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She stared at it in bemusement, frowning.
What the hell was his problem?
John David and Jack Bridger had been friends at one time, she thought. Well, sort of friends.
She pushed her fingers through her hair, grimacing at the bed-tangles that had knotted through the curls and wishing she had her mother’s and sisters’ temper. Then she could just throw her phone across the room and be done with it for the day.
Her mother and sisters had no problem whatsoever doing things like that.
Instead, hearing yet more messages popping up, she turned off the sound and forced herself to stand up. To leave the heated-blanket warmth for the AC cool until she could get to the controls and turn the damned air off.
The phone vibrated with each message, though, and the feel of it was beginning to irritate her.
Turning the AC off, she slipped through the house to the kitchen window, opened a slat, and looked out, refusing to admit to the fact that her adrenaline was pumping without the infusion of caffeine that it normally took for it to do that.
She looked out just in time to watch the wicked black pickup pull into the back of what was usually a deserted house across the street. Said truck pulled a trailer carrying a tarp-covered motorcycle behind it. The truck came to a stop at the closed garage doors and as Poppy watched, the driver’s-side door pushed open and he stepped out.
Jack Lee Bridger.
He turned in her direction, all six feet, five inches of what looked like pure, hard muscle dressed in boots, jeans, and a T-shirt that stretched across broad shoulders, a wide chest, and a set of abs that appeared so hard they should have been illegal.
A darkly tanned, unsmiling face, eyes that were neither gray nor blue but a mix of both, and thick straight black hair that was long enough to give his face a hard, savage appearance.
As he stared at her window, he tilted his head to the side, then lifted his hand, two fingers almost appearing to offer a casual salute as they reached his shoulders, before he turned and let her admire a fine, fine male ass…
Oh my God. He knew she was at the window.
She hurriedly stepped backward, allowing the slat to fall back into place as she realized she’d been holding her breath.
He couldn’t know she lived there, she assured herself. She’d just bought the house a year ago from old man Ralph Milton and his wife when they’d gone to Florida to live with their daughter.
Only she knew that she’d bought this particular house because it was directly across the alley from the house Jack had bought several years previous.
She hadn’t seen him in years. Eight years. She refused to list the number of days, and coming up with the number of hours wouldn’t have been hard, but her brain wasn’t quite with it when she first woke.
Inhaling roughly, she tugged at the sleep top that barely met the band of her gaily striped pajama pants and told herself he was just being a smart-ass because he could tell someone was watching him.
He was a Navy SEAL. Had been for years. They knew stuff like that, right? The hunter-and-hunted kind of thing? They could tell when someone was watching them. At least, that’s what she’d read and seen in television movies.
Her phone vibrated again.
Turning it over in her hand, she frowned down at the new message.
Call me when you wake! It was John David again. The damned busybody. We need to talk about this! Stay the hell away from Bridger, Poppy!
She narrowed her eyes on the message, her lips pursing as she considered telling him to mind his own damned business. It was, after all, her life, not his.
Thank God he was out of town at some lawyer thing in California. Otherwise, he’d probably be on her doorstep with his demands and tight-assed judgments.
For a moment, she leaned her head against the wall next to the window, forcing herself not to fling open the door and run across the alley to throw herself into his arms as she had the last time she’d been in town when he returned home. But she wasn’t a girl now, she was a woman, she reminded herself. And Jack had made it a point to avoid her when he was in town ever since that same summer. She forced herself not to remember the last time she’d done more than catch a glimpse of him. A time or two he’d acknowledged her with a nod or a somber look, but he hadn’t approached her and he’d always disappeared before she could approach him.
The past was a cruel bitch, she thought painfully. A single bad decision to walk home alone through the woods had destroyed a friendship she’d valued and that chance for more that she’d dreamed of having with him.
“He’ll just be home for a minute,” she whispered as her phone vibrated again. “Then he’ll be gone again.”
Just for a minute.
She could survive not speaking to him, not basking in the warmth she’d always felt around him at least that long, couldn’t she?
