Not Another New Year’s (7 page)

D
espite himself, Troy admired the princess’s courage. When faced with his wrath, many a Marine “boot”—new recruit—had looked like they were one second away from screaming for Mommy.

Desirée, on the other hand, looked like she had steel in her spine and ice in her heart.

Then he remembered that her mother would be unlikely to come to Dez’s aid anyway. The once-supermodel, now famous only for her numerous addictions and nearly as many ex-husbands, had never cared a rat’s ass for the daughter she’d given birth to twenty-four years before. When “the Kiss” had first become big news almost a year ago, Troy had read every article and watched each of the tabloid TV stories, wincing for his younger brother all the while.

But remembering the quotes from Desirée’s mother,
his gut gave a twist for the girl now facing him down. “I never wanted a child,” the beauteous but dissipated Maureen was quoted as saying. “Her father insisted, though, and then we were both disappointed that the baby was a girl.”

Stupid-shit people. Both of them. If Troy ruled the world, parenting would be strictly licensed and heavily regulated.

He reached out to grab Desirée’s upper arms and pluck her from the tumble of broken glass around her feet. She gasped in surprise, squirming in his hold. The silky ends of her dark hair waved across the top of his hands, and prickles rose along his skin, tickling everywhere.

He dumped her a few feet away and then rubbed a hand over his shaven head. “Are you hurt?” he ground out, sounding meaner than he meant to.

Her wide-eyed gaze dropped from his face to her arms, bared by this tiny, distracting, diabolical T-shirt she was wearing. It was yellow, thin as a handkerchief, and lopped off across her belly button, leaving inches of golden skin between the hem and the waistband of her low-riding scarlet jeans.

“I’ll let you know if I have bruises tomorrow,” she said.

Aghast, he took a quick step forward. “Did I—” He stopped, noticing her too innocent look. “I was talking about the broken glass, as you very well know,” he said. “Were you cut?”

She shook her head, not even bothering to glance down at her feet, clad in turquoise suede boots, with heels higher than a Manhattan skyscraper. “I’m fine.”

But she wasn’t. For months she’d been hanging
around town, making life hell for his little brother and Tanner’s friend Finn. Finn called her the “Mad Gift Giver” because she kept trying to come up with appropriate thank-yous for the way the other man had saved her father’s life. She’d yet to find a way to pay back Tanner for the havoc she’d wreaked on his.

“You’re nuts,” he told her, remembering what Tanner had said a few minutes ago. “Thinking my brother would even for a minute consider marrying you.”

Her expression didn’t change. A beat passed, and then she shrugged. “It was just an idea.”

“An idea for what?” he threw out. “What the hell goes on inside your bratty, puny brain?”

That seemed to pierce her cool hide. “Magna cum laude.” Her eyes glittered as she tapped her chest.

Her tits were maybe the best he’d ever seen. Round, and her bra must have been flimsy because he could see her hard little nipples poking against the fabric of her shirt. He swung his gaze back to her face, hoping she hadn’t noticed what he’d been noticing.

“That’s graduated with high honors,” she said, her lip curling in a sneer.

“Semper fidelis,” he shot back. “That’s Marine talk for I can kick your butt into Monday.”

Her sneer made way for a smile. “Troy, it
is
Monday.”

He wanted to strangle her. Embrace her. Kill her. Kiss her. From the moment they’d met through every moment since, she’d gotten on his very last nerve…and somehow still wrapped his libido around her dainty little finger.

Even now he could feel that pooling heaviness in his groin, and it only made him angrier.

It was time someone taught her a lesson. She couldn’t go around making messes in other people’s lives and expect that a gift, a smile, or a marriage proposal, for God-frickin’-sake, would make up for it. He jerked his thumb toward the dozens of glasses now turned into thousands of shards. “Well, Ms. Magna Cum Laude, what are you prepared to do about that?”

Her smile fell away. She stepped toward him and put her hand on his arm. “I am sorry. It
was
an accident.”

His muscle hardened beneath her soft touch. This close, he could smell her too, and it was sandalwood and some other exotic spice. A mysterious scent, and for a moment Desirée reminded him of the women he’d glimpsed in Afghanistan, almost completely hidden except through the latticed screens of their voluminous robes.

But she wasn’t camouflaging any of her body. All the curves and planes were out there for him—for anyone—to see. And he already knew who she was inside—spoiled and selfish. He shook her hand off his arm.

“Still, princess,” he said. “You’re going to have to make reparation.”

She tucked the hand that had been touching him underneath the other arm. “Of course. I can do that.” Her hair slid over her shoulder as she glanced around the bar. “Let me get my purse. Do you take American Express, or would Visa work better for you?”

“I don’t take credit cards at all.”

“Yes, you do,” she answered, sounding annoyed. “On the few occasions I’ve been in here before you saw me and ordered me out, plenty of people have used plastic.”

“That’s one of your problems, Desirée. You think money—plastic money, no less—can solve everything.”

She rolled her eyes. “There’s an ATM a block over. Tell me how much you want for the damage and I’ll be back with it in a flash.”

Troy shook his head. “That’s not good enough either.”

Now there was a little wild look about her. “What the heck is it you want, Troy?”

To scare her off. To finally get her to go away. For months she’d been worming her cute little ass into his world. She’d made it too far already. His own mother had wanted to invite her to the family home at Christmas, for God’s sake.

Yeah, he’d known Desirée had no one and likely nowhere to go for the holidays, but she was the enemy, wasn’t she? Sneaky like them too. It was a different kind of war they were fighting these days, war in which the combatants didn’t wear traditional uniforms or fight with traditional weapons. And Desirée could slay him, if she only knew, with her body in those jeans and T-shirt. With a kiss like the one she’d given his brother in front of all the world.

He had to find a way to stop it! Troy Hart had medals for bravery, but she made them all seem a sham.

It was much too easy for her to make him weak.

“I want you to work, really work, to pay off the debt,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

Her mouth pursed in suspicion. “What do you mean? You want me to go find a job?”

“I’ll give you the job. Right here. Starting right now.” She would run, of course. He sensed that inside that poised shell of hers she was as scared of him as he refused to be of her.

She propped one fist on one sweetly rounded hip. “Doing what?”

“What ever I say.” He shrugged. “Swabbing the deck, cleaning the heads, the kind of real grunt work that will ruin your manicure as well as your mood.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then you leave town, princess. Find yourself another kingdom in which to play.”

He watched her mull his proposal over. There was her pride to consider, but he didn’t think it was any match for the idea of true labor. Labor supervised by
him.

Crossing his arms over his chest, he held his breath so he wouldn’t take in another lungful of that bewitching scent of hers. He was just a couple of seconds from finding peace, he figured, and he deserved that after all the sound and fury he’d experienced during war.

“So, uh, well,” Tanner said, looking down at Hannah. The late afternoon sunlight bounced off her dark hair, finding threads of red and gold he hadn’t noticed before. “Did you do all right with Desirée?”

“She’s very generous. With her clothes, with her space.” Hannah sucked her bottom lip into her mouth
and Tanner pretended not to see it. “But she seems, I don’t know—lonely?”

“Well…yeah.” Hell. Tanner hated thinking sympathetic thoughts about Dez, but the longer she hung around Coronado, the harder it was not to. “I’d say you’re a quick study of character.”

Hannah suddenly smiled, rounding her blush-apple cheeks. “When you get up every morning to face twenty or more students with just as many different family situations, scholastic strengths, and personality traits, being a quick study is called survival.”

Tanner nodded. “Secret Ser vice work is like that too. Minute to minute a new situation that needs to be recognized, assessed, and then dealt with.”

“So you’re a quick study as well.”

“I suppose I am.” Tanner watched the breeze toss the ends of Hannah’s hair, sending one strand across her mouth. It caught in the corner of her lips, and he shoved his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t be tempted to take care of it himself. When the urge still itched at his palms, he tilted his head to study the pale blue of the sky.

Which brought back instant thoughts of her panties. The pale blue ones she’d been wearing last night. They’d felt sleek beneath his fingers and—

Hell!

Desperate for distraction, he jerked his gaze to the gray, pitted sidewalk and asked the first question that popped into his head. “So what did you think when you first saw me?”

“That’s not fair.” He could hear the frown in her voice. “You tell me what you thought first.”

He looked up, a smile tugging at his mouth. “Truth?”

“Yes.”

“I wondered about the color of your nipples.”

There was a shocked moment of silence, and then she let out a startled laugh. “No!” Her hand swatted his chest, even as pink color crawled up her neck.

He caught her hand and held it flush against his sternum. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought. Don’t kid yourself about the domesticity of the XY half of the world, sweetheart.”

“I know men—”

“When you haven’t gone to bed with one in four years?”

The color on her face deepened and she pulled her hand away from him. “I said that when I thought that…that…”

“That we were going to bed and then never see each other again? Well surprise, surprise, we were both wrong there. And I just want you to realize that any other male you meet over this vacation has brain patterns the same as mine.”

God, it was smart of him to hit her with the truth. Because now that he thought about it, if Hannah was out looking for jollies that had been on hold for four years—and since he was out of the running to provide such jollies—then she might go searching farther afield, never realizing what rough country she could wander into.

Out of nowhere, that urge to protect her was rising inside him again.

But hell, it wasn’t out of nowhere, right? She was Brooks’s niece, and as such, Tanner’s ticket to life the
way it should be again. He had an important stake in this. If she hooked up with the wrong guy or got hurt by some jerk while she was here, Geoff Brooks was going to blame it on the man he had assigned to protect her.

The Secret Ser vice motto was “Worthy of Trust and Confidence,” and Tanner knew he needed to prove to his former and future boss that he was still a credible source of both.

“Obviously I wasn’t looking for hearts and flowers last night,” Hannah said, now starting to look irritated. “But that doesn’t mean every man I meet—”

“There will be
no
men you meet while you’re here. Got it?”

Perhaps he’d grown another head. She looked at him as if he had. “I don’t even know you,” she said, her eyes wide, her tone incredulous. “You’re not in charge of my life.”

He didn’t like the stubbornness. He was helping her, for God’s sake!

“I’m in charge of your good time,” he replied from between clenched teeth. “I’m supposed to make sure you have a hassle-free, photo-worthy vacation.”

She started sputtering, and the air between them heated with their rising tempers. Her breasts were moving in and out with her annoyed breaths, and he found himself staring at the smooth skin of her chest and the quarter inch of cleavage showing above the zipper of her jacket.

“Look,” he said, waving his hand in her direction. “Just so you know, we’re both mad, and I’m still thinking about your breasts.”

“
What?”

“Don’t get any more pissed, I’m trying to make a point here.”

She glared at him. “The point is you’re a Neanderthal.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I resemble that remark, and so will every other guy you meet to whom you confess you haven’t had sex in the past four years.”

She looked ready to spit or slap or stomp, but just then the door to the bar was flung open and Desirée marched out.

Tanner could kiss—no, God, no, not that—but he could think of something nice to thank her for interrupting the moment. He needed to cool this conversation with Hannah. She hadn’t quite accepted the way their situation was yet, but he’d take the heat off now and come back to it again later.

“Dez!” he said in a hearty voice. “Do you have a few minutes? I thought we could talk over itineraries. You have some time to do sightseeing and stuff with Hannah and me, right?” The smile he sent her was supposed to make her feel both guilty and cooperative.

She didn’t seem to notice he was alive. Glancing over her shoulder at the bar door, she continued advancing toward the gleaming Beemer parked nearby. “Do you want to go back to the hotel now, Hannah?” she asked the other woman.

“I sure do.” She shot Tanner a look full of displeasure.

He ignored a bite of panic. “But Dez, Dez. First just say you can help me show Hannah around.”

She dug keys out of the tiny yellow purse in her
hand. “No can do, Tanner. I’ve got other plans that are going to keep me pretty busy.”

“No—”

“Yep. I’ve got a job working for your big, ignorant, insulting, insufferable, butthead of a brother.”

He blinked. Dez was going to be working for Troy?

Speechless at the thought, Tanner could only watch as this year’s trouble climbed into a car with last year’s trouble. Though the car pulled away, Tanner knew it was a pretty sure bet that neither one of them was done with him.