Touch Me Tender (Alpha Squad Book 1) Read online

  Touch Me Tender

  Alpha Squad Series

  Amy J. White

  Copyright © 2020 by Amy J. White

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced by any form or by any electronic and mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This book may not be redistributed to others for commercial and non-commercial purposes.

  Contents

  1. Lydia

  2. Drew

  3. Lydia

  4. Drew

  5. Lydia

  6. Drew

  7. Lydia

  8. Drew

  9. Lydia

  10. Drew

  Epilogue I

  Epilogue II

  About the Author

  Also by Amy J. White

  Join Amy’s Mailing List

  Lydia

  Just two more hours! Two more hours and I could clock out, maybe spot that stray cat that had been hanging around the dumpster. Two more hours and I could get out of my worn out, non-slip shoes and for ten blissful minutes stand under a shower as hot as I could handle. Then I'd have a whole fifty minutes to pack up the sewing orders I'd finished. If I timed it right I'd be able to drop off all the orders before the start of my shift at the breakfast bar. But maybe, just maybe, if the gods of scheduling aligned, I'd have a day off sometime in the next two months.

  Don't get me wrong, I never meant to have three jobs. But when you were twenty-four and no one cared about the double degree I had in fashion and history or the 3.7 GPA that I had bled for —literally bled for, there were a lot of needles in fashion classes. Well, no one cared but the bill collectors. They cared that I'd spent $26,000 for my diploma. But they didn't care I hadn't been able to find a job willing to pay me more than $8/hr. So there I was, in the middle of my ninth 17-hour day in a row, when they walked in.

  I knew military guys when I saw them. Zoey's Diner was less than twenty-five minutes from the base and they were always easy to pick out. It wasn't the uniform. Half the time they didn't even come in wearing them. It was the Ken-doll haircuts and the dog tags and the swagger. Military men moved differently. As if they were always on watch- always prepared. I didn't know what enemy they were expecting to find in the red leather booths and cups of hour-old coffee, but, even though they were inclined to tip well, but thanks to their loud, frat-boy attitudes and over-inflated egos? I was absolutely done with the lot of them. Okay, to be honest, I was done with men in general, but military ones especially.

  “Lydia, table four,” Amelia, my boss who was as done with me as I was done with military guys, told me.

  “Do I have to?” I asked.

  She fixed her dark eyes on me, planted a hand on her hip. “I already work your shifts around your ridiculous schedule, just take the table.”

  I tried not to sigh. It wasn't my fault that I was over-scheduled and underpaid. I adjusted my apron, put on my professional smile, and approached the table. All of them, save for one, looked to be in their early twenties, so roughly around my age. I wasn't blind enough to think they weren't hot. They were. People could be hot and still be assholes. Especially if you were a girl as big as I was.

  “Evening,” I said, trying to sound pleasant. “What can I do for you?”

  I could have regretted the words the moment they came out of my mouth. I knew better. Never ask a group of riled up men what you could do for them.

  One of them, tan and dark haired with a massive swirling tattoo up one big muscled arm; leaned forward. He tried to tense his muscles to show off. I ignored it.

  “Well,” he said, his tone dripping with double meanings, “how about we start with your name and end with-”

  He cut off sharply as the guy next to him jabbed him in the ribs. They looked similar. It wasn't just the dog tags and the haircuts. There was a similarity in the shape of their jaw and the shape of their eyes. The guy who did the elbowing, I decided was way more attractive than the one who had opened his mouth. Elbow-guy had sandy-blonde hair and eyes that weren't quite blue and weren't quite gray.

  “Five specials,” he said.

  “Five burgers,” I answered, jotting it down before anyone could argue with him. “Fries or tots?”

  "Fries," they all chorused as if by elbow-guy having set the line, they were all going to tow it.

  “Any drinks?”

  They each gave me their drink orders without making any unwanted flirty comments and I moved to hand off the order to the kitchen. Burgers were fast, I thought, maybe I could get them out of there as quickly as possible and finish up my night. I paused long enough to count my tips. At barely $60 I wasn't sure that it had been worth it to pick up a shift on my only night off in a month and a half. I tried to think that every little bit counts. I have never been good at lying to myself.

  "Hey!" the dark haired one with the tattoo called. "Hurry up! We are thirsty warriors!"

  The guys, and even some of the other patrons, laughed. There was table slapping and several shoulder shoves. I hid my rolling eyes and filled a pitcher of tea and a pitcher of lemonade and stacked them on a tray with cups.

  “Careful now, hun…” He said. “Don't drop it.”

  “Hey,” elbow-guy said, “drop it.”

  He had a good voice, I thought, it was deep and warm. I bet he had a nice laugh too.

  I'd never dropped a drink in my life. I'd been waiting tables, off and on, since I was 16. I knew my job.

  “Might have an easier job of it if your pants weren't so tight,” he said, eyeing the heavy swell of my hip.

  That did it. I knew how big I was. I knew that my pants were snug. Do you have any idea how much it costs to shop in the plus-size section? I couldn't afford a new pair of pants every time my body decided it wanted to add a little more to my hips. I certainly didn't need a guy who had to run, jump, and shoot for my country to tell me that I was filling them out a little too much today. I wasn't here for that nonsense.

  "I'm sorry, sir, what was that?" I fixed his gaze with mine. Out of the corner of my vision I saw elbow-guy, who seriously needed a better name, watching me. I could feel the weight of it. I tried to ignore how it made my skin hum and focused my attention on jerk-face.

  “I'm just saying,” jerk-face said, sitting back, oh so confident and so very sure about himself. “That maybe you should-”

  I didn't wait to hear the rest of it. I'd been on my feet for over sixteen hours. I wanted a shower. I wanted to go home, pack up my shipments, and get some sleep. I wanted my other job to call me and say that they were shut down but I was still getting paid because of some needed tax fluke that they'd only just now discovered so that I could turn my four hour nap into a full seven hours of sleep for the first time since I turned 19. What I didn't want was to listen to some overpaid, gun-happy frat boy telling me that my pants didn't fit my curves the way he thought they should.

  So I did what any other self-respecting veteran of waitressing would do. I scooped up the pitcher of tea and sent its contents soaring at the guy. The better part of 64 fluid ounces made a beautiful arc before soaking his too white short-sleeved shirt. A tiny wave swept up and caught him right in the face. His eyes went wide, his smile deflated. I absolutely expected him to get up and start screaming at me. Maybe he would have. But elbow-guy put a steady hand on his shoulder.

  "Drew," jerk-face said, and
I decided then and there that they weren't just battle brothers, but blood brothers because there was something familial about his tone. "Did you just see that?"

  “I did,” Drew, which was a way better name than elbow-guy, said. Honestly his voice was the sexiest thing I'd ever heard. How so much feeling could be put into two simple words, I didn't even know. “Mission accomplished.”

  What did that even mean? I gave him a look, and he returned it with a steady, level gaze before he stood up.

  Drew

  This had been a bad idea from the start and I knew it. We were going to go to the Wing Bar across the street, but Leon had caught me staring at the waitress at the diner. I couldn't help it. She was fucking hot.

  Putting on the uniform and moving to a busy base meant that I'd seen more women in the past week than I'd ever seen in my small, cow-tipping town in West Virginia. Multiply that week by two years, and add on two tours of duty overseas, and I'd lost count of the women I'd noticed. Not one of them, in this country or any other, held a candle to the tired, pissed-off waitress in front of me.

  Maybe it was the dark, curly hair that she'd pinned back with pencils or the way her khakis clung to the kind of curves a man would beg to get lost in. Maybe it was those soft lips and how easy it was to picture them slipping down around my cock that was doing its’ very best to make its needs known. I'd wanted her, and every guy in the Screaming Demons squad knew it.

  “I could go for a double stack,” Leon had said, trying to get a rise out of me. He'd been doing that since we were kids.

  "Fuck off," I'd answered, without heat, probably because I was still staring. She was smiling at an old couple while she filled their cups before moving on to the next booth where she bent to clean something. I didn't know what because I was way too focused on the way she looked bent over a table.

  “What do you think - guys?” Leon grabbed me by the shoulders and shoved me towards the dinner.

  “If it gets the Corporal laid,” Gardner said, linking his arm through my other one and pushing us through the door.

  “Nothing gets the Corporal laid,” Stone, Gardner's battle buddy, laughed. “You remember that club we went to?”

  “The Country club; which the Staff Sergeant made us go to?”

  “Made is a strong word,” Gardner pushed the door open and the hot waitress looked up from what she was doing. Her eyes narrowed, and I knew it was going to be a mistake. It was a mistake I wanted to make.

  “We were outnumbered,” Stone was saying, “Five to fucking one man. They were throwing themselves at you.”

  “The uniform gets them all wet,” Leon smirked. I wanted to punch him in the face. It wouldn't be the first time. Leon liked to push buttons.

  “And what did First Dixon do?” Gardner plopped himself down in the booth hard enough to make his glasses bounce on his nose. He knew, but he was pushing.

  "I am going to have you all running so damn far tomorrow. Fifty-pound packs. Ten miles minimum."

  They all grinned and kept talking about how I wasn't interested in the slew of women at the bar a few nights back. I wasn't going to argue. I hadn't been. My dick had been limp from the time we got there until the time we left. But now it was grinding against my zipper as she approached. It was probably illegal to have hips like that.

  "If you don't get her number, I'm going to," Leon said. He had a mile-wide grin on his lips.

  “I'll kill you,” I said, keeping my voice low. Leon didn't believe me, but I'd never meant the threat more.

  “Girls can't resist Second Dixon.”

  He hated being Second Dixon, but that's what everyone in the squad called him. I'd been assigned to Screaming Demons first. It was simple as that, but Leon had never been able to keep his ego in check. Maybe I'd make him run suicides when he was done with the ten-mile runs.

  “Evening,” she said - her voice angelic. “What can I do for you?”

  My dick had a few ideas, but I kept them off my face. Women at work didn't like to be bothered. That's what my mom had taught me. I'd learned it, Leon hadn't.

  Leon opened his mouth and I decided that I was going to run him from sun up to sundown. I wasn't going to quit until he threw up what he'd eaten last week.

  “Specials,” I finally said, trying to keep everyone from joining my bother in the low key harassment of a waitress who looked like a goddamned goddess. An exhausted one, for sure, but a goddess none the less. I hoped that would be the end of it. I knew better.

  “Those pants look damn good,” Leon said as she walked away. “They'd look better around her ankles.”

  Justified homicide was a thing, right?

  “Shut the fuck up, Spec,” I said, reminding my brother that I outranked him. He didn't like that. He got that look in his eye, the look that said I'd gone and challenged him.

  “Yes, sir.” He gave me a meaningful salute. The kind where he only used one finger. Then he shouted at the waitress for drinks.

  “I'm going to kill you,” I said, almost sure it was true.

  Then he'd started talking about her pants. Before I could put my brother in his place, she did it. When I saw her grip shift on the pitcher, I knew what was going to happen. I saw the look in her eyes. I'd never seen a woman so determined. It was beautiful. I saw the stony resolve as the sweet tea went flying and hit Leon's chest, dead center.

  A tiny, evil smirk touched her lips and god damn it I knew I was in love. I wanted her to smirk at me like that right before she told me to fuck her senseless.

  “Lydia!” A voice boomed across the diner with all the power of a staff sergeant. An angry woman with eyes like fire was making her way across the restaurant, ready to kill. I jumped to my feet without thinking.

  “Trust me,” I said to the waitress.

  She blinked at me, startled. “What?”

  “Just trust me.”

  I didn't say anything else, just stepped ever so slightly in front of her, intercepting the incoming enemy.

  “Evening, ma'am,” I said with a smile. “I'm sorry about that.”

  Despite being all of five feet tall to my six-foot-three she managed to stare me down. “Excuse me?”

  "I knocked the pitcher," I lied. It was the first time I could remember lying since I was seven. I didn't like to lie, it complicated things. But looking at the waitress, I decided it was worth it. "I didn't mean too. We just got back from a tour and I'm still jet-lagged. I was reaching for a cup and I hit the whole damn tray."

  She didn't believe me, but I could see that she didn't want to argue either. “Is that so?”

  “It is, I'm very sorry; I'll pay for the mess.”

  I reached in my wallet and pulled out a fifty. I set it in the waitress' hand and watched her blink.

  “Alright,” the manager said. “Thank you for your service.”

  “Yeah…. Thanks.” The waitress looked up at me, shocked. I knew she wasn't thanking me for the uniform.

  Lydia

  He was waiting outside the diner when I clocked off. Somehow, I knew he would be. I hadn't said anything after tossing a drink on his buddy. Victoria had taken the table over and I'd finished up the last two hours of my shift without spilling anything else. I'd made another $20 in tips. It wasn't much, but I'd make it work. I didn't have a choice.

  I stepped outside and there he was, leaning against a truck that had probably been built before I was born. His thumbs were tucked in the loops of his pants. The weight of his grip pulled at the fabric just enough that there was a half an inch of bare skin between his white t-shirt and his fatigues.

  “Hey,” he said with a little smile.

  I crossed my arms across my chest and gave him a bland look. "I have mace, and I'm not afraid to use it."

  He held his hands up, palms out. Tucked between two fingers was a pair of hundred dollar bills.

  "I just thought you deserved a tip."

  I raise my brow. “Two hundred bucks is pretty steep for a fifty dollar check.”

  “If it helps,
this all comes from Leon.”

  “That big jerk!”

  He smiled again. It was a good smile. It made him look less rigid. “That's the one. Leon is...difficult.”

  I hesitated, but reached out and took the money. I might be pissed off about everything, but not pissed off enough to turn down two-hundred bucks.

  “Thanks for standing up for me,” I said.

  "I mean if you really want to say thanks-"

  I didn't let him finish. With a sneer I slapped the money against his chest. "Jesus, you military guys are all the same, aren't you? What is it? You think because I shop in the plus-sized section I'll be grateful for your muscle-bound attention? What am I to you? Low hanging fruit?" I gave his chest a shove, putting my weight behind it. He was forced back a whole step. I took it as a victory as I stormed past him. I was too tired for this crap. "Fuck off, dick head."

  “Wait, wait.” He stepped around me, blocking off my escape. There was just so much of him. His shoulders were broad and everything about him was shaped to perfection. “I was just going to ask you to dinner.”

  I narrowed my gaze. "Is this where you call yourself a buffet?"

  His eyes went wide, and it was suddenly very clear to me that he hadn't been thinking that at all.

  “Would that...work?” he asked. “I don't ask women out a lot.”

  I scoffed and walked around him, digging in my purse for some keys. “Why? Because they are too busy throwing themselves at you and telling you how gorgeous you are? And how you are so strong and brave?”

  He laughed but followed alongside me as I went to my car. It was about as old as his truck, but not as well taken care of.

  “You think I'm gorgeous?” He sounded pleased with himself.