Jake Read Online Free Page A

McAllister’s life and death were meaningful. That’s what we all want. You let him rest with that.”
                  And Jake believed that. If it came down to losing his own life, that’s exactly the way he wanted it. It’s the way they all wanted it—for their lives to add up to greater than one.
                  Still, Jake had lost a man. A good man. A man with a wife and two children. It’d been three months since the fire shower, the missiles exploding and shaking the earth, hard and close and knocking them to their knees, but the memory had only begun to fade around the edges. They had reached their target—an Israeli operative and two U.S. contractors—and brought them to safety. The human cost—two shot, but none left behind enemy lines.
                  “The first loss is always the toughest. But I’ll tell you this, son, the fact that you’ve been doing this for eight years now, with two tours through the Middle East and forays into Benghazi and Uganda—scuttling into enemy territory, rife with booby traps and land mines—and you just now suffered a casualty tells me a lot about the kind of leader you are. Born into it, you were.”
                  And that might be true.
                  “I’m capable of higher order thinking,” Ivy said now. When Jake refocused on the present he noticed that her face had softened, and not with the warmth of attraction. She had changed, in response to Jake’s shift in mood. He felt the tension in his shoulders and knew he’d worn his feelings. “And I have a good ear.”
                  You’d think his shift into the past would wipe out his state of semi-arousal. Not so. But in addition to responding to her on a physical level, he felt pulled to her softness in spirit.
                  “I’ve made my confessions,” Jake said. He tried to make his words easy but they sounded anything but.
                  Ivy shrugged. “I have, too,” she returned, “but talk is good for the soul.”
                  Jake had done his time with the resident shrink. It was a requirement of every field officer who lost a man in battle. And the truth was, it had been good for him. Still, Ivy was getting too close, too fast. Jake didn’t let anyone even tiptoe into that area and here she was driving a bus through it.
                  “If you have a soul,” Jake returned.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Three
     
                  Ivy pulled on the shoulder harness of her seat belt and eased it back into place. She was turned so that her back was against the door and she could watch Jake drive. He had a strong profile and when he smiled, which didn’t happen often, the stiff cast of his face relaxed. She noticed that his eyelashes were gold, that he had a small scar shaped like a starburst over his eyebrow, and that beneath his solid build he had a soft heart.
                  “So why, exactly, were you ordered to Las Vegas?” Ivy returned to their roadside conversation because she found it fascinating—that someone would resent a little time off. Her life was so hectic now, and had been for so long, that travel, exotic places and long hours of nothing to do, had become her favorite daydream.
                  “R and R,” he returned.
                  “Because. . .?”
                  “I haven’t been on vacation in two-plus years,” he revealed.
                  Ivy nodded. “Me, either.” There was a wistfulness in her voice. She was happy with her life. She loved where she lived, the job she went to everyday. She loved every moment she could spend outdoors with the sun and the sea on her face. She had it good. But she’d also taken on a lot of responsibility after the crash. For the first year, Holly hadn’t been able