The Colonels' Texas Promise

He still would have recognized her in an instant. She was still tall, still energetic, still full of purpose—

Still beautiful.

Still another man’s wife.

“Hello, Evan.” She turned to the sergeant and dismissed him with a nod. “Thank you.”

Sergeant Hadithi backed out of the room, closing the door behind himself. It shut with a quiet snick, the only sound in the room as Juliet crossed the carpet to Evan’s desk. He’d never seen her walk in high heels before, had he? Sharp as hell. Sexy as hell.

She set her hat on the corner of his desk as he began to stand, but then she leaned forward and planted her fist squarely in the center of his desk. She opened her hand and stepped back, leaving a shiny pin on his desk, a silver oak leaf insignia.

He sat back down.

“I was promoted today.”

That was all she said.

It was all she needed to say. The memories he’d spent so many years deliberately repressing broke free. The fountain, the moonlight, the promise—and now here she was.

He’d never been more surprised in his life.

Chapter Two

Evan kept his eyes on the silver oak leaf insignia.

The memories came crashing to the forefront of his mind for the first time in...seven years?

Yes, seven years since he’d last seen her. Seven years since he’d buried his emotions for the last time. It had been a chance meeting, a crossing of paths at an airfield in Afghanistan. He’d been arriving; she’d been leaving. They’d almost walked past one another, both captains at the time, both loaded down with combat gear. A passing glance, a double take, a step away from his unit to shake hands, to grip her shoulder—only a minute available to ask an intense question.

How have you been?

Better now, she’d said, and he’d had a moment of insane happiness thinking she meant she was better now that she’d run into him. But she’d nodded toward the waiting jet and the long line of soldiers boarding it. That’s my ride home. I’ll see my son in twenty hours. Twenty! I can’t wait.

Her son. Of course. When Evan had last seen her at a tailgate party at their alma mater’s football stadium, she’d been carrying a toddler on her hip. She’d looked crazy in love with her child, laughing at his determined little face when his chubby hand made a grab for her hamburger. It was the moment Evan had realized what he wanted in life.

It was the moment he’d realized he was too late.

After the game, her husband—also an alumnus of their college, a guy who’d played baseball with Evan—had chosen to leave his wife and baby at the class reunion hotel while he went out with the single men in their group. No surprise there; Evan had known that guy’s habits too well after a couple of seasons traveling from university to university together on the varsity baseball team. That night, Evan had watched Juliet’s husband have one too many drinks, have one too many dances with women who weren’t Juliet, and he’d stepped in. Go home and appreciate what you’ve got—or another man will.

Evan had spent the two years between the alumni tailgate and Afghanistan doing his best to forget Juliet and her husband and her baby, but as he’d faced her on that airfield, he’d wanted to know if her husband had grown up and settled down. If they were still married.

He’d had to shout over the idling jet engines to ask a more socially acceptable question that would still give him the information he wanted. Is your husband still on active duty?

A quick shake of her head. No, he got out of the army last year. Good timing. He’s been able to stay home with the baby. Actually, my son is four now, not a baby. Crazy how time flies, isn’t it?

They’d looked at one another from under the brims of their Kevlar helmets. Evan had told himself he was happy for her. She was married with a child—exactly the life she’d once been afraid she’d never have because of her military commitment.

Evan had squeezed her shoulder one last time and let go. See? I told you not to worry. I knew you’d marry a guy who would take care of your children while you were deployed.

Evan had spent the rest of his year in Afghanistan pummeling his emotions into submission. Juliet, his college buddy, was happy. She was married, and there was nothing he could do about it. He wouldn’t lust after a married woman. He wouldn’t pine for a woman who was building a life with someone else. He hadn’t been smart enough to pursue her while he’d had the chance. It was over and done. She was the one who’d gotten away. End of story.

Except now she was standing here in his office at Fort Hood, telling him she’d been promoted to lieutenant colonel.

Her voice broke the silence as he continued to stare at the pin. “Don’t you remember dancing with me the night before graduation?”

Of course he remembered. Every word. Pinkie promise, or it doesn’t count.

“We’re both lieutenant colonels now,” she said. Her voice had not changed in seven years, not in sixteen. “Crazy how time flies, isn’t it?”

Their eyes met.

He felt something like anger. The seal on his memories had been broken. The emotions she was resurrecting were both painfully fresh and achingly familiar.

“I’m single,” he said, “but you’re not.”

“Divorced. He moved out for the last time three years ago. We’ve been divorced for two.”

Good God. All these years...trying to forget her, determined not to think about her. He hadn’t heard about the divorce because he hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from their old circle. It was easier to move on that way.

Except he hadn’t really moved on to anything. To anyone.

“Is divorced not the same thing as single?” she asked, and for the first time, her voice wavered. She dropped her gaze. Now she was the one staring at the silver rank of a lieutenant colonel. Her eyelashes were dark, feminine, alluring even as they hid her eyes from him.

After another moment of silence, she reached for the silver pin.

Evan closed his hand over the pin first. “That’s not the important question, Juliet. The real question is, shall we do this in the courthouse or a church?”

* * *

He couldn’t be serious.

Evan Stephens couldn’t be agreeing to honor their pact so easily. Why should he?

Suddenly, Juliet felt foolish for coming here to challenge him to keep it. It was a ridiculous promise. They’d practically been children at the time. They’d even sealed it by linking their pinkie fingers together.

Evan came to his feet. He was a battalion commander, and he looked every inch the military warrior. He couldn’t have gotten taller, but he seemed taller anyway. He was a little bigger, a little broader in the shoulders, and a lot more fierce in his camouflage than he’d been in shorts and flip-flops on a college green.

Her mouth felt dry.

She had things to say to him. To explain to him. The reason she wanted to gauge his willingness to honor their college pact. The gut feeling she had that he was the father her son needed.

Instead, she was mute as she watched him walk around his desk to stand before her, right before her, just close enough that she felt alarmed, and she took an involuntary step backward.

“Courthouse,” she said, her voice husky but still the voice of an officer. Decisive.

“You’ve already thought this through.” He took a step forward. “I’m fine with a judge instead of a minister, but what’s your reasoning?”

This is happening. This is really happening. And he was so very...real. Not a memory. Definitely not a senior in college. She’d grown into herself over the years, physically, losing the last of that lingering teen lankiness—but she hadn’t thought about the fact that Evan would have, too. He was all grown up, fully an adult, and damn, but a man in his midthirties was a man in his prime.

She cleared her dry throat. “The courthouse would be quicker.”

She was in high heels, but he still had to bend his head down an inch to bring his mouth to her ear. They might have been slow dancing, as close as he was to her, but he didn’t touch her with anything but his voice.

“Are we in a rush? How many children are we going to have before we retire?”

He remembered. He’d chosen the rank of lieutenant colonel because she would still be young enough...

She remembered, and he did, too, and it made something in her chest feel suddenly weightless.

But that wasn’t why she was here. Weightlessness wasn’t welcome. It only made her feel wobbly. This was supposed to be about Matthew.

“I already did that part,” she said. “I have a child.”

Evan touched her then, setting his hands on her waist lightly, but it gave her a little stability, a little strength. His eyes were really as blue as she’d remembered, a pure shade of blue that had left dozens of girls sighing in the bleachers at their college’s baseball stadium. She’d teased him for it, time and again.

Now those blue eyes were looking at her with something like...tenderness? Affection? Like he knew her. It had been so long since a man had looked at her so personally. Not as a subordinate or a superior. Not as a daughter or mother or commander or staff officer.

“I have—”

“A little boy named Matthew. I remember. Cute child.” The corners of Evan’s eyes crinkled just the slightest bit, a small smile at whatever he remembered about Matthew. “Did you have any more children after him?”

“No.” She supposed that was a reasonable question. It had been, gosh, seven years since that chance meeting in Afghanistan, when she’d mentioned going home to her son. But the question unnerved her, exposing how little Evan knew about her life. How could he have accepted her proposal as if he’d marry her no matter what, when he didn’t know anything about her? He hadn’t known she was divorced until two minutes ago. He didn’t know how many children she had. He hadn’t kept tabs on her.

She didn’t feel so weightless now. “Just Matthew. But I have full custody.”

“Rob never sees him?”

It was startling to hear her ex-husband’s name said so casually by someone else. For the past three years, if Rob had come up in conversation at all, it had been only as “Matthew’s father.” Polite, careful questions from new teachers: And will Matthew’s father be coming to the school play?

“He has visitation rights,” she told Evan. “He just doesn’t use them.”

Her polite smile was automatic. Matthew’s father lives out of state. However, my neighbor has agreed to be my designated caregiver if I’m unreachable in an emergency. For three years, her answers had been so polite, so practical.

“I’m sorry,” Evan said.

The teachers never said that. Sorry for her son? Sorry for her? For Rob? Evan didn’t explain himself further.

She explained herself instead, calmly—but her heart was pounding so hard, he ought to be able to hear it. “That means you’d be living with a child if we...if we went to the courthouse.”

“You still don’t scare me, Juliet.” He touched her face with the back of his hand, a light run of his knuckles from her cheek to just above her ear, before he leaned in again to speak softly into the ear he’d just barely caressed. “Children don’t scare me, either.”

“That’s because you’ve never lived with one.” But she couldn’t keep carrying off this calm conversation. She couldn’t pretend it was normal to be in Evan Stephens’s office on a Friday in February, discussing living together as a couple.

She moved away from his hand on her waist and paced a step or two before turning to face him. She let go of her dignity and her military bearing, threw her hands up and huffed out a sigh. “This is insanity. I can’t believe we’re even talking about following up on an old promise right now.”

At that, he half laughed as he half sat on the edge of his desk. “You can’t believe it?”

For the first time, she managed a smile and wrinkled her nose apologetically. “I guess you weren’t expecting me to pop in this afternoon. Sorry.”

“I hope you’re not sorry. That you’ll never be sorry.”

She didn’t laugh. He hadn’t been kidding. Again.

“You don’t have to honor an impulsive college promise,” she said, giving him chance after chance to take the easy way out. He could give her a smile, a friendly good to see you again, and tell her he had to get back to work.

“But you must have wondered if I would honor it,” he said. “You didn’t come find me after all these years to tell me to say no. Is ‘no’ what you wanted to hear me say, or just what you expected me to say?”

“I came to hear you say... I don’t know what I expected. I didn’t think you’d be...”

“A man of my word?”

“It was a silly pinkie promise, Evan. Nothing more.”

She said it, but she didn’t believe it. Their promise had meant something. In the back of her mind, this day had always been there. As long as Evan stayed single, there’d always been this alternate future on the horizon. She’d needed that fantasy future, some years more than others, so at every reunion, every get-together with anyone from their circle, she’d asked casual questions. Have you heard from Evan Stephens? What’s he up to these days? Not married, still?

The army was a small world. She and Evan had never been stationed together before, but on every post, she’d run into people who knew Captain Stephens or Major Stephens or Lieutenant Colonel Stephens. His rank progressed, but he was always single. Never married.

She hadn’t thought to ask about a child. He sounded so confident, saying children didn’t scare him, as if he knew what parenthood was all about. A man didn’t have to be married to have a child. Had there been an accidental pregnancy in his past?

Perhaps an intentional one. He could have been half of a couple who’d wanted to have a child but had no intention of ever marrying. He could have met a woman he thought would make a good mother for his child, and they might have decided to...to conceive a baby.

Her flash of jealousy was unjustified, considering the existence of Matthew, but she felt it all the same.

“Do you have a child?” she asked.

Evan shook his head. She couldn’t decipher the serious look in his eyes, but since he never took his gaze off her face, she had to mask her irrational relief.

“I knew you’d never married,” she said, “but I didn’t think to ask if you’d had any children.”

“You asked people about me?” The smile that was really just a crinkle at the corner of his eyes reappeared. That was easy enough to interpret: he was pleased.

“I had to. I couldn’t expect a married man to care if I’d been promoted to lieutenant colonel today.”

“No, of course not.” He pushed away from his desk and walked back into her personal space, still studying her. Then he raised his hand to touch her, and she held her breath, braced this time for that light brush along her cheek. After all, there was nowhere else he could touch her. Her jacket covered her arms to her wrists. Her black tab-tie held her white dress shirt closed at her throat. She was safe in her uniform.

She was not. He placed his whole palm on the side of her neck, warming her tight throat with the heat of his hand, holding her still as he bent his head and kissed her.

It was the college green all over again. The night air, the string music. The impossibly soft mouth of a very hard man. She might have made a sound, an unintentional mmm of delicious recognition, like that first bite of homemade food after months of army rations, or it might have sounded like a whimper at just how overwhelming it was to taste the real thing after years of trying to remember a flavor.

He spoke over her lips. “The courthouse it is, then.”

This close, she could feel what she couldn’t see. Under that easy confidence, his heart was pounding, too.

“You think this is a good idea?” She’d meant to state it as a fact, but her tone of voice had taken on a girlish kind of wonder.

“I do. I have no intention of waiting another sixteen years for the next kiss.”

He kissed her again, and she lost herself in that midnight feeling. Kissing him felt so very intimate. No tongues, no tasting—but oh, his mouth felt so sensual against hers.

She’d had her arms around his neck back then. Today, her suit was too constricting, but she wouldn’t have reached up to throw her arms around him anyway. They no longer saw one another day after day, semester after semester, so although he still seemed familiar, they lacked that casual familiarity. But she felt weightless and wobbly, so she held on to him, a hand on each of his upper arms. His body warmth carried through the camouflage fabric. The flex of his biceps felt insanely sexy as he moved to cup her face in two hands.

His fingertips were warm and gentle along her jawline, while the bulge of his arm muscle felt like steel. She breathed in at the contrasting sensations, parting her lips, and then he was tasting her, and she was tasting him. The instant rush of arousal—a throb, a wanting, a contraction low in her belly—was so strong, it was almost painful.

This wasn’t why she’d come. This wasn’t the point. This wasn’t supposed to be about feeling sexy or—hell—even remembering what sex was, or how they’d once talked about having babies together. No, this was about...something...

She dug her fingers into his biceps a little harder.

Something...making babies...

Matthew. Her son was the reason she was here.

Her gasp ended the kiss.

Evan Stephens, strong and terribly handsome, this more fierce version of the Evan she’d once known, laughed against her lips. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that I am single on the day of your promotion.”

She backed away in one jerky step. Evan let her go, lowering his hands in an almost lazy way to settle on his hips.

She forced herself to breathe slowly. She would not pant. She was in her thirties, she was a divorcée, she was the mother of a middle schooler, she was a lieutenant colonel, for crying out loud. She was not going to be flustered by a kiss, no matter how long it had been since she’d felt so aroused.

How long had it been?

An eternity.

Sex was like riding a bicycle, maybe. Once you knew how, you never forgot—but she hadn’t come here to ride a bicycle.

“You should meet my son first.”

“Yes, I should.” Evan smiled, a real smile, a flash of white teeth to go along with those sexy, smiling eyes. How many times had she seen him flash that cocky smile? Every time a cute blonde girl cheered for him at a baseball game.

Three knocks sounded at his office door. Evan had his back to it. He didn’t stop smiling at her, didn’t change the way he was standing with his hands on his hips, but he called out, “Enter.”

The door opened. “Sir, the brigade S-3 is requesting to schedule a commanders’ roundtable for Monday morning.”

Evan looked over his shoulder at the sergeant. “Put it on my schedule.” Then he reached for the patrol cap he had sitting on his desk, a sure sign that he was ready to leave the building. Everyone in uniform had to wear their cover—their hat—when outdoors. He handed Juliet her hat, its dark blue crown decorated with a gold eagle and the oak leaves of a field-grade officer. “What time is Matthew done with school? Does he have an aftercare program, or does he take a bus home?”

“I’ve been picking him up. We’re still in temporary housing. We’ve been at the Holiday Inn for two weeks.”

Evan shot her a look—she couldn’t guess the meaning of that one, either—before he headed for the door. He nodded to his sergeant as he gestured for Juliet to precede him out the door. “I’ll be out the rest of the afternoon, Sergeant Hadithi.”

“Yes, sir. Good afternoon, ma’am.”

“Good afternoon,” Juliet replied by habit.

She left the office with Lieutenant Colonel Evan Stephens by her side, matching her step for step.

They were really going to do this.

Chapter Three

Evan followed Juliet down the stairs and out into the crisply cool and brightly sunny Texas afternoon.

He followed Juliet.

Juliet Grayson was here.

He’d kissed her, and everything was still there. Everything that he hadn’t known how to handle at twenty-one. Everything he’d recognized too late at twenty-seven. Everything he’d tried to bury at twenty-nine. Everything he’d thought he’d never have in this lifetime.

Because I don’t deserve to have her.

He shoved the guilt deep down, where it had been locked away with his memories of Juliet. Now he could allow the memories of Juliet, but he wanted to keep the guilt buried deep. Maybe he’d inadvertently pushed the wrong man her way, but he’d done the right thing and stayed out of their life once he’d heard Rob Jones had gotten her to the altar. Evan hadn’t had anything to do with their divorce.

She’d gotten divorced anyway. She was free. Single. And she’d come to remind him of their marriage pact on the very day the conditions of that pact had come into play.

She’d come to do more than remind him.

You should meet my son first, she’d said, and he hadn’t been able to contain his smile. First. Before the actual ceremony, she’d meant, as if it were a foregone conclusion that they would be married. She had come not to say hello, not to reminisce, but to fulfill the pact they’d made the night before their graduation.

He needed to touch her again, to feel her skin so he’d know this wasn’t a miraculous mirage dredged up from subconscious dreams. He wanted to give her hand a squeeze of excitement or reassurance or something.

He could not. It would break regulations. There was no hand-holding between soldiers in the US Army, not even if they wore one another’s wedding rings. If Evan were wearing the more formal blue service uniform and if it were after dark and if they were attending a social function, then he would be allowed to offer her his arm to escort her through the parking lot.

That wasn’t the situation now. He was the battalion commander, being saluted by every single person they passed. She was being saluted as well, of course, since they were the same rank. He loved the way they both raised their right arms in sync and briefly touched the right corners of their brims to return the salutes. He loved the sound of her high heels on the concrete sidewalk. He loved the cool but sunny Texas winter weather. He loved every frigging thing about the whole frigging universe.

Juliet Grayson was here.

She stopped beside his vehicle. Since it was parked in a spot marked Battalion Commander, it was no surprise that she guessed which vehicle was his.

“A Corvette,” she said with a little laugh.

The memory was so clear, it was incredible that he’d forgotten it until this second. He laughed, too, and imitated the frustrated lament of a college-age Juliet. “Why is such a sexy car always driven by somebody old enough to be my grandfather?”

She shrugged a shoulder as she traced one metal curve, but her lips twitched with mischief. “I was right, you know. When I saw this car on my way into the building, I had a moment of worry that you were ready to retire to Florida.”

“Not yet. Nor for a long while.” He watched her feminine fingers sliding along his sports car. “We can enjoy this while we’re still young.”

Her fingers paused. That brief, familiar flash of Juliet’s teasing smile disappeared, leaving something more polite, more distant. “Unfortunately, they haven’t invented a Corvette with more than two seats. We’ll have to use my car when we go anywhere together. Party of three, not two.”

“Makes sense.” But he would take her for a long drive, just the two of them, top down, engine purring. Soon.

“School lets out in forty-five minutes,” she said.