Ride the Thunder Read Online Free PDF Page B

stopped in the first place. He would have been thirty miles closer to Idaho Falls if he hadn’t, and that much closer to New York, where fourteen years of work would either be saved or finally lost. At the moment, the importance of that had waned under the potency of baser needs. Trudie took hold of his hand and something hard dug into the center of his work-calloused palm. “Dammit, Trudie!” Brig cursed her for making demands that couldn’t be satisfied now.
    “It’s my house key,” she identified the object he had thought was her fingernails. “It’s the only one I have. Will you wait for me there? I’ll be off work soon.”
    His fingers closed around the key to make a fist. With a curt nod of agreement, Brig started again for the door. This time Trudie didn’t stop him. Outside he paused to take a deep breath. The air was fresh and clean. He wondered if he had taken the key because he truly wanted to be with Trudie or because he wanted to postpone the trip to New York. Releasing a sigh, Brig decided it was a combination of both.
    *   *   *
    Reaching over Brig flicked the ashes from the tip of his cigarette into the ashtray on the bedstand. Blonde curls tickled the underside of his chin and he smoothed them against the head nestled on his chest. Then his hand returned to the curve of Trudie’s bare waist. Trudie let her fingers explore the flatness of his stomach and follow the dark hairs upward from his bellybutton to the scattered cloud of them on his chest. She traced the white scar on his left shoulder, where no hair grew.
    “Why haven’t you ever married, Brig?” Her voice was thoughtful as her stubby fingers continued to caress his skin.
    Women, he thought with absent annoyance; why do they always have to talk after they make love? He’d much rather smoke his cigarette in silence than listen to her murmurings. Containing a sigh, he roused himself sufficiently to answer.
    “I’m content with my own company, I guess.” He took a drag on his cigarette and let twin trails of smoke curl into his nose.
    “Haven’t you ever been in love?”
    “I guess not.” Not since he had discovered that he loved a woman more before he got her into bed than he did afterwards.
    “You told me once that you used to be a mercenary. Was that true?” she asked curiously, changing the subject.
    A frown briefly knitted his forehead. Had he told her that? Those years were something he rarely discussed with anyone. He considered denying it, but he wasn’t ashamed of what he’d done.
    “Yes, it’s true,” Brig admitted.
    “why?”
    “Why is it true?” A pillow was propping his head up. He smiled at the brassy mop of curls, finding her question a little on the peculiar side.
    “No, silly!” Trudie laughed and looked up at him. There was little makeup left on her face. He had kissed most of it off and the rest had rubbed off on thesheets. She looked older without it, easily his age, but more attractive in a plain sort of way. “Why did you become a mercenary?”
    “I don’t know. I suppose I fancied myself as some kind of soldier of fortune.” It had all been too long ago for him to remember what his motives might have been at the time. And it didn’t concern him now.
    “But surely your family . . .” she began.
    “My parents are dead.” But Brig didn’t tell her the circumstances of their death or his survival of the crash that had taken their lives. “My grandfather raised me—or tried. We never got along. I was too wild and rebellious and he was too strict. By the time I was fifteen, I’d run away from home seven times. At seventeen, I enlisted and did a tour of Southeast Asia—Nam, Cambodia, Laos. When I came back, nothing had changed. My grandfather still lived in a world that worshipped two gods—money and business—where a man is judged by the number of digits in his bank account and the influential people he knows, not how he got it or what kind of man he is.” He stubbed out the