Page 96 of Duty and Desire

He heard ripping ice cream bar plastic and felt Jet move his way. He turned his attention to her and saw she was carrying noodles, Tostitos and boxes of granola.

When she got close, she said low, “Thank you for your service, Mo.”

She meant it.

They all meant it, but she thought he was involved with her sister so it hit closer to home, thus shemeantit.

“Not a problem,” he muttered as she passed him to get to the pantry.

He couldn’t avoid Lottie anymore, not with strength of warmth coming from her direction, so he shifted his gaze to hers.

Yeah, that was why he did it right there. That look on her face.

He’d known he was going to be a man who was going to be a soldier for a long time before he became one. That was about a lot of things that were too numerous to boil down to just that look on Lottie’s face. It included his mother and his sisters and the sense of duty and loyalty he had to them since they had no other man in their life. They were not wallflowers or doormats. Not one of them. It didn’t matter. It was the man he was from early on that dictated the man he was going to be.

But that look on Lottie’s face and her wrestling without hesitation with her nephews on her front lawn and her throwdown with a woman she identified as possible competition to claim him morphing into a throwdown to avenge him were why he got in.

And in a different world, one where she really was his, they would be how he could live with what he’d seen, what he’d done and what he’d lost in the dust, dirt and sand.

To be the kind of man who earned that look.

Who deserved it.

And who could claim the woman who wore it.

“It isn’t a big deal,” he lied.

“You’re absolutely wrong and you know it so shut up, pookie-loo,” she returned.

A good ten swats.

Bare ass.

Mo cut ties with her eyes and bent down to pick up the last bag, forgotten in the ice cream rush, not surprisingly carrying the fresh fruits and vegetables.

He put it on the counter and unpacked it.

“So…Afghanistan?”

She’d barely shut the door on her sister and nephews.

He was standing in her living room where he’d retreated, really fucking quick, after he hovered close at her back when she was saying goodbye to her family.

She was standing in the arched entryway that led off her foyer into her living room.

“Lottie—”

“And,” she cut him off, “to go back to our discussion at the grocery store, you may have lived with that woman for two years, but Iama woman, so I know the plays she was making, and they were not what you think they were.”

Mo shook his head. “We’re not doing this.”

She started to move forward. “We are so totally doing this.”

He took a step back and she stopped.

“We’re not, because we can’t,” he declared.

“We can, we are, and I’ll get us started. Backtracking in a belated effort at being an adult, you should know, anyone else, no way I’d be in a nightie making breakfast.”