Free Carolina Man by Virginia Kantra

say if he nuzzled her cheek. If he licked her neck. How she’d taste.
    He shook his head, wiping his hands on one of her pretty blue towels. “Almost done.”
    “Then . . . a beer?”
    He was tempted.
    Before he came home to an instant family, to a kid who
needed
things from him, iPods and kittens and time, he’d spend at least a couple evenings with his buddies, drinking beer, telling lies, and picking up women.
    He had other responsibilities now.
    “Can’t,” he said briefly, regretfully. “I’m driving.”
    Her smile was warm enough to make him blink. “Diet Mountain Dew? Diet Pepsi?”
    Girl drinks. He wondered if she had a man in her life, somebody to keep her refrigerator stocked with cold cuts and nondiet soda. Of course, she’d offered him beer . . . “Got anything with sugar?”
    Her expression turned apologetic. “Sorry, no.”
    He didn’t want to be the cause of that fading smile. “Water will be fine.”
    She brought it to him in a glass, with ice and a little slice of lemon floating on top. For a moment, he could only stare.
    Her brows twitched together. “Is something wrong?”
    He thought of the water he’d drunk in Afghanistan, as hot as tea from a vending machine, with the same pale brown color and metallic tang. “No, this is great. Thanks.”
    Her fingers were cool from the glass as he took it from her. He imagined them on his skin as she watched him drink, still with that tiny pleat between her eyebrows. “Now that you’ve fixed my toilet, what can I do for you, Staff Sergeant?”
    Back to business, he thought. “Now that I’ve fixed your toilet, I figure you should call me Luke.”
    “All right. Luke.” She hesitated over the name, like it didn’t taste quite right in her mouth. “What can I do for you?”
    He sighed. “I need a picture of Dawn.”
    “A picture.”
    “Yeah. For Taylor. Mom found one in my old yearbook.” He shook away the memory of her smiling face, so young, so alive,
Jesus, we were both so young, don’t think about that.
“But I was hoping you maybe had something more recent.”
    “That’s an excellent idea.” Her voice warmed. “The pictures in the office—the pictures on Dawn’s desk—are all of Taylor. But the Simpsons must have pictures of Dawn.”
    “Yeah.” He kept his face, his voice neutral. “I asked them already.”
    “You did.” Her tone invited him to say more.
    “Before I came here.”
    She tilted her head. “I take it they were not responsive.”
    You’ve taken everything else from us. We’re not giving you a damn thing
.
    “Not really,” he said.
    Kate studied him, like she could see inside his head to read the things he would not say. “In that case, I had everything of Dawn’s put in storage after I cleaned out her house. I know there are pictures. Whole scrapbooks of them, actually.”
    “In storage?” He’d never thought about storage. Never thought about much of anything except getting the kid settled with his parents so he could get back to his unit. “That’s kind of expensive.”
    “I didn’t take the cost from the estate, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”
    Man, she was prickly. Or maybe she thought he was questioning her decision. He’d served under officers like that, guys who wouldn’t back up their NCOs, who had to micromanage and interfere and pick at every little thing. If her old man had been one of them, that would be enough to drive anybody on the defensive. “I meant . . . I figured Dawn’s stuff would be with her parents.”
    “Oh.” She turned pink. “No. The contents of the house are part of the estate. As long as Taylor’s guardianship was still unsettled . . . Dawn’s brother kept asking me how much I thought everything was worth. I didn’t want Dawn’s things to wind up in a garage sale before Taylor had a chance to go through them.”
    You’ve taken everything else from us
 . . .
    He could sympathize with the Simpsons’ desire to hold on to their