leave when I get bored, which will be, oh, about three seconds after we get there.”

“You won’t be bored. The guys want to see you.”

She wanted to see them, too. They’d been a huge part of her life for a year, to the point that she hadn’t gone more than twenty-four hours without seeing them except for the two times she’d gone home to visit.

On the way, Levi tossed his phone into her lap. She gave it a questioning look, then turned the same look on him. It was his personal phone, not his work phone. “What?”

“Link our phones, so I can find you and you can find me.”

“What the hell. That’s kind of intimate, don’t you think?”

He snorted out a laugh. “We’re just getting started, babe. And that’s ‘babe’ with a little ‘b,’ not a capital one.” He paused. “I’ve always had a hard time thinking of you as Babe, instead of Jina.”

And she’d thought of him as Levi, rather than Ace. She stared straight ahead, more struck by that than she wanted to be, undermined by the uneasy sensation that this thing between them was more than she’d anticipated. After a minute she silently linked their phones, then gave his back to him.

“What does this mean?” She shouldn’t have asked. As soon as the words were out of her mouth she screwed up her face at her inability to keep her mouth shut.

He didn’t let her off the hook. “Exactly what you’re afraid it means.”

Afraid? He thought she was afraid? She started to argue, then subsided into disgruntled silence, because he was right. He meant they were a couple, and couplehood implied all sorts of things she didn’t know that she was emotionally ready for, because it was such an abrupt change from what they’d been before. On the other hand, if she unlinked her phone from his, he’d get the message.

She didn’t unlink them.

She was still dealing with the idea that they were acouple, when they reached the training site. She started to open the door and jump down, and he said, “Wait.”

“What?”

“Don’t open the door.”

She could see the other four guys walking toward them, and Levi’s order made no sense. Even better—there was Voodoo! He was very thin, he was on crutches, but he was there. “Why? There’s Voodoo! I want to—”

“Just wait a minute,” he said impatiently. “I have my reasons.”

“They had better be damn good, because I—”

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