CHAPTER ONE
Morgan
Donnelly walked into the small shop as his Uncle's truck sped off
behind him. Going to work with his uncle hadn't necessarily been his
plan, but it was a hell of a lot better than being at loose ends.
Having too much time to think just left him in a bad way. Surveying
his surroundings, he frowned.
Searching his
vocabulary for a word to describe the pastry shop, the only thing he
could come up with was ‘girly’. The hot pink walls and white
wrought iron tables were bad enough, but the delicate crystal
chandelier was just too much. He tried to play it cool, as if being
in such places didn't make him feel horribly out of place. Setting
his toolbox down, he resisted the urge to rub his thigh.
His leg wasn’t
hurting. Not too badly, at any rate. Though never pain free, he did
have some good days to counteract the bad. It’d become habit,
massaging those muscles throughout the course of the day, so they
didn’t seize on him. The shrapnel was gone, but the scar tissue and
nerve damage was something he’d be living with forever.
That was the easy
part. It was the loss of his military career, of being forced into an
early retirement that made him cringe. He felt old, used up and put
out to pasture. At forty two, he’d spent more of his life in the
military than out. During the past year, having surgery after
surgery, with more physical therapy than any one person should have
to endure, he’d tolerated the other kind of therapy too.
Of course, his
medical leave would be ending soon, and it would be decision time. Go
back and ride a desk, pushing papers around while other men, no more
than kids, went headlong into danger. Or…he could embrace civilian
life. Those were the choices he'd been given. It wasn't much of a
choice.
Initially, he’d
resented it. After a time, he’d come to see its purpose. Being out
in the world, things worked differently than they did in the
military, and he was adjusting to it. It wasn’t easy though.
Without fatigues and
a gun, it was like walking naked into a room full of strangers. He’d
spent the entirety of his twenties and most of his thirties on army
bases or in war zones. The fluffy pastry shop seemed foreign to him,
but that was only one of the reasons he’d avoided it. He had a few
more.
A woman emerged from
the back of the shop then, her red hair pinned up in some elaborate
style that reminded him of old movies. He took one look at her and
was instantly, painfully hard. With the physical toll of the
surgeries and the painkillers, the exhaustion of therapy and, he was
willing to admit it, a raging pity party, his libido had tanked. He’d
accepted this as just a part of it, until he came back to Falls Creek
and ran into Lexi Flynn.
One look at her and
his libido had come back to raging life. It happened every time he
saw her. He couldn’t even look at her without feeling all the blood
rush south. War zones he could handle. Bullets, bombs, screaming
superiors and an entire country wanting his head on a plate, that he
could cope with and not even raise a sweat. One curvy redhead and he
felt ready to run for the hills.
Try as he might, he
couldn’t look away from her. She was what his aunt would’ve
described as plump. He didn’t have a word to describe her other
than beautiful. Smoking hot also came to mind. Lush. Sexy. Sweeter
than any of the desserts she baked. That line of thought wasn’t
helping him to keep his embarrassingly apparent boner in check.
Moving forward, he
stood close enough to the counter to provide camouflage. She’s
just a woman. Of course, he was a man who hadn’t had sex with
another person outside of his imagination in a long ass time. Then
the fact she had breasts and a pulse, made it even harder to deal
with.
That wasn’t really
a fair assessment, he thought. She had amazing breasts—large, full,
supported by industrial strength lingerie and perfectly displayed
beneath a T-shirt that was snug in all the right places. Look at
her face, Donnelly, before you blow more than just the job.
“Oh! I’m sorry!
I didn’t hear you come in,” she said breathlessly.
She had one of those
voices. A sexy, I just rolled out of bed from doing very naughty
things type of voice. The southern drawl became just icing on the
cake.
Watching her place
the stacks of pastry boxes on the counter, Morgan watched her move as
if he'd been hypnotized. “Sorry,” he managed, his own voice
cracking like a teenager. Clearing his throat, he continued, “I'm
here to do the estimate for the kitchen reno.”
“It's good that
you're working with Jess! I worry about him.”
Morgan nodded. The
truth of the matter was, his uncle was helping him more than the
other way around. There weren't too many employers who would be as
understanding about all the limitations he faced or the fact of how
those limitations came with a certain amount of unpredictability.
Uncomfortable with the topic, he just nodded.
“You know, Morgan,
you’ve been back home for months and I think this is the first time
I’ve even gotten to speak to you! That’s an absolute shame!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The ma’am was instinct. Twenty plus years in the military had
taught him to be polite out loud, even while being a total pervert on
the inside. It made him nervous when he realized she knew who he was.
“I didn’t think
about it when I called...I didn’t realize you’d be working with
him,” she uttered all this with a slight, concerned furrow of her
perfectly arched eyebrows. “It won’t be awkward for you, will it?
I mean, yes, Ashley is my sister, but she’s hardly ever here at the
shop.”
And there was the
other reason he’d avoided Lexi Flynn. He hadn’t changed her
diapers, but it’d been damned close. Ashley Flynn had been his
girlfriend when he was a junior and she was a freshman. At the time,
the woman who now stood before him had been a cherubic four year old.
Fucking pervert.
