Someone Like Her (3 page)

“Yeah, not Mommy of the Year material, was she?” Maria slipped her hand out of his and wrapped her arms around her waist.

That was when he noticed the red stain on her sleeve. “Dammit, Maria.” He grabbed her hand again and pushed the sleeve of the T-shirt up her arm. Dried blood crusted the edges of a bandage just above her elbow.

Brown, sad eyes peered hopelessly up at him. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He kissed her.

CHAPTER THREE

S
he kissed him back.

Maria’s chilled hand slipped around the back of his neck, bringing Jake to his senses, and he pushed her away. What had made him forget she was off-limits? When he thought about it later—and he thought about it a lot—he couldn’t pinpoint the moment he forgot she was off-limits.

Was it the blood? The sad eyes? The small voice? He was almost willing to chance ruining his friendship with Kincaid, but she was hurting, and he was taking advantage of her.

He attempted to make a joke of his misstep. “Sorry. I was aiming for your arm but missed the mark. You know, kiss it and make it better.”

“Whatever. It was just a stupid kiss. Nothing to get all weird about.”

Her eyes shuttered, became blank. The boss could do that, too, Jake thought. Must be something they learned growing up in their house of horrors.

“Wait here,” he said as he exited the car.

At the back of the Challenger, he grabbed the first aid kit from the trunk. His lips tingled, and he put a finger on them. It had been wrong to kiss her, and even though he should regret it, he didn’t. Her warm, soft mouth had been everything—and more—that he’d imagined for years now.

The trick would be not kissing her again. Because he desperately wanted to, especially now that he knew how incredibly good she tasted. Spicy and sweet—a little like a chili dog and a milk shake. He grinned as he closed the trunk.

Once he got her Band-Aid changed, he tossed the kit onto the back seat. “So, you found your mother’s book. How did that get you to what happened last night?”

“Will you hold my hand again?”

Touching her was as dangerous as stepping his way through a minefield, but apparently he thrived on danger because he laced his fingers through hers. Oh yeah, he was in serious trouble.

She blew out a weary-sounding breath. “As soon as I realized what the book was, I stuffed it away in a drawer. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What if my father’s name was in there?”

“Considering your mother’s . . . um, activities, I would think there could be a lot of possibilities,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t take offense.

That earned him a little snort. “Now there’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one. I hadn’t given much thought to who my father might be before. I mean, there were so many possibilities, why bother? But then I had this book that might have his name in it. It was like being a kid and dying to open a present under the Christmas tree, one you can’t stop shaking and poking at.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “Not that I know what that’s like either.”

The woman was breaking his heart. “So you got the book back out?”

“I tried to ignore it. I even threw it in the garbage when I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That same night, I got out of bed and dug it back out. I don’t know if I can make you understand, but the only parent I have to define myself by is my mother, and she never loved me. Not that she loved Logan either, but at least she sometimes seemed to like him. I didn’t even get that from her.”

Soulful eyes peered up at him. “She might be dead, but I can still hear her. ‘You’re so stupid, Maria.’ I heard that one over and over. ‘I wish you’d never been born, Maria.’ That one was her favorite.”

Jesus. The way her voice had changed just then—sounding exactly like a vindictive, chain-smoking bitch—planted a clear picture in his mind of how it must have been for her as a little girl. He’d give a thousand dollars to unsee it. It was one thing to be aware of how Maria and the boss had grown up, but he’d never considered the hurt that lived in her.

“Your mother was the stupid one, Maria. You must know that.”

“Must I?” She shrugged as if having a mother who hated her was of no importance. “So, to answer your question—”

“Question?” If he’d asked a question, he couldn’t remember it. He couldn’t get past the hurt little girl she’d once been . . . still was.

“Pay attention, Jake. I don’t talk about my mother to just anyone.”

Whoa. He didn’t want to be special to her. Couldn’t be even if he wanted. Not only had her brother threatened to do him bodily harm if he so much as looked at her wrong—
wrong
meaning with lust in his eyes—but he was Romeo. He didn’t do permanent, and she was as special as they came. Maria deserved better than he could ever give her.

He stared out at the empty parking lot, unable to meet her eyes. “Go on. You were telling me about your mother’s book.”

A squirrel raced down the tree nearest them, followed seconds later by another one. A spring mating dance ensued between the two before they disappeared into the branches above him. Were they getting it on even as he sat in a now-stifling car with the one woman he could never have, no matter how much he wanted her? He turned on the car and rolled down both their windows.

“I just kept wondering, you know. If I could find my father, would he love me? Maybe not right away. I don’t expect that, but later, if he had a chance to get to know me. So, I got the book out of the garbage and searched for men with Spanish names. I found three. Are you curious how many stars they got?”

Not even. He switched off the ignition. “Only if it’s relevant to what happened.” Did she realize she was seeking validation that she was loveable from a man she’d never met? What if she did find her father and he wanted nothing to do with her? What would that do to her?

“It’s not, and I’m glad you don’t want to know. Leave it to Lovey Dovey to keep records like that. I felt dirty just reading it. Anyway, you know if you put a computer in front of me, I can find anything.”

That was an understatement. She’d been instrumental in hacking past firewalls and exposing the dummy companies behind the cult that had kidnapped her brother’s wife. Like a bloodhound on the scent, Maria had found their compound location in the Ozarks, and sniffed out the leader’s sordid background. Without her, the outcome might have been much different.

Considering it was one of her mother’s johns she was searching for, it might be better if she wasn’t so computer savvy. “So, you went to work tracking down father possibilities?”

“You know me so well, Jake. I love that about you.”

He would have taken her words as a joke if her eyes hadn’t turned wary. There had been a sort of longing in her tone—a wistfulness. She couldn’t possibly mean she loved him. He’d long ago admitted that there was chemistry between them. The attraction he’d felt for her had turned to full-blown lust on the night of her twenty-first birthday party.

Kincaid had walked into the restaurant where they were meeting to celebrate, his wife on one arm, Maria on the other. The air had swished out of Jake’s lungs. Maria had been away at school, and he had avoided her whenever she came home on breaks, and hadn’t seen her in almost a year. The black-haired beauty on the arm of her brother hadn’t been the girl he remembered. Somehow, in that time, she’d transformed into a woman, and a sexy-as-hell one at that.

He glanced at their hands where they rested on the console, hers browner than his, and rubbed his thumb over her skin. “Tell me the rest.”

“Okay. There were three possibilities, and I found addresses for two of them. Turned out one, Hernando Fortunada, lived just north of here in Ridgeville. I didn’t see any reason not to pay him a visit, and maybe I’d find a father who, when he knew I existed, would be proud to call me his daughter. I had this picture in my mind, you know. If he was my father, he would be glad to see me. If not, no harm done.” She shuddered. “I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

It was only through sheer will that he didn’t yell at her for going to a strange man’s house alone. He pressed his lips together. If he opened his mouth, whatever words came out would no doubt cause her to close up like a damn clam.

“Fortunada, who I pray to God is not my father, did this when I interrupted whatever was going on with the girl. Problem is, he now knows who I am and where I live.”

It hurt to breathe. She’d been in the grasp of a possible rapist, one who’d had his hands on her with the intention of shutting her up. Jake had never been so glad of his skills. He could protect her. His decision—instant and final—to not let her out of his sight until this Fortunada bastard was in jail or dead would have repercussions. Let Kincaid do his worst. Even if it meant getting fired for not delivering Maria into the safety of her brother’s arms, Jake didn’t care.

“I’m curious. Did you think you would take one look at him and say, yes, that’s my daddy?”

She flinched. “You don’t have to be sarcastic, but no, I didn’t think that. I kinda hoped he would look like me, but I thought he wouldn’t object to a DNA test once I explained who I was. Then once he knew I was his daughter, he would maybe love me.”

Maybe
love her? She asked for too little. He could no longer ignore how much she was hurting, not only from the wounds on her body, but deep in her soul. He wrapped his hand around that gloriously silky hair and gently tugged her head to his shoulder.

“I have to find him, Jake. If Fortunada’s my father, then both my parents are trash and it’s better to know that now so I can get on with my life. I just need to know,” she whispered, turning her face into his shirt.

And he just wanted to kill someone. Her mother, her father. Didn’t matter. “I need to know what we’re up against, Chiquita Banana. How does he know who you are?” The kiss he planted on her forehead was pure impulse. She slipped her hand under his shirt, and his skin rippled, hot and wanting under her fingers. Any other woman, and he would have had her under him in the blink of an eye.

This one, though, wasn’t for him. Calling on every damn control technique he’d learned since making it through each torturous day of SEAL training, he managed to keep his hands—along with other parts of his body—from claiming her.

Maria pressed her nose against Jake’s shirt and breathed him in. It had been a long time since he’d called her by the pet name. Not since her twenty-first birthday had he called her Chiquita Banana, and she’d missed it. Missed him.

Their kiss had been tender and special. At least to her. She assumed to him, probably all in a day’s work. She felt his stomach muscles tense under her fingers, and he pulled her hand away, gently pushing her back into her seat.

“I know this is hard, but you have to finish telling me.”

She’d much rather he kiss her again.

It was hard because talking about it meant reliving it, a reminder of her stupidity. When she slipped her hand back into his, he let her. “I had my finger on the doorbell when the girl ran out of the house and crashed into me. I pushed her away and told her to run. When I turned to haul ass myself, he grabbed me and pulled me inside.”

“Go on.”

He spoke in his SEAL voice, the one she heard the guys use when they got serious about something. Likely, he would yell at her again when he heard the rest.

“We fought. He hit me in the face with his fist, so I kneed him in his balls.” She could still see the fisted hand coming at her and had known she only had a slim chance of getting away. “Then I hit him on the head with my purse. It was the creep’s bad luck that I forgot to take out one of my textbooks, and it dazed him. I ran out the door, jumped in my car and sped away. End of story.”

“End of story?” Jake echoed, still in his take-no-shit SEAL voice. “Somehow, I doubt that.”

“Well, there’s one other little thing. The second time I hit him with my purse, he grabbed it and wouldn’t let go. I had a choice of wrestling him for it or running. I ran. Now he has my wallet, so he knows my name and address.”

With his free hand, Jake pinched the bridge of his nose. “Shit.”

That about summed it up. “I’m sorry. I never dreamed something like this would happen.”

“How did you get the cut on your arm?”

“There was a water glass on the coffee table, and when we were fighting it got broken. At one point he had me down on the floor and my arm got cut. That’s when I kneed him.”

Jake’s eyes grew hard and as cold as the glaciers in Antarctica. He probably didn’t know who he was more angry with, her or her attacker. Not that she blamed him. And he really wasn’t going to like what she was going to say next.

“After we go to the police, I want to find the girl.”

“Excuse me?”

If she hadn’t already been used to Logan’s intense scowls, she might have confessed her worst sins then and there. Was that look something they learned in SEAL school?

Jake gave her his fiercest glare, not sure which part of her statement to address first. Innocent brown eyes stared back at him—too innocent.

She arched a brow. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

The staccato sound of his fingers as they rapidly tapped on the steering wheel drew his attention. He stilled them and gave a shake of his head. “I’m almost afraid to know what’s going through your mind right now when you say you want to find the girl, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Are you telling me you haven’t called the police?”

“No, I was waiting for you.”

That didn’t make sense. “I don’t understand. You should’ve called them the minute you got a chance.” Something flickered in her eyes. What was he missing? “Maria?”