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“One of the new subdivisions. You’ll see.” There was no way to divulge their exact destination without divulging more than he wanted her to know.
Apparently going with the flow suited her this afternoon, because she just rolled her eyes and then combed the side of his hair with her fingers. “Looks like you had a busy day.”
He leaned into the rake of her nails against his scalp as she tried to bring order to hair he’d let wind dry after his shower because he hadn’t wanted to spare extra minutes to run a comb through it. “A busy couple days,” he admitted as he made the turn onto the main road. “I had a meeting in Virginia this morning with a special consultant, after coming off a full day of meetings yesterday.” Not to mention a shitload of personal business he’d sprung on himself in his effort to give her tangible evidence he was invested in this.
She scoured her nails along the back of his neck and sent a scalp-tightening chill of pleasure along his nerve endings. Only the fact that he sat behind the wheel of a moving vehicle prevented him from dropping his head and giving himself over to those roaming fingers. “Sounds important.”
“Hmm.” Her fingertip brushed his earlobe, and his cock twitched. “Some of it is. Some is bullshit. Politics. Money. Jockeying for position.”
“You thrive on the challenge.” Her hand retreated down his neck and across the top of his shoulder.
“I like it, most of the time,” he acknowledged. “I know it might seem counterintuitive, based on the guy I was until Uncle Sam got ahold of me, but I’m good at what I do. The planning, the logistics, and especially the execution. Acquiring those skills forced me to learn patience and get a handle on my reckless tendencies.”
Then again, he’d let his impulsive side off the leash in a major way over the last forty-eight hours. He glanced her way to find her giving him a hard-to-read look. “I know a lot of people around here expected me to end up like Derek. Can’t say I’m sorry to disappoint them.”
She skimmed her fingers along his jaw, just a fleeting touch, and then lowered her hand to her lap. “I’m proud of you,” she said quietly. “I always have been.”
Something in his chest warmed and expanded, but he simply took her hand, joined their fingers, and gave her a smile. “Always? Why Sinclair, have you been keeping track of me?”
She shrugged. “I might have heard a thing or two, from time to time. Mrs. Pinkerton’s cousin-in-law has a neighbor whose nephew works in the same nursing home where your mom works—or something like that. I’m never one hundred percent on her sources, but she seemed to know about every stripe and commendation, and then every promotion when you went private.”
“No personal curiosity on your part, then?”
She shrugged again. “I might have visited the Haggerty website once or twice over the years.”
“Just keeping tabs?”
Her smile dug a little indentation in her cheek. “Checking to see if you’d gotten fat and bald.”
He laughed. “Disappointed?”
“Extremely.”
“Well, I didn’t have Claudia Pinkerton supplying me with highlights from the adventures of Sinclair Smith, but I cyberstalked you, too, from time to time.”
“To see if I’d gotten fat and bald?”
He laughed and slowed to make a turn onto a narrow paved road. “To watch you establish your business, and grow it. I’m proud of you, too, baby girl.” He gave her hand a squeeze and then released it to take the wheel and steer the Rover as the road transitioned from paved to dirt. “You turned something you loved into a successful career. That takes talent and hustle.”
The road turned bumpy, but he risked a glance at Sinclair and found her blushing.
“Thank you,” she said. “There’s luck involved, too. I got some good visibility early on thanks to a sorority sister who married into a high-profile family. She asked me to design her rings and the jewelry she wore for the wedding. That parure I did for her is what really launched me.”
“You can’t underestimate the appeal of a good puh-roo.” What the fuck was a puh-roo?
“You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
She had him there. He could distinguish a ring from a necklace, but despite checking her website and social media posts, he didn’t know much about jewelry. Given everything he had on deck for this evening, he figured he might as well tell the truth. “Honestly, the entire time I stalked you I was only on the lookout for one thing.”
“Discount codes?”
“A change to your last name.”
She stilled. “You checked to see if I’d gotten married?”
He braked and eased the Rover to a stop at the end of the dirt road. Resting his wrists on the wheel, he turned to her. “Back in the day, when you wouldn’t answer my calls and returned my letters, my CO advised me I had no business trying to stay in contact a sixteen-year-old girl who clearly wasn’t feeling reciprocal. He told me to consider you the one that got away and let you get on with your life. I did, because a part of me had always figured it was only a matter of time before I fucked us up, and then—big surprise—I did, and obviously, you wanted nothing to do with me. But another part of me knew better. I ignored it. I shouldn’t have.”
She shook her head. “It’s ancient history, Shane—”
