"I'm not so sure the general's wife would have agreed." Julia twirled the flower between two fingers, her laugh too high, too thin.
But he'd take care of that soon enough. The wait had strung them both tight. Time to get her alone.
Zach swung open the front door and followed her along the brick walkway to Julia's sedan. Street lights hummed, illuminating a path to their car. The inky sky glinted with a partial moon and the occasional airliner in flight, but it held none of his planes tonight.
He had hours left before he turned on that radio again, and he intended to make full use of every minute.
Holding the door open for Julia, he tracked the mesmerizing glide of her legs as she slid them into the car. She dropped the flower on her lap. On her thighs. In ten more minutes, he'd be grazing her bare skin with those soft petals.
Zach shut the door and beat a path around the hood.
Behind the wheel, he looked over his shoulder to back out of the parking lot. Almost in the clear.
Julia pleated her red wrap between her fingers for three stop signs before she broke the silence. "I called home again at ten, and Shelby sounded okay."
"Good thinking." The fifteen mile-an-hour speed limit through base housing had his foot twitching. With any luck his daughter would be asleep by the time they hit the driveway.
"Shelby checked on Patrick for me while we talked, and he was sleeping soundly. She even put the cordless phone up to his face so I could hear his sweet little baby breaths.
Isn't it funny how I can recognize my child just by the way he breathes?"
"Parenthood has a way of changing the way we see things." Damn but he wished he could figure out how to fix things with Shelby, but an ice cream cone and trip to the park didn't cut it anymore.
"The parenthood thing still feels so new to me. I second-guess all those instincts. I had a great time tonight, but I couldn't stop thinking about the children. What do you plan to say to Shelby about Pam?"
Say to Shelby? He'd already tried, for all the good it had done. "I'll talk to her tomorrow after band."
He pulled into the driveway behind his truck. Three minutes to take-off. Zach reached for the door.
Julia stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Pam showing up out of the blue like that was tough for both the girls." She traced the silver band circling the wrist of his uniform jacket. "How are you?"
Sexually frustrated as hell. "How am I what?"
"About Pam coming back."
The muscles along his arm flexed beneath her touch. "It doesn't affect me in any way other than how it affects my children. Pam and I were over a long time ago. The divorce was only a formality."
He didn't want to discuss Pam, especially now. Zach fingered one of those spiraling curls.
"Jules, let's talk about something else."
"We can't pretend she's not back."
"I'm not saying we should." The three-minute wait suddenly promised to stretch into at least an hour.
Okay, so Julia would need a slower pace to relax, thanks to Pam's surprise return. He could handle that, even found the revised plan for seducing Julia had definite merits.
Through the windshield, his tarp-covered Harley loomed, offering the perfect way to romance his free-spirited wife.
Zach bolted from the car, calling over the roof to Julia. "Wait right there. Don't go inside yet."
He unlocked the kitchen door, ducking into the darkened kitchen. The television droned from the next room. "Shel," he called, tugging his leather jacket off the coat tree by the door, "everything going okay?"
A rustling sounded from the family room just before Shelby shuffled into the kitchen.
Rumpled and bleary-eyed, she shoved a hand through her mussed dark hair.
"Everything's cool, Colonel. Patrick took a bottle at about nine, but went right back to sleep." She pulled the nursery monitor from her pocket, Patrick's steady sighs filled the silent kitchen. "Hear?"