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“You don’t believe me? You’ve gotten messed up in the head being around too many superficial people.”
“I just think you’ll say what you need to say to get me into bed.”
“You might be the most jaded woman I’ve ever met. But I’m still very attracted to you. Maybe because you’re a lot less aware of your own beauty than the typical beautiful woman.”
Jane gnawed at the inside of her cheek and tried to think of the most graceful way out of this conversation. Having a guy as gorgeous as Luke compliment her looks was sort of like Albert Einstein telling her she was a real smart gal. Was he right? Had her perspective gotten skewed by having the blond bombshell triplets to grow up with? Or was he really just trying to get in her pants?
“What about you? What kind of neighborhood did you grow up in?” she asked, hoping to take the subject far, far away from herself, though the thought of Luke getting in her pants lingered in her mind.
And the memory of what they’d almost done in her parents’ bathroom sent a jolt of heat to her groin. What had gotten into her? How had she gone from a restrained, sensible woman to a lusty maniac so quickly? The answer to her questions sat only a foot away.
“I’m from Miami originally, and nobody in my neighborhood drove a Ferrari. El Camino, yeah—Ferrari, no way. Our street was mostly Puerto Rican. My mom is from Puerto Rico, and my dad was half Italian and half Heinz-57, but they were divorced by the time I was old enough to remember anything.”
“Do you know your father at all?”
“Yeah, I got interested in him and started asking to go visit him in Texas where he’d moved. So I spent summers here in Texas from elementary school on. The summer visits are how I met my cousin Michael and became friends with him when we were kids.”
“You two must be close still, if he asked you to be in his wedding.”
“No, not really. I guess there will always be that childhood bond, but we have almost nothing in common as adults.”
Jane found herself inexplicably satisfied to hear that Luke wasn’t a member of Michael and Heather’s shallow party crowd.
Luke went silent as he turned into the parking lot of Vittorio’s, an old-time Italian restaurant that was low on polish and high on great food. They made their way into the restaurant in silence, and a waitress led them to a dimly-lit U-shaped booth. This was exactly what Jane had always dreamed of as the perfect setting for a casual date.
They sat down and took the menus offered by the waitress, and Jane opened hers and tried not to notice how close Luke sat. Instead, she stared at the monstrosity of a candle flickering on the table, a big glob of wax in a bottle crisscrossed with what looked like a decade’s worth of hardened wax drippings.
“You ever been here before?” Luke asked.
“A few times, but it was years ago.”
“Everything is good, but the manicotti al forno is unbelievable.”
“Okay, I’m sold.” Jane slapped her menu shut and noticed that Luke had never opened his. “Is this one of your favorite haunts?”
“Yeah, I don’t live too far from here. The smell of garlic lures me in every time.”
A waitress came to take their orders. She knew Luke by name and flirted with him in a natural sort of way that didn’t even seem offensive given the fact that his “date” was sitting right beside him. When she left, Jane’s thoughts wandered to Luke’s background again. Maybe it was just writer’s curiosity, but she couldn’t help wanting to know what made her sexy bodyguard tick.
And maybe knowing what made him tick would give her some insight about why he was so sexually irresistible to her. Or maybe not. But at least talking about something besides sex might keep her mind off of it.
“I’m still waiting for you to tell me more about where you grew up.”
Luke glanced over at her and smirked. “There’s not much more to tell. I was a street punk—drove my poor mom crazy. Our neighborhood might have been a clean working-class one when we first moved there, but by the time I was a teenager, the only way to survive was to be more intimidating than the other street punks.”
“So how did you go from troublemaker to security specialist?”
“My mother would have killed me if I hadn’t done well in school, and school was pretty easy for me, so I kept my grades up. And the baseball coach at school took an interest in me and talked me into joining the team freshman year. By senior year, I had a scholarship offer from the University of Texas.”
“That’s how you ended up living in Texas?”
“Partly. I joined the army for a few years after college, but I found out I didn’t like blindly taking orders, so I got out and went back to Miami. A guy I’d worked for in the army had started a security-consulting business in South Florida, and he hired me to work with him. After a few years of that, I was ready to go it alone, and since a lot of my acquaintances from college had settled in Dallas, I figured I’d try starting a business here.”
