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Page 5

  I can't see her eyes. They're obscured by the hair hanging in her face as she looks away from me.   The fact that I want to see her eyes, that I want to know what she's thinking, should be setting off warning bells in my brain.

  Addy whirls toward me, tucking her long blonde hair behind her ear, and giving me a look. I recognize that look. That's the one she used to give me pretty much all the time when we were teenagers. She wants to throttle me.

  The problem is that when she licks her lip the way she does, her tongue running over the bottom of it slowly, I swear she's doing it on purpose just to wind me up. I have to consciously think about not getting hard when I look at her.

  I don't know what the hell I was thinking, agreeing to the Colonel's plan.   This was a big fucking mistake.   I ran headlong into the Marines when I was eighteen just to get the hell away from Addy. Five years away from her should have cured me.

  All it takes is one look, one lick of her lips, and I'm right back where I was five years ago.   Addy has no idea how I felt about her back then, though, I made sure of that – and I'm not about to let her know now.   And I sure as hell don't want any pictures of us that imply we're something we're not.   Something we can't be.

  Addy pushes me away from her. "Something stupid like what?" she asks, her eyes flashing. "You pick me up and carry me outside like a damn caveman.   What do you expect people are going to think?"

  She whirls around, wobbling in her heels.   I catch her elbow so she doesn't fall, but she jerks her arm away from my grasp.

  "You want to fall on your ass?" I ask, squeezing her arm tighter. "Stop being so fucking obstinate.   Shit, I can see some things really haven't changed at all, have they?"

  "Obstinate.   That's an awful big word," she says, not looking at me. But she doesn't yank her arm away this time, not until we get outside. Then she wrenches it from my grasp, like she's ashamed of being seen with me publicly. The gesture pisses me off more than I care to admit to myself.    Of course, Addy has always gotten under my skin, from the first moment I laid eyes on her, seven years ago. She'd already hit it big then, so she was the golden child, and I was the black sheep.

  "Yeah, well, some of us Marines can use big words," I say. "A few of us can even read. "

  Addy makes an unintelligible sound under her breath, and the fact that she has no response gives me a perverse feeling of satisfaction.

  "What?" I ask. "Nothing to say, sweet cheeks?"

  "Stop calling me that," she huffs. "I didn't ask for them to make you my fucking handler or bodyguard or whatever the hell they're doing. "

  "No shit," I note. "I didn't think you were that much of a masochist. "

  But Addy doesn't respond. "Is your car here?" she asks.   "I had a driver. "

  "At your service. "  My tone is sarcastic, and I hear her huff behind me as she follows me to the car.   I make a point of opening the door for her with a dramatic flourish.

  Addy doesn't say anything, but as we drive, she moves her finger absently on the arm rest.    Tap-tap-tap, pause, tap-tap-tap, pause. She used to count when she was anxious, which was a lot more than she ever let on, I think. I doubt she knows I ever noticed, but I did.   She had these little habits – counting, arranging her stuff in a certain order – people wrote it off as her being a diva, but I knew it was more than that.   I noticed a lot of things about her back then.

  Goddamn it. Why am I suddenly feeling protective of her?

  "You need food," I say. As soon as the words come out of my mouth, I realize how caveman-like they do sound. You. Eat. Food. Now.

  Addy turns to look at me, and I can see her raise her eyebrow over the frame of her giant sunglasses. "Is this what our parents hired you for? To tell me what to do?"

  Shit, it's been five years of giving orders in the military. She should be glad I didn't use my yelling voice. "Maybe if you took care of yourself a little better, they wouldn't have to hire someone to tell you to eat. "

  "The Marines sure didn't make you less of a jackass, did they?"

  Her question makes me laugh, and I look out of the corner of my eye, only to see her try to hide her smile. "That would be a negative," I say, as I pull the car into the parking lot of a diner. "Besides, if they had, you'd only be disappointed. "

  Addy snorts, but she follows me out of the car, pushing open the passenger side door before I can pull open the handle.

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  "You could wait two seconds and I'd open it for you," I tell her.

  She huffs as she pushes the door closed behind her.   "Because I can't open my own car door?"

  "You haven't learned any manners in the last five years, have you?" I ask.   She has her back against the car, and I stand in front of her, blocking her from moving. I'm so close to her we're almost touching.   She tilts her head up to look at me, her sunglasses obscuring her eyes, and the fact that they're on her face irritates me to no end.   I reach out and slide them onto the top of her head so I can look at her.

  Addy huffs like she's annoyed with me, except her pupils are large and her eyes are wide as she gazes at me, her lips parting as she inhales sharply.   The sound makes me hard.   My cock presses up against the zipper of my jeans, and I think about sliding my hands underneath that curvy ass of hers and placing her smack dab on the hood of the car and fucking her right here and now.

  What the hell is wrong with me? Twenty damn minutes with her and I can't think straight.   This is definitely not the seventeen-year-old girl I left behind in Nashville.   This Addison is all grown up.   Something's got to be seriously messed up with the fact that screwing her is all I can think about.

  "You're one to talk about manners," she says, her voice trembling. "Ordering me around like I'm some kind of employee. "

  "I haven't even begun to order you around, sweet cheeks," I say. I clear my throat to try to hide the arousal that's evident in my tone, but the innuendo in the words is as plain as day. The fact is, I didn't want this fucking job, but after three months of trying to work in an office after getting out of the military, I'm shit out of luck. Apparently I was not adjusting well to a corporate environment. Now that I've see Addy in person, I'm not sure this was the best plan ever. A perpetual case of blue balls is not my idea of a good time.

  Addy's cheeks flush pink, but I can't tell if it's because she's embarrassed or turned on. Either way, I feel smug when I see her reaction.   "I'd love to see you try," she says.

  "Is that a request?"  I ask.   The way her lips part slightly in response makes me think it sure as hell is, and I have to tell myself to step away from her before I really do something I regret.   I can't even begin to imagine how the Colonel's head would fucking explode if I so much as laid a finger on Addy.

  Of course, that might be even more incentive to behave inappropriately with the stepsister I haven't seen in five years, I think as I follow her inside the diner, watching her hips sway as she sashays on those heels.

  SEVEN YEARS AGO

  "He's troubled," my mother says, as she applies another coat of mascara to her lashes.   She's half-bent over the vanity in her room, wearing a dress that's cut down her lower back, barely covering her rear, garish and more appropriate for a twenty-year-old than for her.   Sometimes I think that my launch to stardom just gave her a reason to relive her youth.   That's been doubly true since she met the Colonel.

  At least the Colonel is somewhat responsible, better than the sperm donors that fathered my sister and I.   Fathered is hardly the right word.   They haven't been involved with us since they did the deed and left my mother.   The Colonel might be okay.   He's stiff as a board and doesn't smile much.   And he makes everyone call him the Colonel, even though he's not in the Army anymore.   So those are reasons to dislike him.

  On the other hand, he does occupy my mother's time, gives her a distraction from micr