“I eat meat on occasion.” The bartender, who was wearing a shirt covered with surfers who were also wearing aloha shirts, poured a brown liqueur into another row of shot glasses.
“After all, it’s important to keep my strength up for court-martialing innocent sailors.”
“Don’t look now, Juls,” Dallas said. “But I think you just made a joke.”
“I also do that on occasion. And don’t call me Juls,” she murmured, unwillingly fascinated as the bartender began balancing a shot glass on the rim of each of the glasses of Red Bull. “What’s he doing?”
“Making Jäger Bombs. It’s kinda cool.”
She wasn’t the only one watching.Although she didn’t take her eyes off the row of glasses, she could sense that every patron in the place was watching as intently as she was. The difference was, they seemed to know what was about to happen.
“This isn’t going to involve flames and explosions, is it?”
“Nah. Until maybe later, when the guys drinking them are drunk on their asses, but too high on the Red Bull to realize it.”
The bartender lifted his right hand. As the Marines held their collective breaths, Julianne decided all that was missing was a drumroll.
He tapped the first shot glass. Which, as it fell into the Red Bull, knocked the subsequent glass, which in turn knocked the third, and so on down the line. When the final shot glass fell into the final glass of Red Bull, the place erupted in deafening shouts of “Oo-rah!”
“That was very impressive,” Julianne, who’d always believed in giving credit where credit was due, told the bartender, who was taking bows.
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” he said.
“And here I’d always been impressed watching someone build a pint of Guinness.”
“There’s a real art to that,” the guy, whose upper arm was taken up by a tattoo of the Marine Devil Dog bulldog wearing a cammie cap and spiked collar, allowed. The initials
USMC
had been inked above it,
Semper Fi
below. “You gotta get the tracery of the foam on the glass just right. This is really more of a circus trick. Like walking on stilts while juggling.”
“Well, I imagine it still took a lot of practice.”
“He stank up the place dropping glasses for two weeks,” claimed a statuesque blonde wearing a flowered shirt tied beneath remarkable breasts and low-slung white shorts. She glanced up at the order the bartender had just stuck on the clothespin for the cook. “Ha!” she said. “Didn’t I tell you adding a veggie burger would be good for business?”
“Other than the ones you’ve been eating for free every day, this is the first one we’ve sold in the six months they’ve been on the menu,” the bartender pointed out.
“Gotta start somewhere.” She began filling her empty tray with the Jäger Bombs. Then she patted his cheeks with fingernails painted in patriotic red, white, and blue stripes. “He’s such a pessimist,” she confided in Julianne. “I’ve no idea why on earth I’ve stayed married to the man for going on five years.”
“Maybe because I make a great Screaming Orgasm?” White teeth flashed beneath a thick mustache.
“Well, there is that.”
She laughed, a rich, deep, sexually satisfied laugh that assured Julianne they were not talking about alcoholic drinks, then sashayed off with her tray. Every eye in the place was now glued to the sway of her hips in those tight white shorts.
Including those of her husband, who was watching her with undisguised pride and not an iota of jealousy. Julianne decided that was partly because he possessed enough masculine confidence to know that he was fully capable of ensuring his wife would have no reason to stray.
The other reason, she allowed, was that she figured every Marine in the place knew he’d get his head ripped off by those huge hands if he did anything more than look.
“Oh, wow,” Dallas said. “Look at that.”
She was about to tell him that
everyone
was looking at that, when she realized he wasn’t talking about the waitress/coowner, but a pinball machine against the far wall.
“Does that work?” he asked the bartender.
“Sure. I wouldn’t keep it around just for decoration.”
“Damn. I haven’t played one of those since I was stationed in Germany and a Hofbräu Kaltenhausen beer heiress who had more money than God bought one for the USO club after a sergeant climbed up on her roof and retrieved her beloved dachshund, Fritzie.”
“How did the dachshund get up on the roof in the first place?” Julianne had to ask.
“No one knew. Though there were suspicions that her brat of a stepson put it up there just to torment her.” Dallas shrugged his wide shoulders. “Whatever. She asked the sergeant to name his reward.”
“I would’ve chosen a Mercedes convertible,” the wife, whose name tag above that amazing cleavage read
Rea
, said.
“Or a Porsche,” her husband said.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Dallas asked. “But fortunately for all of us, the sergeant was not only a man of fairly simple tastes, who believed in buying American, he was also generous enough to share. So, he asked for a pinball machine.”
Dallas was looking at the machine with the same lust some men might show toward a
Playboy
centerfold. Then he turned toward Julianne.
“Want to play a game?”
“I’ve never played pinball in my life.”
“Well, then, darlin’, this will be a new experience.”
“I told you not to call me darlin’.”
“I know.” He flashed his bad-boy grin at the bartender, who grinned back. “But I just can’t seem to help myself.”
“Try,” she suggested.
“The shrimp’s gonna take a while,” the bartender said. “Might as well give her a whirl.”
Dallas didn’t need a second invitation. Without so much as a by-your-leave, he took Julianne’s hand in his and pulled her off the stool and across the room.
“A Stern is the Cadillac of pinball machines,” he told her as he began feeding some coins into the metal slot.
“There’s a difference?”
“Absolutely. This baby has half a mile of wire, three thousand, five hundred components, and takes thirty-two hours to build. Which is, by the way, longer than it takes to build a Ford Taurus.”
She looked up at him. “That’s one of those trivia things filling up your mind, isn’t it?”
“Partly.” Lights began flashing on the panel that displayed Spidey with all his movie enemies. “Also, I built a pinball machine for my final AP physics project my senior year of high school.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I think I told you that first day we met during the inquiry that I don’t lie,” he said mildly. Then he held up a finger. “Except for when I’m going undercover into enemy territory. Then I can lie like a rug if that’s what I need to do to save my ass—or some other soldier’s life. . . .
“It’s really pretty basic,” he explained as he worked the flipper and sent the first metal ball into the center of the table. “A pinball is a solid sphere of mass, cocked back on that spring, and fired onto the machine’s surface. The stored elastic energy in the spring is converted into the gravitational potential energy of the ball. Which is when, of course, you have to include the kinetic energy of rotation into the equation.”
He could have been talking Greek. Or Farsi.
Julianne knew that if she began rattling off legal jargon, Dallas O’Halloran would find himself over his head. Still, even though she knew that Air Force CCTs underwent a rigorous education and training process, she was still impressed.
“You’re very good,” she said as more lights flashed and bells rang.
“I’ve played it a lot,” he said simply.
That was another thing she’d noticed about him. Many military men, especially a lot of Spec Ops guys, were big on impressing the opposite sex with their manly egos. Maybe because of his innate charm, he’d never had to worry about that, but it was admittedly refreshing not to have to deal with testosterone-heavy male swagger.
“Why don’t you take over?” he suggested.
“Now you’ve got to be kidding.”
The ball was bouncing around the brightly painted table so fast, Julianne was having a difficult time keeping up with it.
“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do.”
Now that she, a classics major turned lawyer, had discovered it had to do with higher-level science and math—which, while she knew women could do them just as well as men, she’d never enjoyed the subjects—the idea was even more daunting.
“It’s not that hard.”
He deftly changed their positions so she was standing in front of him. His hands covering hers, he lifted them to the flipper mechanism.
“The concept of the game is to battle the villains.”
“Well, duh,” she said as he moved their joined hands—hers pale, his several shades darker—sending the ball shooting toward the Green Goblin hovering over what appeared to be pumpkin bombs. “Even I could figure out that part.”
“There are various techniques. First, we use the Web-slinger to launch the ball back into play. Then we can influence the movement by bumping the machine. Which is known as nudging it.”
Speaking of nudging. He was pressed against her, his chest against her back, his legs against hers; if they’d been horizontal, they’d be spooning.
“One thing you have to watch out for is the mechanisms built in to guard against excessive manipulation. When a sensor is activated, the game registers a tilt and locks out, disabling the solenoids for the flippers.
“It also locks down all the other playfield systems, so the only thing that happens is the ball rolls down the playfield into the drain. Which will cost you the loss of any bonus points you earned during that ball.”
A ball that, thanks to another quick move on his part, shot up the side ramp, where it took out Venom.
As she felt his body stir against her butt, Julianne felt in danger of tilting herself.
“Older games used to end the ball on a tilt. Modern games—oops, just like that,” he said, as the warning flashed on the screen, “give you warnings before sacrificing the ball in play. . . . You catch on fast.”
“You’re the one doing all the work.”
“Ah, but I can feel your instincts kicking in.”
She certainly hoped not. Since most of the instincts in question had them both getting naked.
Not that she’d ever believed in following her instincts. Except legalistic ones in court.
“Okay, now you’re ready to learn about trapping.”
“I think I already have the idea,” she said—given that her body was effectively trapped between his hard male one and the vibrating, flashing, ringing machine.
His chuckle, coming from deep in his chest, only made things worse. She could also feel the beginning of an erection, proving that he wasn’t the only one finding this game more personal than planned.
Or, more likely, he
had
planned it.
After all, it only stood to reason that a Spec Ops guy whose job was to be first in would also be really, really sneaky.
“If you can hold the ball in place with the flipper,” he said, leaning over her, his breath warm against the nape of her neck, “you’ll have more control where to place the ball when you shoot it forward.”
When he moved forward, echoing his words, Julianne was torn between just calling this stupid game off, or saying the hell with restraint, and dragging him down onto that sawdust-covered floor.
“The trick is all in the technique.”
His ripped chest was pressed against her back, his stony penis fit too perfectly against her curved flesh, and his rigid thighs were creating so much heat against the back of hers as he moved them together, nudging the table again, that Julianne wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the friction caused enough sparks to set this place on fire.
And wouldn’t that be a dandy way to be remembered in the annals of naval history . . . the first JAG officer to self-immolate.
And worse yet, not on some distant battlefield, but in a jarhead enlisted bar, playing a stupid pinball game.
“Okay.” His mouth was against her hair; his deep voice vibrated in her ear. “What you do is, just as the ball falls toward the flipper, you catch it in the corner and trap it between the base of the flipper and the wall.”
He did as demonstrated.
His breath smelled of coffee and the lemon drops she’d remembered him chewing all during the three-day interrogation. Although she could have called him for a lack of respect toward a senior officer for the candy, she’d let it slide.
Because, although she hadn’t wanted to admit it at the time, even to herself, she’d honestly been uncomfortable with the entire situation. Even knowing she’d been doing her job, as they’d gone over that long day of the failed mission, minute by minute, she hadn’t been able to keep thinking, what if that pilot had been one of her brothers, one of whom had joined the Marines, the other of whom was a naval aviator?
She wouldn’t have hesitated for a heartbeat to break every law on the books to save their lives.
Dallas O’Halloran and the other men might not have been blood brothers, but they’d been brothers in arms, and having grown up in the military, she realized that could often be a stronger bond than blood ties.
“Okay,” he said, bringing her mind back to the game. “Now release the flipper just a little, which will allow the ball to slowly roll down the wall, and as soon as it falls back onto the flipper, you’re back in play.”
She’d just managed to do exactly that, sending the metal ball toward the yellow targets to battle the Sand-man, when his teeth closed down on her earlobe, causing her to jump, which in turn caused her to miss the target.
“Did you just bite my ear?”
The ball, no longer in play as she got distracted, disappeared into a hole on the colorful playfield.
“Of course not.”
She turned around, the game forgotten, and pushed her hands against his chest to put some room between them. “No way did I imagine that.”