Getting Lucky Read Free

never known their parents, Grandfather had just died, and she’d been in need of someone to bolster her emotional fragility. Since he was all the family she had left, that job had fallen to him, and he’d been happy to oblige—when he was available. But he’d been in and out of the country on a pretty regular basis, so he’d had to leave her on her own quite a bit. She’d hardly been a child, though. Hell, she’d been a year older than he had been when he’d left that cold mausoleum of a mansion in Philadelphia to join the Marines, so he refused to feel guilty about his inability to be there on a constant basis. He did sometimes wonder, though, if she might not have become a little more savvy during the past six years had he been around more to ride herd on her.
    Especially when it came to money. Glynnis was dead hopeless in the finance department. He couldn’t remember a single month since she’d moved in with him that she’d managed to live on the allowance from her trust fund. Maybe that was his fault for always bailing her out. He probably shouldn’t have let her get away with “borrowing” from him, particularly when nine times out of ten she’d just turned right around and shelled out his money to one of her lost causes. She was too damn trusting for her own good.
    Which brought Zach’s thoughts swinging right back to the very curvy little Lily. Ruthlessly cutting themshort, he ripped his clothes off and padded naked into the bathroom, ditty bag in hand. Don’t even go there . He washed up and brushed his teeth, then headed back to the bedroom with the full intention of getting some much-needed rest.
    But exhausted as he was, sleep was slow in coming. He had a month’s leave, and his plan had been to use the time to catch up with his sister and figure out how to hang on to the only billet he’d ever cared to have for the final two years he had left in the service. Now Glynnis wasn’t home, he was struggling with the fact that he needed to worry about his career at all, and to top it all off he was half hard from the scent on his pillow left by some Marilyn Monroe lookalike out to bilk his sister of her fortune. This wasn’t the way he’d envisioned his homecoming.
    He flipped over onto his back, cradled his head in his clasped hands, and stared up at the ceiling. Big deal, so he was suffering a random surge of lust—that would get the zero attention it deserved. And since he wasn’t willing to go pound on Lily’s door to demand his sister’s whereabouts, there wasn’t much he could do about Glynnis tonight. But the remainder of his military career was a subject he could devote some attention to.
    Nothing was the same as it used to be. He was the only one left from his original unit, for starters. His closest friends, Coop Blackstock, whom he’d met his first day of boot camp, and John “the Rocket” Miglionni, whom he’d met not long after that, had both been out of the service for several years now. Since their discharge, Coop had gone on to become a best-selling author of military-techno thrillers and Rocket was a private detective with his own agency. And all the other grunts in their unit had either retired, transferred, or died.
    Zach had somehow ended up as the old man in a new recon unit full of eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds. Jesus . He scrubbed his hands over his face. How the hell had that happened? In any other business a thirty-six-year-old in his physical condition would be considered in his prime. But reconnaissance was a young man’s game and the brass was beginning to hint he should think about giving up field work to teach the younger men its finer points. To teach, for crissake!
    Sure, the younger men could go for days on end without sleep and never have it catch up with them, and at some point during the last year or so he had lost that ability. And yes, this last assignment in South America had been a bitch. But, hell, it had been a hundred and ten fucking