Night Watch. Suzanne Brockmann

      “What did he say?” she persisted.

      Wes paraphrased and summarized. He’d heard quite a bit this afternoon that he didn’t want to repeat. It really was none of his business. “Melero told Andy that he’d, uh, you know, slept with her. Only, he put it a lot less delicately.”

      “I’m sure.” Britt let out an exasperated laugh. “And Andy didn’t just walk away? What a lunkhead. That girl is devoted to him—she thinks he makes the sun rise. She’s a nice kid. A little low in the self-esteem department in my opinion, but, okay, she’s still young. Maybe it’ll come. I just hope…” She shook her head. “I’m not sure she’s right for Andy and I’d really hate for her to get pregnant. I preach safe sex pretty much nonstop. He just rolls his eyes.”

      “Yeah, well, you can cross that off your list of things to worry about, at least for right now.” Wes finished his beer before remembering he’d planned to make it last all through dinner. Crap. “Apparently Dani is all about taking it really slow.” Ah, hell, why not just tell Brittany all of it? It wasn’t his business, but clearly this wasn’t something Andy would bring up in a conversation with his mother. “She’s a public virgin.”

      Brittany put down her fork. “Excuse me?”

      “She’s a virgin, and apparently she’s not afraid to tell people—you know, make it public knowledge that she has no intention of messing around before she’s good and ready.”

      “Well, you go girl! Good for her. I had no idea she had that much backbone.”

      “But now Melero’s telling everyone he popped her cherry and—” Holy God, what was he saying? And to Lt. Jones’s sister-in-law, no less. “Look, he was beyond crude, okay? When I heard what he’d said, I wanted to throw him up against the wall myself.”

      “You did.”

      She was looking at him so pointedly, so like the way Mrs. Bartlett, his third grade teacher had looked at him, he had to laugh. Man, he hadn’t thought about Mrs. B. in years, God bless her. “Yeah,” he said, “no. I didn’t do that until he said the other thing.”

      “Which was…?”

      She wasn’t going to like this. “I went into caveman mode,” he apologized first. “I’m sorry I did that in front of your kid. That was the wrong message to send, but when that little cow turd started laughing and saying you were hot, and that you were next on his list…”

      Brittany looked surprised for about half a second. Then she laughed. Her eyes actually sparkled. “Sweetie, that was just a schoolyard taunt. And your mother, too…You know? This boy is a total jerk and a bully, but he’s not any kind of a real threat. And even if he was, I could take care of myself. Believe me.”

      “Yeah, I picked that up from you right away,” Wes said. “And I told him that.”

      “After which you told him you were a Navy SEAL and if he so much as breathed in my direction, you were going to…what?”

      Wes scratched his chin. “I may have mentioned something about my diving knife and his never having offspring.”

      She laughed again. Thank God. “That must’ve been when he looked like he was going to faint.”

      “How is everything?” The waiter was back, but the place was crowded and he didn’t wait for an answer. He deftly removed the empty beer bottles from the table. “Another?”

      “Yes, please.” Brittany smiled up at the guy, and Wes said another short prayer of thanks that his knee-jerk treatment of Melero hadn’t made her decide not to like him.

      “Sir?”

      “Yeah. Wait! Make it a cola.”

      “Very good, sir.” The waiter vanished.

      “I’m trying to cut back,” Wes felt the need to explain as the warmth of her gaze was focused back on him. “One beer a night. Two becomes six a little too easily these days, you know?”

      “I appreciate it,” Brittany said. “Especially since you’re driving.”

      “Yeah, well, I’m a sloppy drunk. It’s not pretty. It’s definitely not a good way to make new friends.” Why the hell was he telling her this? He didn’t even talk with Bobby about his fears of becoming an alcoholic, and Bobby Taylor was his friend and swim buddy from way back. “This is a very interesting first date. We talk about your son’s sex life and my potential drinking problem. Shouldn’t we be talking about the weather? Or movies we just saw?”

      “It finally stopped raining, thank goodness,” Brittany said. “I just rented Ocean’s Eleven and loved it. When did you quit smoking?”

      Damn. “Two days ago. What’d I do? Pat my pocket, searching for my nonexistent pack?”

      “Yup.”

      Crap. He resisted another urge to reach into his pocket. Not that he could’ve had a cigarette until later. This restaurant was smoke free.

      “It must be driving you crazy,” Brittany observed. “To stop smoking and cut back on your drinking all at the same time.”

      “Yeah, well, I’ve tried to quit before, I don’t have a whole hell of a lot of faith in myself. I mean, the longest I’ve gone without a cigarette is six weeks.”

      “Have you tried the patch?”

      “No,” he admitted. “I know I probably should. I don’t know, maybe the idea would appeal to me more if I could get Julia Roberts to glue it to my ass.”

      Brittany laughed. “Maybe not smoking would appeal to you more if you had a girlfriend who told you that kissing you after you smoked was similar to licking an ashtray.”

      He forced a smile. “Yeah, well…” The woman he wanted to be his girlfriend was married. He didn’t want to think about the one time he did kiss her. As easy as it was to talk to Brittany, he couldn’t talk about Lana. This was a date, after all, not therapy.

      Not that he’d managed to talk to the team shrink about Lana, either, though. The only talking he’d done was when he was completely skunked.

      The waiter brought their drinks to the table and vanished again. Wes took a sip of his soda and tried to like it, tried not to wish it was another bottle of beer.

      “My ex used to smoke,” Brittany told him. “I tried everything to get him to quit, and finally drew a line. I told him that if he was going to smoke, he couldn’t kiss me. And he said okay, if that’s what I wanted.”

      Wes knew what was coming from the rueful edge to her smile.

      “So he stopped kissing me,” she told him.

      The adjectives he used to describe the bastard were blistering—far worse than anything that had come out of Dustin Melero’s mouth that afternoon, but she just laughed as he winced and apologized.

      “It’s all right,” she said. “But cut him some slack. He wasn’t entirely to blame. You know, he smoked when I married him, so it was pretty unfair of me to make those kinds of demands. Bottom line, sweetie, is that you’ve got to quit smoking because you want to quit smoking.”

      “Or at the very least, I’ve got to want Julia Roberts to glue the patch onto my—”

      “Yes,” she said, laughing. “That might do it.”

      “He was a fool,” Wes told her, reaching across the table to take her hand. “Your ex.”

      The smile she gave him was stunning as she squeezed his fingers. “Thank you. I’ve always thought so, too.”

      

      Brittany took a sip of her coffee. “Melody told me you had leave for a week—”

      “Two,” Wes interjected.

      “And