Breakpoint (11 page)

“Okay.” He backed up, his hands up in the air. “I may have nuzzled. Just a bit.”

“Biting, nuzzling, they’re both inappropriate behavior.”

“Yeah. I get that.”

His expression managed to express regret, but, accustomed to watching interrogation suspects for signs of prevarication, Julianne didn’t miss the faint glint of humor in his eyes.

“But it honestly wasn’t intentional. More instinctive.” One side of his mouth lifted in a half smile as he dipped his hands into his front pockets. “It’s not my fault your hair smells so good. Like my granny O’Halloran’s peach pie.”

Refusing to be charmed, Julianne narrowed her gaze—the one that had been known to cause grown men to cower in their combat boots. The same one that, she knew from naval scuttlebutt, had earned her the title of JAG Ice Bitch.

“I’m still not entirely buying the idea of you calling your dear old granny ‘darlin’,’ but I sincerely doubt you ever wanted to nuzzle her ear.”

The hard-as-nails look that had always worked so well in the courtroom deflected right off him. “You’d be right.” If he was at all intimidated, he didn’t show it. “But ever since I landed in the family and tasted my first piece of that pie, the aroma of peaches has always made me hungry.”

The drawl deepened on that word, turning it into sexual innuendo.

Julianne cleared her throat. “This isn’t going to work,” she said.

“What?”

“You.” She pointed at him, then touched her finger to the front of her shirt. “Me. Us working together.”

“Like I said, I think we might make a pretty good team.”

“Not if you keep coming on to me, bringing sex into the situation.”

She lowered her voice, attempting to keep the conversation private, even as she could feel the Marines’ attention having turned from the waitress to them.

“If I ever come on to you, Juls, you’ll know it,” he assured her. For just an instant, the easygoing Texan pinball player disappeared again, fleetingly replaced by the rough, tough, risk-taking first-in Spec Ops CCT. “And I don’t remember mentioning a word about sex.”

He tilted his head and slid an appreciative glance over her. “But it’s only natural for a guy to notice when a woman smells real good.” She’d never seen anyone, male or female, who could switch gears so fast. “Doesn’t mean he intends to do anything about it.” He paused. “Unless, of course, the woman in question asks.”

“I wouldn’t hold your breath.” She suspected he was more accustomed to women begging. But not her. Never her. “And don’t call me Juls.”

“Not only have I gone through the Pipeline, which is two months of a program like the SEALs Hell Week. I’ve also had frogman training,” he said mildly. “So I could work with SEALs.

“Which makes me able to hold my breath a helluva lot longer than most men. And what would you like me to call you? You’re not an LT anymore. And you keep objecting to ‘darlin’.’

“I guess we could go with ‘ma’am,’ ” he mused. “But then, to keep things on an even playing field, you’d have to call me ‘sir,’ which, given that I wasn’t an officer, would sound really weird.

“I suppose ‘Ms. Decatur’ would work. But, damn, then I’d be Mr. O’Halloran, which would be even weirder, since that’s my dad’s name.”

The annoying thing was that he had a damn point. Again, this was another thing the military made so much easier. If they were still in their respective services, she’d be a lieutenant and he’d be a sergeant. Which, of course, meant that any nuzzling would have been immediate grounds for a court-martial.

“I think you should just get over your paternal issues and we should stick to the formal ‘agent’ with our last names when we’re conducting our investigation on board the boat,” she decided. “When we’re alone, we can stick to first names.”

“That works for me.”

Another pause. Obviously there was something else.

“But?” she asked, biting back her impatience.

“No offense, but while Julianne’s a real pretty name, it’s a bit of a mouthful.”

“Only the way you say it.” His drawl did add extra syllables.

“There you go.” The humor was back in those chocolate-smooth eyes. “Here’s the deal. As you’ve obviously already figured out, I’m not real big on formalities. So, how about you just try my suggestion on for size?

“If it doesn’t work, I’ll try to go with the fancier version. But I gotta tell you, darlin’, I’m still going to be thinking of you as Juls anyway. Because, as much as you try to hide it, you’re as pretty and sparkling as a pirate’s ransom.”

“Oh, please.” She rolled her eyes. “Is there a book where you get those lines?”

“That wasn’t a line. Just telling it like I see it. Which makes it the truth. And yeah, maybe I’m not as smooth as some guys”—he shrugged those impressive shoulders again—“but I guess maybe that’s because I’m pretty much a nerd. Everyone knows we’re lacking in social skills.”

Which was, she suspected, in his case a false stereotype. At least partly. Julianne had always preferred putting people in neat little niches. It had made both her job and her life simpler. Less messy.

Also, growing up as the daughter of an admiral who’d occasionally come into the room she shared with Merry and test their bed-making skills by bouncing a quarter on the mattress, she’d always preferred things tidy.

The man she’d been teamed with was a Special Ops warrior.

Slow-talking, sexy Texan.

Dangerous, potentially volatile male from the oil patch.

Brilliant, pinball-machine-building computer geek.

She couldn’t get her mind wrapped around the varied and dissimilar aspects of Dallas O’Halloran. Dammit, the man refused to fit into any of her boxes.

And even if she could somehow manage to stuff him into one, she knew he’d never stay there.

She caught a glimpse of the sexy waitress and half owner of the club, handing over two bags to the MA who’d stayed at the bar, sipping a Coke.

“Come on, Einstein,” she said, grateful for the distraction. “Dinner awaits.”

The Marine Corps base occupied the windward Mokapu Peninsula. Boasting its own beach, it also allowed a fabulous view of the bay.

“I’ll bet the sunrises are fantastic,” Dallas said as they approached the lodge where the housing officer at the naval station had arranged for them to stay.

“I guess we’ll find out tomorrow,” she murmured. “I spent two years on Pearl growing up, and we came over here to the beach from time to time, but never that early.”

“So,” he said, “were you one of those military brats who automatically fit in wherever you went? Or would you rather have missed the opportunity to attend six schools in twelve years?”

“It was eight.”

Down below the cliff, sailboats were skimming over unbelievably blue water. Dallas, who’d grown up in the flat brown oil patch of Texas, figured being stationed in Hawaii wouldn’t exactly be hardship duty.

“My sister, Merry—”

“The pregnant designer,” he remembered. As if he’d ever be able to forget that knockout hot dress.

“The designer,” she agreed. “Merry was one of those who fit right in immediately, wherever we landed. When we lived in Florida, she lived in bright colors, tube tops, and shorts. Hawaii, of course, was all floral. In Washington State she went through an earth-mother stage and took to wearing flowing skirts, tunic tops, and earrings depicting whales, or totem poles, and other such North-western stuff.”

“Sounds like she had some chameleon skills.” And couldn’t Dallas identify with that?

“That’s absolutely it.” She shot him a quick, obviously surprised look.

Damn. With the mouthwatering smell of the French fries and coconut shrimp wafting into the car, and the even more appealing female sitting in the backseat beside him, Dallas had forgotten that inside the sweet-smelling package dwelled a computerlike brain that never forgot a thing. And those tropical lagoon eyes currently hidden by oversize dark framed glasses didn’t miss much, either.

“I moved around a bit,” he hedged.

“Was your father in the service?”

“No.” He felt his jaw tighten. Knew he was giving away what Zach Tremayne, who was the poker champ of the group, would describe as a tell. “He’s a geophysicist.”

“In west Texas.”

“Yeah. Midland, actually.”

“I guess that’s where you got your alleged nerdiness from.”

“I guess so.”

Having no idea who his birth father was, Dallas found it easier to buy into the nurture part of the nature-versus-nurture argument and decide his affinity for math and science came from his adopted parent. After all, the guy whose DNA he carried could be a serial killer. Or, from what he’d heard about his mother, more likely some biker-gang meth dealer.

“But there’s nothing nerdy about my dad. He put himself through Texas A&M on a football scholarship playing tight end.”

“That’s impressive. But you didn’t play at Cal Poly.”

Wow. She really had dug deep into his records during that court martial investigation. “Nah. I played a bit of JV ball in high school, but although I can hold my own on a basketball court, I never enjoyed getting tackled by guys who actually seemed to enjoy hitting people.”

“Okay, I’m going to have to agree with you on that,” she said. “My brothers played football, and I used to spend Friday nights in the bleachers, chewing my fingernails to the quick.”

“So you weren’t a cheerleader?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you could be anything you wanted to be, Juls.”

“Well, I didn’t want to be a cheerleader. Once again, that was Merry’s gig. What about your mother?”

Even as he noted her tendency for straight-track thinking that probably had worked real well in JAG, but would’ve been a disadvantage in an actual warfare situation, he smiled, as he always did whenever he thought of Angie O’Halloran.

“She’s an old-fashioned family doctor. Not that there’s anything old-fashioned about her. She’s actually a fire-cracker and a rabble-rouser, and, I mean this with all due respect, a babe.”

Damned if she didn’t smile at that. The first genuine smile he’d seen from her. As his heart kicked into overdrive, Dallas assured himself that a guy as fit as he was, and only a couple years past thirty, couldn’t possibly be having a heart attack.

“That’s nice.”

“That she’s a babe?”

“That you’d call her that.”

“She put herself through medical school modeling for Neiman Marcus,” he said. “Runway shows, mainly. Some catalog work. She’s probably the best-turned-out doctor Midland, Texas, has ever seen.” He glanced over at her. “She’d like you.”

“Actually, I believe you have me confused with my sister. The gorgeous former-beauty-queen fashion diva.”

“Mom likes smart women. You’re smart as a whip. Ergo, she’d like you.”

“Even if I did try to put your best friends behind bars?”

“You wouldn’t have done that.”

He’d been thinking about it a lot. And he realized what had really been bothering him about the entire interrogation. Even as she pressured him, he’d felt something else going on beneath the surface. Something that, because he’d been so intent on answering her questions in ways that were truthful, but still wouldn’t help put his battle buddies behind bars, he hadn’t been able to put a finger on until now.

“And you know this why?” Although her tone was the same she probably pulled out for cross-examinations, she did not, Dallas noticed, deny his statement.

“Your job—your mission—was to prosecuteTremayne, McKade, Chaffee, and Douchett. Which you did. But only because you knew it was a lost cause. Because you also knew if they DD’d out of the military, they probably would’ve ended up behind bars.

“And even when they got out, their lives would’ve been pretty much over, because dishonorable discharges follow you like a bad stink. Having grown up in the military, and having such a strong sense of justice, you never would have done anything that hurtful to men who’d spent years putting their lives on the line for their country.”

Which was why, Dallas had always thought, the Air Force brass had opted against putting him through the JAG wringer the Navy had subjected the SEALs to.

“When you’re in the military you follow orders,” she pointed out. “That’s as true for lawyers as it is for CCTs. And Osama bin Laden would be throwing snowballs in hell before I’d ever tank a case.”

“You think I don’t know that? But here’s the deal, Juls.... You wouldn’t have had to. You had a damn good rep. In fact, your service jacket might as well have had smiley faces and little gold stars pasted all over it—”

“You’ve seen my record?”

“Of course. You’ve undoubtedly at least skimmed through
The Art of War
at Annapolis.”

“It’s required reading. ”

“Absolutely. So, having studied the quintessential text on the topic, you may recall the quote about if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

She stared at him. “What did you do? Memorize the entire book?”

“It’s not that big a book. Besides, like I told you—”

“Yeah, yeah.” She blew out a frustrated breath. “Once a fact gets in, it never gets out.”

“That’s pretty much it,” he said agreeably. “But the point I was making was that if you’d thought there was any chance your actions would result in a dishonorable ending, which it would have if those SEALs had been imprisoned, you would’ve refused to take the case.

“At which point your commander would’ve just tossed it off to some junior officer hack who wouldn’t have known how to properly prosecute it. Or to someone less scrupulous, someone who would be willing to throw the case to guarantee the same outcome.