Page 11 of Her Selfless Warrior (Omega Sky)
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Lark Sorenson rolledher shoulders as she slowly drove her rental car along Ohio Drive Southwest to Hains Point. Even in the cold weather, with the trees bereft of leaves, the place settled her. Here on the Point she could watch a gorgeous sunset and let her mind drift. It was a different world here in Washington D.C. than where she grew up in California.
“You’re not even listening to me, are you?” Amy sighed from the car’s speaker.
Lark shook her head to clear it and then looked down at the dash. “I am too. I even parked the car and everything, just so I could concentrate on you,” Lark protested.
Her best friend laughed. “I call bull-pucky, your mind was wandering. Where are you?”
“Hains Point.” Amy grew up in a not-so-nice part of Baltimore and as soon as she’d been old enough she’d gotten a crap apartment near the Capitol and started waiting tables; Amy knew D.C. like the back of her hand.
“What’s got you down?” Amy asked. “If you needed to watch the sunset, something must really be bothering you.”
“Hey, wait a minute, girly. Don’t even try it, we were talking about you.”
She heard Amy sigh. It was the second sigh in five minutes, things must be serious. Lark tried to cajole her friend to talk. “Come on, dish. Is it a guy? I hope it’s a man. You haven’t been laid in so long, I think certain parts of your anatomy might be developing cobwebs.”
Amy snorted. “That’s not how it works, Lark, haven’t you been keeping up? Actually, your hymen grows back.”
Lark shouted with laughter. When she finally got herself back under control, she focused on the dashboard again. “Nope, hadn’t heard that one,” she admitted.
“That’s because you’ve gotten some in the last eighteen months. However, I don’t think Jerry really counts.”
Lark sat up straighter in the Chevy Malibu rental car. “Jerry counted. I was with him for the whole summer.”
“I’m not talking about the fact that you boinked him for three months, I’m talking about the fact that you managed to pick yet another teeny-tiny little dweeb. When are you going to date someone with a little backbone? Hell, all the guys you choose, you could squish with your pinky finger.”
“That issonot true. Think about Claus back in college, he was six foot five.”
“He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds if he weighed an ounce!” Amy exclaimed.
“He did triathlons, he was fit,” Lark defended the poor guy.
“His collarbones were sexier than yours, and his elbows were so pointy that I almost lost an eye that time we went to the movies.”
It was a lost cause. Amy was right. There was not one guy she’d dated that she couldn’t have fought off in a dark alley. Now it was her turn to sigh.
“I heard that. You sighed. Don’t tell me it just registered that you’ve been choosing men who aren’t just pathetic, they’re pathepic!”
“Huh? Are you hanging out with teenagers again?”
“I’m hanging out with people in their early twenties, and if you weren’t so career-minded and dating such weak-assed-boring men, you’d know that pathepic means pathetic to the epic degree!”
“Amy, I’m putting a gun to my head if I start dating some hipster who knows that word. And anyway, I’m surrounded by manly men. Think about it, I know some of the toughest men on the planet. There’s the Brits I was just hanging out with last month. You can’t call them pathepic or dweebs. Hell, I don’t want to think about what they could destroy with their pinkies.”
Lark was met by silence.
“Amy are you still there?”
“Sorry, I was fantasizing about those commandos and their fingers, and how I could make use of them.”
Lark flushed. Suddenly she wasn’t thinking of British special operatives, nope, now she was thinking about a certain big, blond Navy SEAL.
She sighed again.
At least those thoughts took her mind off her informant for a moment. For the first time in five months, Lark had caught Candy in a lie and now she couldn’t get ahold of her. Something was wrong.
“I heard that sigh. Come on, ’fess up. Tell me what’s bothering you.” Amy pestered her again.
