by Cathie Linz
“Then I guess you’re stuck.”
“Gee, thanks, that was real helpful, Blackwell,” Joe said sarcastically. “I’m so glad I called you.”
Curt laughed. “Hey, anytime I can help, I’m just a phone call away.”
Joe’s growl didn’t need translating.
“You’re stuck, Wilder,” Curt said. “Make the most of it is my advice to you. Semper Gumby, buddy. Be flexible.”
“Yeah, right.” Frustrated, Joe flipped the cover on his cellular phone and stared at the bag he had packed while talking to Curt. A Marine was always ready to leave, never knowing when some situation might require him to defend his country.
What about defending his sanity? Joe wondered caustically, furious with himself for feeling the way he did. What was the procedure for that?
He was a Marine, by God. There were no foxholes in the Marines. Foxholes are for those who want to hide. In the Marines they had fighting holes. There was no hiding in the Marines. He’d been trained to fight.
His father and his grandfather had been Marines. He was part of a proud tradition—the few, the proud, the Marines.
Joe glanced down at his watch. His allotted hour was almost up. Falling back on years of conditioning and training, he willed his misgivings away and completed packing with ruthless efficiency. The sooner he got started on this idiotic assignment, the sooner it would be over with.
Joe Wilder was late. Prudence couldn’t believe it. Marines were rarely late. Commissioned officers or enlisted men—it didn’t matter. They tended to work with military precision. Especially those in her father’s command.
Maybe Joe had chickened out? Yeah, right.
Or maybe he’d come up with someone else to take his place? Yeah, right. As if he’d disobey an order.
Or maybe that was him over there talking to Sinatra…
Yes, it most certainly was.
So why hadn’t Joe alerted her to his presence instead of letting her stand around like a doofus waiting for him? There was just something about him that set her teeth on edge.
From the moment he’d walked into that conference room and flashed his confident smile at her, she’d known that this was a man used to getting his own way where women were concerned. She’d seen the type before.
Yes, he was better looking than most men. And, yes, he had incredible blue eyes. But there was no way she was going to be swayed by a man in uniform. She’d been down that path before.
Joe Wilder might not have been at the base very long, but already he had the reputation for being a heartbreaking daredevil. At one point his wild ways would have appealed to her, but she’d grown up since then and those days were long gone.
Being stuck out in the wilds on the North Carolina mountains with a sexy Marine was one of her worst nightmares. That and spiders. She’d always been a sissy about spiders. Snakes and other bugs didn’t bother her one little bit. But spiders gave her the willies.
Even a sexy Marine was better than getting stuck with spiders. Besides, the bottom line here was that she was immune to the charms of any man in a uniform. She’d been played for a fool once by Steven Banks, who had professed to love her but had really been looking to pay back her father. Steven, a commissioned Navy officer who’d gone to Annapolis, hadn’t appreciated the lukewarm performance evaluation her father, an enlisted man and a Marine to boot, had given him. So he’d gotten even by going after Prudence behind her father’s back.
Prudence didn’t intend to make the same mistake twice by getting involved with another military man. She was currently dating a very nice teacher named George Rimes. He was quiet and studious. A birdwatcher. He’d wanted to accompany her this weekend but had had to return home to Iowa for a family wedding.
And so she was stuck with Joe Wilder—who was as far off the high end of the masculinity spectrum as you could get from shy George.
“Sergeant Wilder, are you ready to go?” Her voice reflected her impatience.
“Yes, ma’am.”
His words didn’t sound too convincing to her, although they were delivered in a Marine’s clipped voice. “Good.”
She’d already run through the detailed checklist she had on her clipboard twice, covering everything from sleeping bags to sunblock, to make sure that none of her students had forgotten anything.
She also had signed parental approval forms from everyone. She’d wanted to include a parent for the outing, but none had volunteered or even been willing to be drafted. Which left her and Joe Wilder as the only adults accompanying the five students. Of course, Joe was a Marine so that meant he probably counted as two adults…as least as far as he was concerned. Marines were nothing if not confident. “Then let’s get in the van, everyone.”
Joe quickly stowed his gear in the back of the van, which was already packed tight, and then headed for the driver’s seat.
“I’m driving,” Prudence informed him.
“She’s a good driver,” Sinatra told Joe reassuringly. “For a teacher.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Sinatra,” Prudence said. “Sergeant, you no doubt remember Sinatra, Rosa and Pete from the tour we took a short while ago.”
Joe nodded. Sinatra was the one who’d taken pity on him, Pete was the whiz with facts and figures and Rosa was the one with the unusual questions. He didn’t recognize the other two kids, though. One was an Asian kid with a short buzz haircut and a silver earring in his left ear. The other was an African-American girl who was eyeing him with blatant skepticism while proudly wearing an I’m Mean And Green T-shirt. But then he hadn’t really been paying attention to the entire herd of kids. After the first minute or two their faces had blurred as he’d focused on maintaining his control.
“This is Keishon Williams,” Prudence said, putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “And this is Gem Wong,” she added, turning to the boy with the earring.
“Nice tattoo, sir,” Gem noted with a nod at the eagle on Joe’s upper arm.
“Nice earring,” Joe said in return.
The kid grinned, the flash of sunlight off his silver braces nearly blinding Joe. Time for more aspirin. His post-hangover headache was coming back. And the thought of being in the passenger seat while the sexy but infuriating teacher drove the van didn’t help improve his mood any.
“I can drive,” Joe said, hoping against hope that she’d give in.
“I’m sure you can,” she replied. “I heard about your motorcycle racing escapades.”
“You race motorcycles? Awesome,” Pete asked.
“You don’t trust me, ma’am?” Joe asked her.
She sidestepped answering that one. “It’s my van. I’ll drive. That way, while we’re en route, Sergeant Wilder can give you some wilderness tips for our weekend.”
“When they trained you in survival stuff in the Marines, did you have to eat live bugs like those guys on that TV show where they were stuck on an island?” Pete asked.
“Larva,” Sinatra corrected him.
“I read on the Internet that you shouldn’t eat mice because you could get some disease,” Pete said.
“I wouldn’t eat mice because I’m a vegetarian,” Keishon stated with a shudder.
Pete grinned. “You’d eat ’em if you were hungry enough.”
Infuriated by his attitude, Keishon yelled, “Would not!”
“Would so!” Pete shouted right back.
“Williams and Greene, cease and desist!” Joe barked.
The two kids looked at him in astonishment before Keishon loftily informed him, “It’s not nice to call someone by their last name.”
It wasn’t nice for them to argue when his head felt like it was going to detonate. But then the world wasn’t a nice place. The sooner they knew that the better.
How was he going to manage cooped up in this tin can of a van with five kids for hours?
He just had to stop thinking of them as kids and instead treat them as recruits. Really short recruits. Maybe that would help his stress level.
He’d dealt with raw recruits before.
“Isn’t this van equipped with a video player?” Pete asked.
“She won’t let us watch The Matrix,” Gem quietly complained.
“I’ve already seen it ten times,” Pete bragged.
“Then you don’t need to see it again,” Prudence said. “Instead I want you to notice how the trees change as we head away from the coast and head for the mountains.”
“That was some big bad kind of tree on the base,” Sinatra noted.
“It’s 350 years old,” Pete said.
“That was just an estimate,” Rosa reminded them.
“Now she’ll probably tell us how many inches the tree grows every year,” Pete said in exasperation. “She’s the class math whiz.”
“So why were you all chosen for this mission?” Joe had almost slipped up and called them kids. Mistake. Short recruits. Really short recruits, that’s what they were.
Not that the image was helping as much as it should.
“We are the five finalists in our class Knowledge Fair. Our projects were chosen by Principal Vann as the best,” Sinatra proudly stated. “We had to come up with a hypothesis and then try and prove it was true. Mine was that the Internet improves kids’ grades if they use it for researching science homework projects.”
“My hypothesis is that a vegetarian diet is healthier than a nonvegetarian one,” Keishon said.
“Mine was that the hole in the ozone layer is changing the climate,” Pete said. “Gem’s was about the life cycle of a frog and Rosa’s was about using rings in a tree to figure its age.”
“Do you do have to do a hypothesis to be in the Marines?” Rosa asked him. “Do you have to prove that something is true?”
Did he have something to prove? Constantly. Corps values—honor, courage, commitment—were the life-blood of a Marine. From the second a recruit stepped off the bus at Marine Corp Recruit Depot the Marine Corps created a change of mind, body and spirit meant to last a lifetime. They were constantly taking on challenges that proved a recruit was worthy of being called a United States Marine.
Did he have something to prove? You bet. Was he still worthy? Joe didn’t know…and that was one of the many things eating away at him.
“In the Marines, do you have tests like we have in school?” Rosa continued.
Focus on the facts and figures, he ordered himself. “Boot camp has five graduation requirements—rifle qualification, swim qualification, a physical fitness test, battalion-commander’s inspection and scoring eighty percent on academic tests.”
“Eighty percent isn’t that good,” Keishon pointed out. “That would only be a B in our class.”
“Depending on the scores of the rest of the class,” Rosa said. “Girls can be Marines, right?”
“Affirmative,” Joe replied. “I pointed out their training area and barracks area during the base tour.”
“Girls can be whatever they want to be,” Prudence added.
“Were you ever a Marine?” Rosa asked her.
“No,” Prudence replied. “I always wanted to be a teacher.”
“There aren’t any teachers in the Marines?” Rosa said.
Prudence shook her head. “Only drill instructors, and they aren’t the same thing.”
“I don’t know,” Joe drawled, giving her a wry look. “I can easily imagine you barking out orders in BWT, ma’am.”
“What’s BWT?” Pete asked, always eager to learn something new.
“Basic Warrior Training,” Joe replied.
“You think Ms. Martin is a warrior?” Pete said.
Joe nodded. “She was raised by a warrior.”
“That would be my mom,” Prudence told her students. “Not that my dad is any slouch, either,” she noted with a grin. “After all, he is a Marine.”
“I was referring to your father,” Joe said.
She gave him a mocking look. “No kidding.”
“Is kidding allowed in the Marines?” Pete asked.
Joe thought back to the numerous practical jokes he’d played on his brothers or his buddies over the years. “In very special circumstances and under certain conditions, then the answer is that sometimes kidding is allowed, yes.”
Pete frowned. “I didn’t think warriors were supposed to be kidding around.”
“Sometimes laughter is the only thing that keeps you going when it seems impossible to continue,” Joe quietly said, his smile disappearing. And sometimes even that didn’t work.
The Fates had to be laughing their heads off at him, crammed in a tin can van with five kids and his C.O.’s daughter. Yeah, someone up there was no doubt having hysterics right about now.
Too bad Joe wasn’t laughing with them. A year ago, none of this would have bothered him. But then Joe was a very different Marine than he’d been a year ago.
So far he seemed to be the only one aware of it. But that awareness was slowly eating away at him, along with the guilt and the secret shame that he was no longer good enough, strong enough, courageous enough to be called a United States Marine.
He bolted down those dark emotions and focused his attention on the passing scenery. They’d left the coastal plain and the short palmetto palms behind. They’d also passed the urban areas of Raleigh-Durham and Winston-Salem, traveling clear across the state until they were now surrounded by pine forests. The green foothills had given way to bigger mountains, their rounded curves flowing from one ridge to the next in layers of smoky-blue.
The kids…er…the very short recruits continued peppering him with questions for the remainder of the drive. Every so often, Joe would turn to look at Prudence to see if he could read her thoughts. She didn’t talk much, letting him do the bulk of the work in responding to the questions being tossed his way by her ubercurious students. The small smile on her lips made him think that she was enjoying putting him in the hot seat.
Looking at her mouth made him hot, hot in a different way. Hot to kiss her, hot to taste her mouth, part her lips with his tongue and…
Joe blinked. What was he doing? He had no business fantasizing about his commanding officer’s daughter. No business at all.
Ordering his gaze away from her, he reminded himself that she was off-limits to him in every way.
“Is it true Marines have nicknames like Jughead?” Keishon said.
Joe tried not to wince. “Jarhead, not Jughead.”
“What other nicknames do Marines have?”
“Devil Dogs,” Joe replied.
“Sounds like a kind of hot dog they have at Dog ’n’ Suds. I think it has hot peppers in it,” Pete said.
Joe tried not to grit his teeth. “Sinatra, do you know why Marines are called Devil Dogs?”
“It better not be because they’re mean to dogs,” Keishon, the animal activist, said.
“Marines aren’t mean to dogs. The name came from the Germans during the first World War,” Sinatra proudly replied.
“Teufelhunden,” Joe said. “So named because of the Marines’ tenacity in combat during the Battle of Belleau Wood. Nice going, Sinatra.”
“Teacher’s pet,” Pete muttered.
“What was that?” Joe demanded, using his drill instructor voice.
“Nothing,” Pete quickly replied. “I was just…uh…coughing, sir.”
Just when Joe was sure he couldn’t stand being cooped up with this bunch a second later, Prudence cheerfully announced, “We’re here!”
The Sunshine Trailhead wasn’t nearly as impressive as it sounded. In reality it was merely a graveled parking lot. But it represented the end of the line as far as being stuck in this van with Pete, Keishon, Gem, Rosa and Sinatra—not to mention their impossibly sexy teacher Prudence.
Joe was the first one out of the van. As he watched the really short recruits climbing out of the van, he was reminded of circus routine he’d seen as a kid with clowns tumbling out of a VW Bug.
This wasn’t the most graceful bunch of really short recruits he�
�d ever seen. Not that being graceful was something a Marine aimed for, but this group seemed to fall over their own feet an awful lot.
Meanwhile Prudence stood watch with a clipboard, ticking off items as they were unpacked from the van.
“Six sleeping bags…” She paused to count them off as each student donned their backpack. “Check. Two tents. Check. Six backpacks. Check. I’m assuming you’re responsible for your own items, Sergeant Wilder?”
“Affirmative,” he replied, while efficiently adding the larger of the tents to his pack.
Prudence watched him work, the muscles in his arms rippling as he easily hefted the pack and put it on. He didn’t have the bulky frame of a football player or wrestler, but he was powerfully built in a lean-and-mean kind of way.
The sun had seared crinkles around his eyes, or maybe those were laugh lines? She was only now noticing that his nose and jaw weren’t perfectly symmetrical, saving him from a merely pretty-boy handsomeness. His was the face of a man who’d seen and done more than his fair share of living.
He’d been fairly good-natured about the kids’ incessant questions during the drive. She was surprised. She shouldn’t have been. Marines were infamous for following orders and as Joe had told her more than once, he’d been ordered to accompany her and her students on this field trip.
But that didn’t mean he’d grown any more comfortable with the situation. She still didn’t know what it was about the kids that made him uneasy. Maybe he was an only child or something and didn’t have much experience with kids.
She could ask him, she supposed. But she was hesitant to form a friendship with him. She didn’t want to know if he was an only child, didn’t want to know why his nose was a little off-kilter. The man himself made her feel off-kilter all the time. Keeping her distance, emotionally even if she couldn’t do that physically, was clearly the wise thing to do in this situation.
Yes, she was spending the weekend in the mountains with him, but they were being chaperoned by five sixth-graders. And it wasn’t as if she was dressed like a fashion model or anything. Her hardy hiking boots were hardly the thing to turn a man’s head. She was wearing the same khaki slacks and white T-shirt she’d had on earlier. She’d added a long-sleeved denim shirt and tied a red windbreaker around her waist.
