Free Hungry Heart: Konigsburg, Texas, Book 8 by Meg Benjamin

during the day. And my sister-in-law and my cousins in Dripping Springs helped out some.”
    His dark eyes were warm. “Do you miss her?”
    She nodded. “She was tired and she was ready to go. But yeah, I miss her. She was a big part of my life.”
    He moved his hand across the table, close enough that she could feel the heat of his skin, almost but not quite touching.
    “What about your family?” she murmured.
    He shrugged. “Two brothers. Three sisters. More cousins than I can count. All of them living around here. My folks are sort of in the middle of it all, but that’s what they want. They’re natural grandparents.”
    She took a quick bite of her chicken, moving her hand away from his a little reluctantly. “Are you the oldest?”
    He shook his head, smiling. “I’m the baby, believe it or not.”
    She grinned back. “I know you played football in high school. Did you go on to college after that?”
    He shook his head again, his smile beginning to fade. “I had some offers for football scholarships, but I wasn’t interested in school. I went into the army instead.”
    “Oh.” She watched him take a bite of hamburger. “Did you… Were you in the war?”
    He nodded. “Iraq. Two tours. I was a Ranger.”
    A Ranger. She stared down at her plate. Rangers were damned impressive. Also long-term, as a rule. “You didn’t want to make the army your career?”
    “Not so much, as it turned out. It’s a tough job, plus you run into a lot of idiots, many of them your superior officers. I got tired after a while.”
    He’d also probably seen more than his share of death and destruction. But she figured he didn’t need to talk about that if he didn’t want to. “Is that when you came back to Konigsburg?”
    He sighed. “Nope. I was with the WWE for a couple of years. Only then it was the WWF.”
    She blinked. Of all the answers he might have given, that wasn’t one she’d expected. “You were a wrestler?”
    He nodded. “They wanted a villain. I obliged. Fits my character, I guess.”
    She wasn’t sure what to say about that exactly. “That’s…surprising.”
    The corners of his mouth edged up in a dry grin. “Which? The fact that I was a wrestler or the fact that I was a villain?”
    She managed a grin of her own. “Both, sort of. Did you like it?”
    “It was okay. Got kind of boring after a while.”
    “Boring?” Being pounded by men as large as he was every night was boring? Well, maybe so.
    “Yeah. It’s sort of the same thing all the time, the same act.” He shrugged. “And I got tired of the hype after a while. The whole giving interviews in character crap.”
    “So then what did you do?”
    “Cashed in my chips.” Another dry grin. “I had a lot of chips as it turned out. Came back to Konigsburg. Met Tom Ames.”
    “You met Tom Ames. And went to work for him?”
    He sighed. “Yeah. Sort of.”
    Something about that didn’t compute, maybe the idea of the former Ranger and wrestling star settling in as a bouncer at a tavern. But asking him about it also sounded unbearably nosy. “Do you like it here?” she found herself asking instead.
    He raised an eyebrow. “You mean here as in the Coffee Corral?”
    She shook her head. “Here as in Konigsburg. You don’t find it boring being back here after all you’ve done?”
    He stared down thoughtfully at the beer bottle in his hand. “For me, boring means routine . Doing the same thing every day, every night. I don’t like that much—that kind of boredom can get to you. Make you do stupid things. But Konigsburg usually isn’t routine. It may be nuts sometimes, but it isn’t routine.” He smiled up at her again. “What about you?”
    She cut another bite of chicken. “I like Konigsburg. That’s why I’m still living here instead of Austin.”
    “Austin’s where your main office is?”
    She nodded. “That’s the regional lab. Right now I’m sort of running a Hill Country office out of my car, along with the storefront