Tempted by the Soldier (A Falling for You Novel) (Entangled Brazen) Read Online Free PDF Page B

wouldn’t be Lilly if she wasn’t being a colossal pain in his ass.
    “My truck. My music.” He punched the preset again, reviving George Strait’s voice, and Lilly made a frustrated sound. When she reached out again he grabbed her wrist before her fingers could reach the button.
    Immediately, he regretted the decision. After all her teasing, that little bit of skin-on-skin contact was all it took to send a hot shiver of desire down his spine, lighting a fire under his cock so hot, he didn’t think he could ever snuff it out.
    “What are you going to do?” She smirked. “ Retaliate ?”
    He could think of a hundred ways he’d like to retaliate for all of the torture she’d unleashed on him over the past year. Shaking her earth-shattering ass in those tiny dresses at the club while he was forced to stand behind the bar and watch. Twisting him up inside with her smart mouth until he didn’t know the difference between anger and lust. He released her wrist, ignoring the heat in her eyes, and returned his attention to where it belonged.
    The road .
    “You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” he said like it wasn’t a question.
    “Fine,” she shot back. “Listen to your honky-tonk torture. But if my ears start bleeding, I’m blaming you.”
    “Can’t be any worse than the sound of your voice, Princess, and you live with that every day.”
    “Asshole,” she muttered, dropping her feet back into the floorboard and folding her arms across her chest.
    He frowned over at her. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”
    Lilly stiffened and stared out the window. “My mother’s dead.”
    Ah, hell . Nate flickered his gaze across the seat, wishing he could take the words back and make her forget he’d said them.
    He knew what it was like to lose a parent. Hell, he’d lost both of his. That shit wasn’t something to be taken lightly. He and Lilly may take jabs at each other for a lot of things, but even he knew he’d crossed a line. The haunted look in her eyes told him he’d just dredged up a memory that cut deep.
    Maybe they were more alike than he wanted to admit…
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was a shitty thing to say.”
    Her expression turned surprised a second before she answered. “Whatever. You didn’t know.”
    He tapped his fingers against the wheel, knowing damn good and well the last thing he should do was dig deeper. Deeper with Lilly wasn’t going to lead to anything good. They were good at pissing each other off, right up to the point of wanting to tear each other’s clothes off. And they were experts at avoiding anything below the surface. They weren’t good at…deeper.
    He stole another glance in her direction and caught the sadness in her reflection in the window. The sorrow in her eyes made him feel as though someone had punched him square in the chest. If she knew he’d seen that, she would hate it. She would hate him for getting even a tiny glimpse of the vulnerability she always kept locked up tight.
    Before he could stop himself, he found himself asking, “How did she die?”
    “She slit her wrists in our bathtub when I was fifteen,” Lilly said matter-of-factly. “How did your mom die?”
    He swallowed the thick sensation coating his throat. “Cancer.”
    Saying it out loud like that tore down the dam holding back the sea of guilt and grief inside him. Lilly’s mother may have given up, but not Maggie Jennings. She’d fought, and fought hard.
    And what had he done? He’d run away. Put an ocean between himself and her life-and-death struggle. It had been too easy to forget that the woman he’d loved more than life was withering away when he was flying loads of bloodied, destroyed soldiers to safety every day. He’d almost been able to justify not being there to help Jace take care of her.
    Almost.
    Until the day he couldn’t even do that right. After the helicopter crash, and leaving his dead men behind, suddenly none of it felt worth it. He’d sacrificed his