Page 17 of Honk if You Love Real Men (Tempting SEALs 1)

“You’re sure?”

“Mmm.” Estrella felt guilty for withholding Jesse’s confession about his stint in prison, but she wasn’t comfortable revealing it either, especially when she didn’t know the full story. She didn’t need to look any more inconsistent, either. That she’d run from his tattoos but not his prison record made no sense.

“Before you noticed the tattoos,” Brenda said, picking up one of the flat hard sugar cookies Estrella had put on a plate. She had bought a package of them for ninety-nine cents at the corner market. Her mother would be appalled, but between work and school, she had no time for niceties like baking.

Brenda finished crunching and returned to the question she’d started. “Before the tats, how did you feel about Drum? I mean Jesse.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I was only feeling.”

“Knowing you, that’s probably a good thing.”

“Wait, now. Mindless sex with a guy I barely knew—how can that be good?”

“Sometimes it just is. ‘Cause that’s what a woman needs. And sometimes—” Brenda looked at Estrella with her eyes crinkling into mascara-caked slits. “—it leads to the real thing. Hot chemistry is there for a reason, you know?”

“We’re not ‘meant to be,’ if that’s what you think. He turned me on from the window of a passing bus. That’s hardly a grand romantic beginning.”

“Twenty-one years ago, I met Lou in the men’s washroom of the Sunshine Superette. The ladies’ was clogged as usual. I came out of a stall with a piece of tissue on my shoe and he was at the urinal.”

“And it was love at first sight?”

“It was chemistry. But I was halfway gone when he had the decency to wash his hands before coming after me.”

Estrella chuckled. “Thanks for cheering me up.”

“Maybe you want to spend some time thinking about why you overlooked the tattoos in the first place, and if that’s really why you stopped.”

“That’s all I’ve done for the past two days. Maybe I actually need to stop thinking.”

“And start, oh, I dunno, living?”

Estrella wanted to protest, but she couldn’t. Until Jesse, she’d been existing, which had been about all that she’d thought she could handle. He’d made her want so much more.

Sunday night at Rosa’s Mexicali was Jesse’s favorite way to finish off the weekend. The partying crowd was absent, leaving the die-hard regulars and the occasional newcomer who looked amazed to have found chili-colored walls and tango dancers pulsing away inside a building with such a drab exterior.

On Sunday night, the band was generally coping with the remnants of their hangovers. They played only slow songs with a lot of desultory sax and more thumps and brush-sweeps than hard drumming. The multicolored lights were toned down to a warm glow and Jesse could hide out in a roomy corner booth with a plate of empanadas and salsa and not be bothered.

Except, tonight, by Sweet Tea. “What about that one?” he said, aiming his beer bottle at a hoochie whose breasts threatened to spill out of her top every time she leaned over to filch from a friend’s plate. Her hair was brushed forward around her face, as if being past forty were a crime she was trying not to be fingered for. “She’s pretty.”

Jesse thought of Estrella’s breasts, soft and real. He could still feel them in his hands, taste them against his tongue, like sweet plums. “You can have her.”

“She don’t want an old man like me.”

“You never know.”

“You’re the one she’s checking out.”

“Tell her I’m taken.”

Tea burped against the back of his hand. “What’s that? You’re taken?”

Yeah, taken with Estrella, who didn’t want him. “I didn’t mean anything,” Jesse said. He’d had two beers, the chipotle salsa was a green puddle and he was getting maudlin. Time to go.

He didn’t move. Weighed down by the block of lead that had been lodged in his stomach ever since Estrella had stared at him with fear in her eyes. There had been a watchfulness about her all along, but he’d sensed she was toying with the aura of risk, letting it excite her. What had happened in the elevator was different.

Jesse grazed his knuckles over the tattoo on his right forearm. Different, and senseless.

“I like the looks of that redhead at the table under the window,” Tea said, grinning. “She’s built for my speed. But that’s gotta be her husband with her.”

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