“You don’t play fair, Phil,” he muttered as the other man sat down.
“What’s that?”
“I...” His words trailed off as the food truck’s order window slid open.
Layla leaned out. Her face was flushed—by an oven maybe?—and she wore a pink-and-green paisley kerchief over her hair. “Uncle Phil,” she began, but then her voice died, too, as she caught sight of Vance.
She frowned, her gaze shifting under those luxurious mink lashes. “Uncle Phil,” she said, a warning in her voice.
“We’re only eating cupcakes,” her relative answered, all innocence.
She blew out a breath from her bottom lip, stirring the fringe of bangs that skimmed her eyebrows. “I’m concerned he’s uncovered a latent meddling streak,” she cautioned Vance. “Don’t let him give you the third degree.” Then she disappeared.
Layla gone was good. Much of the problem when it came to her was that Vance’s mind muddied in her proximity, those tender brown eyes and pretty mouth just too diverting. Per usual, after a brief delay, his stalled brain reengaged. He’s uncovered a latent meddling streak.
It was his turn to glare at the older man. “You should have meddled a little harder. What were you thinking? I could have been some freak! You set up your ten-year-old niece—”
“But she’s not ten,” Phil pointed out. “I didn’t realize you thought so.”
“I told you in the emails I was going to hire a nanny.”
The older man shrugged. “Whoops. Sometimes the particulars pass me by.”
Vance ground his back teeth, not sure if Layla’s uncle was really that clueless or just playing the part. “Phil—”
“Anyway, I knew you were a friend of my brother’s.”
That overstated the case. “I—”
“Clearly he trusted you.”
Shit. “Maybe he shouldn’t have,” Vance muttered.
Phil pushed the plate of cupcakes closer. “What makes you say that?”
Instead of answering, Vance selected a cake that was pale blond on the sides and golden on top. Vanilla, he figured, popping it into his mouth. But when it melted on his tongue it offered up a surprising wealth of flavor. Warm milk and brown sugar, he decided, and the luscious taste left him speechless.
“On the menu board it’s Dharma Dulce—a dulce de leche cupcake,” Phil said in response to his unspoken question. “And for the record, I didn’t agree to let her spend a month with just anyone. I have my ways of discovering the truth.”
Vance grunted, unwilling to open his mouth and lose any of the sweet taste still lingering on his tongue.
Phil sat back in his chair. “At twenty-three, you dropped out of college and joined the army. Spent four years as a combat medic, then you were out for a couple before being called back to active duty through the Individual Ready Reserve. You were in Afghanistan for seven months when you were injured in the process of saving my brother.”
Now Vance was forced to speak. “Didn’t save him,” he corrected, though hell, it was painful to say the words aloud.
“No one could expect—”
“I expected!” Startled by his own outburst, Vance looked away, staring off across the parking lot. “Look, it’s...”
“It’s...?”
Vance shook his head. “I had a good run all those years, okay? I never lost anyone on the battlefield.”
“Is that right?”
Yes, it was true. “Every time I reached a fallen man I told him the same thing. I’d say, ‘I’m going to get you out of here, soldier. I’m going to get you to the best doctors and nurses we have available.’”
“And you did?”
“Every time,” Vance said. “That’s not to say I didn’t see death while racing to the wounded. And there were guys I patched up and got onto the choppers who didn’t make it out of the hospital alive. But I...I fulfilled my battlefield vow to all of them.”
Phil regarded him pensively. “All of them?”
“Except one,” Vance answered, closing his eyes. A small sound had them flying open again. His gaze found Layla. She was standing in the open doorway of the truck, a hand over her mouth, her brown eyes wide. Their expression transported him to the day before, to that moment when she’d passed him the errant pen and his fingers had found hers.
He held himself rigid, remembering the jolt of heat, that blast of purely physical sensation that had dried his mouth and dizzied his head. Even under its influence he’d known the reaction was trouble. The last thing he needed was some unwelcome and hard-to-control chemical combustion.
He’d been wild in his younger days, acting on impulse and always riding an edge of danger, but years at war had finally leeched that from him. Plenty of soldiers came back from combat with adrenaline still flooding their system and no place for it to go. Those were the guys who operated at the whim of their cocks instead of their common sense, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to be one of them.
Because he was smarter than that now.
And because he’d made promises. Though the colonel’s daughter deserved more than a horny bastard who’d do better waiting out his return to service by tossing back beers on a Mexican beach than by babysitting an enticing woman he couldn’t in good conscience touch.
He probably scowled, because Layla made another little sound and then disappeared inside the cupcake truck.
“Shit,” he said. “I wish she hadn’t heard that.”
Phil appeared unconcerned. “Now she understands you have your own reasons for being here.” He nudged the plate of cupcakes closer. “Try the one we call Berry Bliss.”
Strawberry? Raspberry? Cherry? His taste buds couldn’t pinpoint the exact flavor. But it definitely tasted like bliss.
“So,” Phil said, “I understand you have family in California?”
Oh, yeah, Vance thought, nodding as he swallowed the cake. Layla’s uncle was cannier than he initially let on. Because Vance did have a family, one with tighter connections than many, because his father and his uncle had married twins and lived in side-by-side houses on a compound at their sprawling avocado ranch about an hour from Crescent Cove. William and Roy Smith continued to lead the business together, with Vance’s older brother, Fucking Perfect Fitz, and their cousin Baxter being groomed to take over.
Thinking of all that made him scowl again, as old bitterness mixed with new disquiet. Bax was sworn to secrecy, but it worried Vance that he might not be able to keep his return to the area quiet. He was determined to avoid a face-to-face with any other members of his family, including his mother.
That brought on a new thought and he shifted his gaze toward the other man. “Phil, where’s Layla’s mom? Her father implied he was divorced, but his ex—”
“Is in the wind. She left her marriage and her daughter behind when Layla was two. My niece has only me now,” Phil said. “And for the next month, you.”
“Me?” She sure as hell didn’t “have” him.
Then Vance thought of finding her on the beach yesterday afternoon, how the instant she’d known she was being observed she’d brushed away the telltale tear. The save-face gesture had found some soft spot inside him. Then she’d said, Doesn’t keeping your word mean anything? and the question had burrowed deeper.
But the truth was, she’d gotten under his skin from the moment he’d