A Santini Christmas Read Free Page A

he’d seen Joey. Music was blaring on the jukebox and there was an argument over at the pool tables. He ignored it all. It was easy to do with the object of his attention being so interesting.
    “ Earth to Papa,” Andrews said. He glanced at the Texan and realized his friend had been trying to get his attention for a while.
    Papa sipped his whisky nonchalantly and asked, “What?”
    “ We were talking about hitting Scores later.”
    He made a non-committal sound when he heard Joey laugh at something one of the idiotic college boys said. Dammit, she was avoiding their table as if they had the plague. He knew why the college boys were flirting with her. Part of it was the job. Any young man getting served beer would flirt with a waitress. They always hoped to either get her phone number or free beer. Or both. The other part of it was the woman.
    Tall and slender, she definitely demanded attention as she walked through the bar. There was something else about her, something that drew the eye toward her.
    “ Santini,” Johnson said.
    “ What?”
    He’d loved the sassy long ponytail that swung back and forth as she hurried around the bar. She wasn’t overly flirty and he realized that maybe she didn’t realize just how sexy she was. Natural beauty was always a turn on for him. He didn’t go for a lot of makeup on a woman. Just not his thing. He also liked the fact she wasn’t super skinny. Especially that full, round ass of hers. The way her bellbottom jeans hugged her curves was enough to make a man beg. Hell, the top she wore kept moving so he was playing peekaboo with her belly button.
    “ You’re going to give her the creeps if you keep watching her like that.”
    He sighed and looked back at his buddies. The four of them had known each other at Annapolis, but not that well. Making it through training together had drawn them closer. The fact they all got stationed together at Camp LeJeune recently just added to that. Still, they made him feel old. They were all around the same age, give or take a year, but being the oldest of four boys made him look at things differently. And now that he had seen Joey, he didn’t feel the need to head out to a strip joint.
    “ You can go on without me. I’m going to spend some time talking to Sam.”
    Johnson, a bruiser of a guy from Idaho, “God, we’ve lost our leader, men. He’s all soft on a woman.”
    Papa didn’t say anything. He knew they didn’t understand, and explaining the Santini curse to them wasn’t going to help. It would just make them mock him even more. As a Santini, he understood it well. When he had seen her, he’d felt like he’d had the air knocked out of him. After that, he didn’t remember much.
    “ I told you Sam and my dad went way back.”
    The other shock of the evening was seeing just how old Sam had gotten. Papa’s father had aged, but Sam…the years had weighed heavy on the Marine. Papa knew both Sam and Thelma had taken the death of Mike, their son, hard.
    “ Sure,” Donaldson. “It has nothing to do with that fine filly that’s been flitting around the tables.”
    Born and raised on a ranch in Montana, everything he said had to do with horses. Anyone else, Papa wouldn’t like the term filly used for Joey, but with Donaldson, it was nothing.
    They finished off their beers and left him with the check, as usual, and headed out the door. Joey came up to collect their glasses. “Your friends abandon you?”
    Again, he couldn’t speak. Dammit, what the hell was wrong with him? Just like last time, it seemed his tongue was glued to the top of his mouth. This went beyond attraction, but he didn’t even want to think about that.
    Of course, he could come up with all kinds of other things he would like to think about. Like what it would be like to have Joey slip right there onto his lap and give him a kiss.
    Then he realized she was looking at him waiting for his response to her question. Dammit, what had she asked him? Oh, his