Breakpoint Read online

  “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 bo
dy 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.”

  “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 goi
ng 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.”

  13

  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?”