“You aren’t still?” Reece asked.
Jesus. Sometimes he wished his second-oldest brother’s snark came with a mute button. “We had something good, and I fucked it up. As usual. C’mon, you can’t tell me you’re surprised by that.”
“No,” Greer said. “I’m not.”
Jude refused to let that answer sting. It was the truth, after all.
“How long were you with her?” Camden asked.
He thought about the ring in his pocket and considered lying, because they sure as fuck wouldn’t believe that he’d wanted to marry her more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. He finally settled on a half-truth. “A year. I met her through Pruitt while at OCS.” He still remembered the first time he saw her having lunch at a restaurant off base with her father. He’d approached them on the pretense of asking Pruitt a question, but he’d really just wanted to find out who the blond beauty in the strappy sundress and sandals was. “We dated during my senior year at Old Dominion and broke up after graduation, right after I was commissioned.”
His brothers stared at him.
“No way,” Camden said. “You’ve never stayed with anyone that long.”
“Well, I did with her, okay?” Jude snapped. “And don’t look at me like that. You all met her once at my apartment in Norfolk.”
“Then why don’t we remember her?” Greer asked.
“I do,” Vaughn said.
“That’s cuz you have the memory of an elephant,” Cam said and elbowed his twin in the side.
“Pretty girl. Smart. Very sweet,” Vaughn continued without missing a beat. “I thought she was too good for you.”
“Yeah, I can’t argue that.” Jude dropped into the chair vacated by Pruitt’s pretentious lawyer and rubbed both hands over his face. “When we were dating, I was always real careful about where we went, what we did, who we saw. Always took her out of town or to places where there was no chance of me being spotted with her.”
“And why was that?” Reece asked, his tone full of disgust.
Because he’d wanted her to himself. He’d wanted her to know the real him and not the image he projected. And because he’d been warned away from her—several times. But his brothers didn’t need to know any of that. “Because I didn’t want this third degree.”
Reece snorted. “More like you didn’t want one of your other girlfriends to catch you.”
“Yeah,” Jude muttered and touched the ring in his pocket again. “You know me too well.”
As his brothers processed the situation in silence, the dread tightening his chest started edging dangerously close to panic. He couldn’t face Libby ever again. If it came to it, he wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to hurt her a second time.
“So it’s settled.” He made sure there was no room in his tone for argument and got to his feet again, intent on making a quick escape. “I’m not doing it.”
“No,” Greer said. “You definitely are.”
“What?”
“You always admit when you fuck up—I gotta give you credit for that—but you never really face your mistakes.” Greer leveled that dark, all-too-knowing gaze on him and handed over the folder containing Libby’s personal data. “It’s long past time, bro, and after I hash out the details with Pruitt, you’ll start tomorrow.”
Chapter Two
“Late again.”
“Dammit, I know.” Libby Pruitt shoved into her office, hooked her purse over the back of her chair, and searched her desk drawers for a hair clip. Noah Saunders, her intern for the semester, lounged in the doorway, his skinny arms crossed over his chest. He already had a coffee stain on his tie, even though it was barely eight thirty, and his kinky, orange-red hair looked as if he had styled it with an explosion.
Unfortunately, he was the more organized out of the two of them this morning. Where was that damn clip? Despite her efforts, her hair was already out of control.
“You can’t keep doing this,” he said.
“Again, I know.” Especially since her boss expected nothing less than 110 percent from his underlings. But it didn’t help that her father seemed intent on making her life into a special kind of hell. With one ten-minute phone call, he’d managed to ruin her entire day before she’d even had her first cup of coffee.
Noah frowned. “You never used to be late for work. What’s going on?”
Ah-ha. Hair clip. She twisted her hair into a ponytail and clipped it up. “We need to analyze the police reports regarding the Gatewood case—”
Noah straightened. He may have been a toothpick, but he was a tall toothpick and used his entire height to block her escape. “Libby, slow down a second. You can talk to me. Is something wrong?”
Her heart tripped, but she managed a smile she hoped didn’t look as fake as it felt. “Of course not. It’s just stress.”
“Over K-Bar’s release?”
Sure, she’d go with that. In a roundabout way, it was the truth. “He shouldn’t have gotten out, and I feel somewhat responsible that he did.”