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Still, having that question in my head was probably preferable to alienating my best friend.
I had a good imagination. And the time Alison had given me tonight would be enough to provide me with fodder for my fantasies for quite a while.
That would have to be good enough.
Chapter two
ALISON
“You’llneverguesswhoI saw last night,” I told my father as I took the seat opposite him at his favorite restaurant, Teague’s Smokehouse.
Dad was already poring over the menu as if we didn’t both know perfectly well that he had it memorized. He and I ate dinner here together every other Sunday like clockwork. Dad wasn’t like me—I always ordered the shrimp linguine, but he switched up his order between four or five dishes. Even so, it wasn’t like he was going to find something on the menu that he didn’t already know about.
“Who’s that?” he asked absently.
“Brian Clark.
Now I had his attention. He looked up from the menu, his eyebrows lifted. “Really! Brian Clark?”
“When’s the last time you two saw each other?” I asked.
“Oh, a couple of weeks ago,” he said. “We go out for drinks sometimes. But where did you see him?”
“I ran into him at that bar on Donnelly Street.”
“What were you doing at a bar?”
“Having a drink, Dad.” Sometimes he still saw me as a kid.
“You didn’t drive home, did you?”
I sighed. “Dad, I live two blocks from Donnelly Street. Of course, I didn’t drink and drive. Do you think I would?”
“I know you know better,” he said. “But you can’t expect me to stop giving you advice just because you’re grown. I’m still your father. I’m always going to try to tell you what to do.”
He grinned at me. I grinned back. “That’s fine,” I snapped. The truth was, I liked the fact that Dad still did this stuff. I liked that he worried about me. Since Mom died, it was just the two of us, and I knew he relied on me just as much as I relied on him. Sometimes it felt as if we were alone on an island, us against the world.
“So, how is Brian?”
“He’s good,” I replied almost immediately. “I didn’t realize he was still with the SEALs.”
“You didn’t?”
“I guess I always figured he had retired when you did.”
“Nah, not Brian. They’re going to have to pry him out of that office with a crowbar to get him to leave. I loved being a SEAL, but I think it’s Brian’s favorite thing about being alive. I’m surprised he didn’t bore you to tears with all his military stories—or did he?”
“No, he didn’t,” I chuckled. “He didn’t tell any military stories.”
“Then what did you two talk about?”
“He mostly wanted to talk about me. What I’m doing these days.”
I wasn’t going to tell Dad the truth—that I could barely remember what Brian and I had talked about because when I thought back that evening, the only thing that came to mind was the overwhelming desire I’d felt to take my clothes off. I hadn’t been that out-of-control aroused since high school. Seventeen wasn’t all that long ago, but I’d believed that such a high level of horniness was a relic of my past.
Apparently not.
That definitely wasn’t the subject you could talk to your father about, though. Even I couldn’t, and I told Dad just about everything. I was pretty sure he knew about my childhood crush on Brian, although no doubt he had always thought of it as just a harmless little girl infatuation.
