His mouth twitched. “I see. And aren’t appreciative sounds just another word for moaning?”
Lacey considered arguing the point, but then dropped her face into her hands. “I can’t believe I did that. Kelsey teases me about doing it at home, but I never realized I did it in public. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said softly. “You have a nice moan. Feel free to do it as often as you like.”
Lacey dropped her hands to see Alex looking at her with a glint in his dark eyes. The way the candlelight was reflecting off them, it almost seemed like they were glowing. It was enough to send a little shiver through her and quickly had her forgetting why she’d been so embarrassed a moment ago.
They stared at each other for what might have been five minutes or five seconds. Either way, Lacey felt heat coalesce between her legs. She squeezed her thighs together under the table.
“Weren’t we talking about how you ended up in Dallas?” she asked.
She needed to get her mind on something other than the suddenly rising temperature in the restaurant.
“Were we?” His mouth edged up. “I thought we were talking about you moaning.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s what we were talking about before the waitress brought our appetizer,” she reminded him. “You mentioned you were from Rochester.”
For a moment, he looked as if he’d rather not change the subject, but then he broke eye contact and concentrated on using his fork to cut into his ravioli. “I grew up in Rochester, but then I left after graduating from high school to serve four years in the Marine Corps.”
She sipped her wine, forcing herself to pay close attention to his story. It was either that or think about exactly what Alex had meant when he said she had a nice moan.
“After I got out, I went back home to Rochester and became a police officer,” he continued. “A couple of years later, I ran into Sergeant Gage Dixon—the commander of the Dallas SWAT team. He offered me a job, and I took it. That was over four years ago, and I never looked back.”
Leave it to a guy to distill such an amazing amount of life down to a few sentences. Considering the fact that she’d never gotten the chance to leave Texas, she needed more details.
“Wait a minute.” She gestured with her fork. “Go back to the first part. What did you do in the Marines? Did you get to go anywhere overseas?”
He took another bite of ravioli before answering. “I was a sniper in the 1st Recon Battalion. And yes, I got to see the world. Not exactly the parts I would have preferred to see—mostly Iraq and Afghanistan. But I guess if I wanted to see vacation destinations, I should have gone to work for a cruise line.”
She didn’t know what a Recon Battalion was, but she understood the sniper part. That seemed like a difficult job.
“Did you ever have to…?” Lacey hesitated, abruptly realizing it probably wasn’t something she had a right to even bring up.
“Did I ever have to shoot anyone?” he finished softly, then nodded. “Yeah, I did. I try not to spend too much time thinking about the people who were in my scope, though. I prefer to focus on the people I saved by pulling that trigger. My fellow marines, soldiers, coalition forces, civilians who were just trying to get on with their lives—they lived because of the things I did.”
The words brought tears to her eyes, and she blinked them back. In a few simple sentences, Alex had admitted to taking on a responsibility that few people in the world would ever be asked to bear. Yet he’d seemed more impressed with her getting through college and taking care of her sister. He probably didn’t even see the disparity.
She cleared her throat. “Since you went back to Rochester, I’m assuming you have family there. Why’d you leave?”
He shrugged, pushing his empty appetizer plate away. That was when she realized he’d eaten the three big raviolis she’d left for him while she’d barely put a dent in the one she had.
“I’m not really close with my family,” he said. “I needed a change, and Dallas was it.”
Okay, that was a non-answer if she’d ever heard one. And she had, because she used them herself anytime people asked her about subjects she didn’t want to get into. Something serious had definitely happened in Rochester to get him to move halfway across the country. But Lacey didn’t push. She knew what it was like to carry a lot of baggage.
The waitress appeared with heaping plates of spaghetti and meatballs then, and as they started in on their entrees, Lacey asked Alex what he’d been doing since moving to Dallas. While she knew he was a SWAT cop, truthfully, she didn’t know what that entailed. Alex didn’t seem to mind talking about the subject, though she noticed he talked more about his teammates than about himself. No big shock there.
“So you’re a sniper and a paramedic in SWAT?” she asked. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but isn’t that a little strange?”
He casually shrugged as he twirled spaghetti around his fork. She couldn’t eat pasta that way. It would end up all over her lap.
“Not really,” he said. “When I was deployed, being able to help a marine who’d been shot or injured by an IED—improvised explosive device—was a crucial skill. That’s why I went through combat lifesaver training. It’s like being an EMT on the battlefield. When I joined SWAT, I was amazed at how many times I was the first person on the scene after someone had been injured. It just wasn’t in me to stand there and do nothing, but my combat lifesaving training wasn’t enough. I was just going to get my EMT basic certification, but my boss encouraged me to get my paramedic license. There are two of us on the team now, one on each squad.”
When he put it that way, it made sense.
Alex continued to entertain her with stories of the kind of work he did with SWAT, focusing more on the fun things he and his team did, not as much on the scary stuff that she doubted she wanted to know about anyway. It quickly became apparent that Alex loved his job as well as the other members of the team.
“They’re my family,” he said simply.
