Bring Him Home by Karina Bliss

colors—teal and navy—into the site. “It’s not active, though, is it?”
    “It will be as soon as I’m sure of making the proposed launch date.”
    He frowned. “You’re not even pretending to keep an open mind.”
    “Or maybe I’m supremely confident you’ll come to support this project the way I do,” she countered. “Because of your open mind.”
    Such a smart woman.
    He looked down at the report. She’d negotiated some great deals, no question.
    “If you’ve had second thoughts,” she said, “about talking about Steve…”
    “Steve once committed credit-card fraud,” he said, feeling the first lash of memory and ignoring it. He’d decided he could manage this by being selective about the stories he recounted.
    She blinked at him over her laptop, the screen light giving her face an angel’s glow. “I don’t believe it.”
    “Shut that thing down and I’ll tell you.” He’d already suggested she get an early night—she’d been yawning ever since dinner—but although she kept saying, “Great idea,” she hadn’t moved.
    “Blackmail,” she complained, but closed the lid and stretched in her chair, looking at him expectantly. It would take a while to go through the reports and assess Claire’s state of mind, so he’d said the incident in which Steve nearly got the unit killed needed to come chronologically. That was bullshit.
    He couldn’t tell that story. If the ambush was a fire, that story involved sitting close enough to have your eyebrows singed. On the other hand, Claire wasn’t going to be a soft sell. Nate needed to work out how to present his mate in the best light, with the least collateral damage.
    Why hadn’t Steve told the guys about his deal with Claire?
    “First I knew of it was when I received a letter from some kid in Indonesia thanking me for becoming his Child Fund sponsor,” he began. “Steve admitted he’d stolen my credit-card details and signed me up.”
    Another lash, through flesh to bone. Revisiting the good times only accentuated what he’d lost.
    Claire’s eyes brightened with amusement. “Why would he do such a thing?”
    “We’d been talking about him being married so young. I was pretty feral then—a hard-ass who mocked what he couldn’t understand. I’d said something on the lines of, ‘Who needs a dependent? I’d hate someone leaning on me, tying me down and cramping my style.’”
    She was still smiling, but the expression was fixed.
    Closing the report, Nate sat back. If he focused on orchestrating Claire’s reactions, his own became bearable. “When I asked him what the hell he was doing forging my signature on a World Vision application, Steve said I needed to lose the chip on my shoulder and understand that mine wasn’t the only sad story in the world. That he and the other guys relied on me for their lives and I needed to start caring about someone other than myself. I lost my temper, told him to keep his preachiness for the little wife who I was sure obeyed his every command.”
    “What!”
    “I’d only met you once,” he reminded her. Yeah, if he concentrated on Claire, it became easier. “We were both on our best behavior.”
    She snorted. “I don’t remember you being on your best behavior. You checked me out, informed Steve I had a nice ass, kept choking back cusswords and spent the whole evening ignoring me.”
    “I didn’t know how to talk to a pretty woman I wasn’t trying to hit on,” he admitted. “I watched, though.…how Steve treated you, how you treated him. Waiting for one of you to slip up on the lovey-dovey respectful-partnership scam.” He shrugged. “As I said—feral.”
    “So that’s why you were staring?”
    “Well, that, and as I’ve already mentioned, your ass,” he said. “At least until your husband told me to quit.” How had they wandered so far off track? “You have to remember, I had very basic socialization skills for the civilized world.”
    Nate looked out through the patio