“But not enough. Isn’t that right?” she asked quietly.
His mouth tightened. For a second, she thought he was going to curse. She wished he would, for some reason. It would be nice to see him lose control for once. Instead, he turned suddenly and whipped open his door, got out and slammed it behind him hard. She watched his long-legged saunter across the parking lot in the makeup mirror, her anger amplifying to a low burn.
When she followed him a minute later—perfecting her slouchy boy walk—she noticed him standing in the checkout line, holding two cups of coffee and several bottles of water tucked beneath his forearm. She hesitated outside the bathrooms, inhaling for courage before she plunged into the men’s. Thankfully, there was no one inside, and it was reasonably clean.
When she reached the parking lot after leaving the bathroom, she didn’t see him in the SUV. He must still be inside. As she approached the vehicle, however, she spotted him in the distance. There was a small playground in the back of the establishment, built to give car-confined kids an opportunity to expend some youthful energy. Seth was the only one using it today. She leaned her hip against the car and watched, openmouthed. He hung off an iron horizontal ladder, knees bent to keep him suspended, doing pull-up after pull-up, his precise, rapid strength and obvious pent-up power stunning to observe.
When he straightened, feet on the ground again, Gia turned away abruptly and got in the car. She felt rattled by the vision. It took her a few seconds to realize why. In her mind a moment ago, she’d accused him of not wanting her, of possessing annoying amounts of sexual restraint.
But the truth had just been right there in front of her. Seth Hightower wasn’t impervious. Far from it.
He was burning just as much as she was.
* * *
They didn’t talk much as Seth drove for the next several hours, and dusk slowly began to settle. What had happened in that Flagstaff parking lot seemed to hover like a dense cloud inside the SUV, making the atmosphere crackle with tension. Seth showed no sign of tiring, even when full night fell. Curiosity pierced her ruffled emotional state after they paused for gas and a quick break on the outs
kirts of Albuquerque.
“Do you miss it? Living here?” she asked him, once they were on the road again.
“Yeah. The wide-open spaces. The quiet.” He lifted two long fingers off the wheel, gesturing to the midnight dome of millions of bright stars above them. “The night sky.”
She loved the sound of his deep, rough voice in the darkness.
“I recall you mentioning college once when . . .” She cleared her throat remembering too late the circumstances where he’d mentioned it. She’d been in his arms, following a particularly fulfilling round of lovemaking, their breaths and hearts slowing. Blinking away the potent flash of memory, she rallied. “Did you go to school around here?”
“Yeah. University of New Mexico. Jake and I both went there on football scholarships.”
“Is Jake big like you?”
He nodded. “Jake’s the one who played four years though. Made Defensive Player of the Year two years in a row. I quit late in my freshman year.”
“College?”
“No, football.”
“Didn’t like it?” she asked, turning slightly in her seat, her interest caught. She could perfectly imagine Seth as a football player, given his size and athletic grace. She could imagine one big problem with the scenario, though, given what she knew about him.
“I like football okay, but it’s a game.”
“It got in the way of your art, didn’t it?”
He looked over at her swiftly. She gave him a small smile.
“Yeah. That’s the reason I jumped at the scholarship,” he agreed quietly, his eyes back on the road. “I couldn’t have studied art any other way. We didn’t have the money for school. But being an art student isn’t like being in your typical liberal arts program. It’s very demanding. I started to resent all the practice hours and travel time required for the team. So I joined ROTC and got my free ride that way.”
“I was wondering how being an artist and the whole Army intelligence thing went together,” she mused. “But I suppose military intelligence could use a master of disguise.”
“The military taught me almost as much about makeup as a special effects internship I did for a couple years in college. Maybe more.”
She wanted to ask him about some of his assignments but figured perhaps they were confidential, so she refrained. The mood in the vehicle had segued from tension-filled to mellow, and she didn’t want to ruin it.
“It’s certainly a beautiful place to call home,” she said, gazing out her window onto the dome of stars.
“Yeah. But ever since my mom passed, it doesn’t feel as much like home to me.”
“She was the artist.”