“If I had to guess? They’re not watching TV, they’re having wild gorilla sex.”
She thought about that and sighed, sounding a little wistful.
Lucas took the bag of food from her hands and set it on the car. Then against his better judgment, he nudged her up against it. “Say the word and you could have the same thing for dinner.”
“I thought you were . . . done,” she said.
He met her gaze. “I thought so too, but apparently my brain and body aren’t in accord.”
The sound of someone ratcheting up a shotgun stopped him in his tracks. They both turned to the porch and, yep, there he was, Alan Malone sitting in his wheelchair on the porch. “How sure are you that thing isn’t ever loaded?” Lucas asked Molly.
“One hundred percent. But that isn’t a comfort if he decides you’re a threat because the military trained him how to kill a person with his bare hands without breaking a sweat.”
“Right. Something to remember,” Lucas murmured and lifted his hands off the man’s daughter and sent what he hoped was a reassuring smile as they walked up the path to the duplex.
“Hey, Dad,” Molly said in greeting.
“Baby,” he said, eyes never leaving Lucas.
“You remember Lucas?”
“Uh-huh.” Her dad casually lifted his gun and checked the site.
“Dad, stop that. He knows there aren’t any bullets in this house. You can’t intimidate him. And we aren’t staying. I’m going to put the food inside for you. Behave.”
Her dad didn’t answer, but she went inside anyway.
“So,” Alan said to Lucas.
“So.” Lucas mentally cracked his knuckles. It’d been a damn long time since he’d tried to impress a dad of any kind. “Nice evening, huh?”
“You going to do right by my daughter?”
Oh boy. He let out a breath and eyed the gun. “It’s not like that between us, sir.”
“Soldier, it’s always like that.”
“I like your daughter,” Lucas said carefully.
“Yes, I believe I heard just how much you like her when you offered her . . . what was it? . . . gorilla sex?”
Lucas grimaced. “It’s not like that either.” At least not anymore.
“So what is it like?”
Lucas drew a deep breath, because he was still coming to terms with the answer to that question. “I care about her very much.”
“Everyone cares about Molly. The question is, will you protect her?”
Finally, something he had an answer for. “With my life.”
Chapter 20
#Lobsterlove
After dropping the bag of food on her dad’s table, Molly stepped back outside onto the porch and caught Lucas’s answer.
I’d protect her with my life . . .
She stilled as a set of the warm fuzzies went through her, but then ruthlessly shrugged them off. They were done with that. “Let’s do this,” she said briskly, bending to brush a kiss over her dad’s jaw. “Love you, Dad.” And then she headed past Lucas, leaving him to catch up with her.
In twenty minutes they pulled into the Christmas Village.
“Close your eyes,” she said and pulled her elf costume from her bag. She shook it out. “And you just know something’s wrong with a costume when it fits into a small purse.”
Lucas let out what sounded suspiciously like a snort, but when she glanced over at him, he was blank-faced. “You’re still looking,” she said.
“I’ve seen it all already, remember?”
“Actually, no, you haven’t. We played assault with your friendly weapon in my dark living room. And then in your dark bedroom. You haven’t seen anything.”
He turned toward her in the driver seat, brows arched so high, they vanished into his hairline. “Assault with my friendly weapon?”
“Just close your damn eyes!”
Shaking his head, a small smile curving his mouth, he closed them. Suspicious, she stared at him for a long beat, and when he cracked one eye open and looked over, she pointed at him and said, “Aha!”
“You weren’t moving, I was just checking to make sure you weren’t sneaking off without me.”
“Maybe I was just being all stealthy and silent.”
He gave a soft, amused laugh. “Molly, you’re a lot of things, most of them really great, but you’ve never been stealthy or silent in all the time I’ve known you. Not even once.”
She was all kinds of insulted, but her mouth disconnected from her brain. “I can think of two occasions where I was silent,” she said.
Their gazes met and his heated as his mouth curved with a soft, affectionate smile. “Sorry, but you were most definitely not silent on either of those two occasions.”
She felt her face flame. “I was too!”
“I’ll give you that you didn’t exactly scream my name, but you did whimper it, all breathy and short of air. And you begged a little too, very sweetly I might add.” He paused and his smile widened. “That was my favorite part.”
Her entire body quivered. Stupid body. “Just . . . close your eyes!”
He did as she asked.
“No cheating,” she warned.
“I never cheat,” he said and she knew that was most certainly true.
He wasn’t a man who needed to cheat, at anything. He was honest to the core, almost brutally so. Still, she kept an eye on him as she quickly changed from Business Woman to Bingo Elf. “Okay,” she said when she was done imitating a contortionist to get into the costume. “I’ll be at bingo. I get a break in two hours. According to Mrs. Berkowitz and Mrs. White, that’s the same time that Louise goes on break. She’s the one who used to be an elf, but got a promotion and works in the office now. On her break, she walks to the woods and smokes two cigarettes, taking every second of her allotted twenty minutes. That’s when I’m going to go back into the office and snoop around while their laptops are in there, hopefully unguarded.”
“I’ll be with you.”
She nodded. This was not a surprise. What was a surprise was how much she knew she could count on him and how good that felt.
Dammit.
Lucas got out of the car and watched as Molly entered through the front gates, being waved through thanks to the costume.
He paid the entrance fee for himself and made sure Molly got into the bingo hall safely before he went wandering. He made his way through the grounds including all the booths, noting who was working where. The booths were run almost entirely by female elves, although there were a handful of male elves as well. Their costumes were shorts instead of a dress, and they were just as unfortunately snug in all the very wrong places.
There was a new addition since they’d last been here. A Christmas tree lot, worked by two teenage kids. All transactions seemed to be cash. In between the booths and the tree lot was another new area—a Santa photo booth. It sat empty. The sign said Santa would show at eight p.m.
The same time as Molly’s break.
Lucas circled around to the office trailer and spent some time staking it out. He could see through the two lit windows that the only people inside were Louise and Santa. At five to eight, Santa stood up and pulled on a red coat and wig and exited the trailer, stomping down the stairs and past Lucas in the bushes.
At two minutes to eight, he heard Molly come up from behind him to stand at his side.