Trevor laughed, the sound a deep, sexy rumble. Jenna really liked it when he did that. It made her happy.
“I grew up in Virginia. Near Richmond, actually,” he said, taking a much smaller bite of his second doughnut, apparently wanting to make it last. “I come from a big family with three brothers and two sisters, and we were all raised in a big farmhouse that has been in the family for over a hundred years.”
“That must have been cool,” Jenna said, even though she had a hard time imagining that many siblings. “Growing up on a farm, I mean.”
He shrugged. “I guess it was, for the most part. Don’t get me wrong. I had a great childhood. But if there’s one thing I remember about growing up in a house full of six kids, it was the constant noise. There wasn’t a day that passed when one of uswasn’t shouting or arguing about something. After eighteen years of it, the constant noise started to get to me.”
Jenna caught Cindy’s eye across the diner and motioned for her to bring another serving of doughnuts. Trevor had already inhaled five of the things while she was still nursing hers, and he looked like he might reach over and nab a bite of hers any second.
“So…what, you left home and ran off to Dallas to join the SWAT team?” she asked him.
“You make it sound like I ran off to join the circus,” he said with a chuckle. “But no, it wasn’t quite like that. When I made the decision to leave home, I had no idea what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go. I only knew that I needed to get out of the town where I’d spent my whole life. College wasn’t what I was looking for, so I ended up joining the army.”
Huh. Jenna wasn’t completely shocked at hearing he’d enlisted in the military. Well…maybe a little…but only because she’d stayed in Trevor’s apartment for almost a week when she was in Dallas and had never seen any pictures or mementos that would lead her to think he’d ever been in the army. It hadn’t come up in any of their conversations either. Though, if she was being honest, Jenna would have to admit that she’d been a little distracted most of the time she was there, upset by thoughts ofHannah and the horrible things Connor had said during their argument.
“I didn’t know you were in the army,” she said. “Were you a cop? What are they called…MPs?”
“Yeah, they’re called Military Police—MPs,” he said with a smile, helping himself to another doughnut that Cindy had brought over.
She’d long since given up on trying to understand how a man could eat like Trevor did and have a body that looked like his. He must have the metabolism of a wild animal or something. It should have been a crime.
“But no, I wasn’t an MP in the army,” he added after taking a sip of iced tea. “I was a mechanic, actually. I always loved working on cars and the equipment on the farm, so I thought it would be a good fit.”
“I guess that explains the sweet classic Ford Thunderbird you told me you refurbished.” She smiled as she remembered how much fun she’d had riding around Dallas with him, the top down on that cherry-red car.
“I found that car shortly after I became a patrol officer in the Dallas PD,” Trevor said, his mouth curving into a fond smile. “I’d been a cop for all of a month when I got called out to help search for a missing kid. I ended up finding her trapped in a rusted-out shell of a car buried in the middle of a dilapidated barn on the back side of her family’s property. Her parents wanted the barn bulldozed immediately, so Iasked if they’d let me haul out the old car and whatever parts I could find before they did. Six years later, that rusted shell is the mint 1957 Thunderbird you enjoyed riding around in so much.”
Jenna had at least a hundred questions regarding that story but decided to start with the part he’d obviously skipped over. “Wait a minute, I think we missed a step. How did you go from the army to being a cop in Dallas?”
She could see the hesitation in his eyes, even as he attempted to hide it. That immediately spiked her curiosity, and she wondered what he could be hiding.
“I was in the army for four years,” he said slowly, focusing all his attention on the last few pieces of his bacon-covered doughnut. “But I ended up getting hurt during a deployment and made the decision to get out.”
“You got hurt?” Her heart started to thump uncontrollably for no reason that made sense to her. “Was it bad? Are you okay now?”
“Relax,” he said, his expression soft as he gazed at her. “I won’t try and pretend what happened to me was fun, but I got through it and I’m fine now. Afterward, staying in the army wasn’t an option, though. I’d been assigned to Fort Hood prior to the deployment, which is only about two hours from Dallas, so when I came back to do all the out-processing paperwork, it made sense to look around there for something else to do. One thingled to another, and I ended up becoming a cop. A few years later, I got recruited by SWAT.”
Jenna didn’t miss the fact that Trevor seemed to be leaving out most of the story. Her first instinct was to ask an endless stream of questions about exactly how he’d been injured, how bad those injuries had been, why he hadn’t gone back home to Richmond after getting out of the army, and why he’d become a cop instead of doing any other job.
But before she could open her mouth and start interrogating him, she took a second to remember that there had been a significant event in her own life that she didn’t like talking about. This was probably the same kind of thing, and from her own experience, she knew that trying to get a person to talk about a subject they’d rather not was the fastest way to shut them down for good.
Deciding to table all her questions for the moment, Jenna instead asked him about his time in SWAT and the people he worked with. It was immediately obvious that his teammates were special to him. From the way he smiled when he talked about them, it was like they were a second family to him.
They chatted about that until Cindy showed up with the check and a cardboard box filled with the takeout meals. Jenna reached for the bill, but Trevor got to it before she did, swiping the paper away seconds before her fingers got close.
“Okay, you can pay for dinner, but I’m paying forthe takeout meals,” she said firmly, even as Trevor handed Cindy his credit card.
“Let me pay. Please,” he said when Jenna held out her own card. “It’s the least I can do considering the fact that you’re letting me stay at your place this week and eat up all your food. Besides, I’ll never be able to thank you enough for introducing me to maple bacon doughnuts. I’m not exaggerating when I say you’ve quite likely changed my whole life.”
Jenna snorted at that, especially the stuff about the doughnuts. Still, she couldn’t come up with a way to argue his point, so she let it go. And if she was being honest with herself, she sort of liked the idea of him stepping up and paying for dinner. Guys she dated didn’t do anything like that, not unless they thought they were going to get something out of it. Something told her that Trevor had never entertained a thought like that in his life.
A few minutes later, Cindy came back with his card, telling them to have a great night. Trevor stood, collecting up the box of meals. “All right, let’s go hand out this food.”
Jenna smiled as they walked out of the diner and started down the sidewalk. Then she remembered she was essentially lying to him about why they were going to the Skid Row district, and a good portion of her happiness faded. She tried to tell herself that the end justified the means, but that didn’t seem to help.
CHAPTER 3
When he and Jenna got to Skid Row, the area cluttered with tents and makeshift lean-to shelters, she led Trevor toward the back alleys instead of the larger clusters of people scattered along the main street. She waved at a few people and said hello to others, handing out meals along the way. But mostly, she focused on where she was going, every step taking them deeper and deeper into the darkness as she moved her head from side to side.
