by Cathie Linz
Of course, she’d vowed to stop being so careful, and frankly the idea of him taking a bite out of her—huge or otherwise—was infinitely appealing and downright sexy. The man gave her hot flashes.
He looked awesome in jeans and a black T-shirt. It was the first time she’d seen him in civilian clothes and she had to admit she wanted to see more of him. She remembered every ripple of muscle beneath that T-shirt.
With his close-cropped dark hair and vivid blue eyes, he was garnering plenty of attention from the female diners. Hands off, girls, she wanted to say. He’s mine.
When he caught her staring at him, she had to say something. “So who broke your nose?”
Oh great, that was real smooth, she thought to herself in disgust.
He laughed. She loved the sound of his laughter. It was rich and addictive, like coffee ice cream.
“I did,” he admitted. “A few months after leaving Okinawa. We were stationed in Oklahoma and I was an altar boy. Only a clumsy one as it turns out. My brothers called me falter boy. I tripped over the hem of my altar boy robe and fell flat on my face.”
“So instead of Flyboy maybe I should call you Falter Boy, huh?”
“Only my brothers can get away with that.”
She ate a forkful of creamy coleslaw before commenting. “You know, I envy you having siblings. It must have made the moving around a little easier, because they came with you and you weren’t alone. As I recall, you’re all only a few years apart in age.”
“That’s right. There’s only a year or two between one brother and the next.”
“That must have been nice.”
He shrugged. While he loved his brothers, talking about them made him uneasy for some reason. Maybe it was just his overall condition of being messed up, he noted darkly.
“The moving around can be hard,” she admitted. “But my parents did everything they could to make it an adventure. We’d call it establishing base camp and while we didn’t have much furniture, we always used the same living-room drapes to make wherever we were seem like home. And I always had my books. I brought them with me, and those characters in my favorite stories became friends that traveled with me.”
“You made friends along the way. What about that princess you were telling me about?”
“Vanessa? Yes, we did become friends.” Prudence nibbled on another fried clam. “I think partially because we had that in common, the fact that we both had led unusual lives compared to the other girls at the ritzy school.”
“A Marine brat like you at a ritzy school?”
She laughed. “Yeah, I know. I told my dad it was a bad idea. I got tossed out after two years. For organizing a student strike on behalf of the cafeteria workers. But Vanessa and I have kept in touch over the years.” Daintily dabbing her lips with a napkin, she paused to look at him. “Do we have time for dessert?”
“Depends what it is.” If she was the dessert, he’d make time.
“Lemon sherbet. The best in the state. They make it right here. Are you game?”
Game? He was primed and ready. But not for sherbet. For her.
“I think I’ve had enough.” Even his voice sounded tight.
“Do you mind if I get some sherbet?” She gave him a guileless look before adding, “You can taste some of mine if you want.”
Oh, he wanted all right. Wanted her so much he ached. Watching her as she sensually licked the sherbet from her spoon a few minutes later only made things worse.
“Want some?” she asked with a saucy smile.
Instead of replying, Joe simply leaned forward and kissed her, bracing his hand against the back of her head as he hungrily licked the icy sherbet from her warm lips.
He broke off the kiss before she could do more than gasp—with pleasure or outrage. He couldn’t be sure until he sat back. Then the bemused softness in her brown eyes told him that he’d gotten to her.
“Very tasty,” he noted huskily.
“Mmm,” she murmured. “Very tasty. Want more?”
“I can’t,” he said regretfully.
“I know.” She sighed. “This isn’t the time nor place.”
“I’d better drive you back to your car.” Because the more time he spent with her, the more he wanted to make love with her.
The short ride back was accompanied by the sound of the Jeep’s radio. The Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams” was playing on the local light rock station.
As Joe approached her car, she said, “Did Principal Vann get in touch with you yet? He said he was going to call you about coming to speak at the school. Keishon, Gem, Pete, Rosa and Sinatra have been raving about you, and the other kids in the other classes would like to meet you.”
“I can picture Sinatra raving, but I can’t see Keishon speaking that highly of me. After all, I chopped down evergreen branches.”
“She’s forgiven you for that,” Prudence noted with a grin.
“She still wearing those T-shirts?”
Prudence nodded. “She wore her Mean and Green one again the other day.”
Joe smiled.
“So are you willing to come to the school?” When he paused, she added, “If you’d rather not do that, I understand.”
The sympathy in her voice was like a bullet to his pride. “I’ll be there first thing Monday morning.”
“You don’t have to prove anything…”
“I said I’d be there,” he stated curtly.
“Okay. I’ll see you then.” Kissing his cheek, she hopped out of the car, leaving him before he could leave her.
Which made Joe discover something—that he really didn’t like being the one she left behind.
Chapter Ten
“So, buddy, how was your wilderness weekend?”
“Who is this?” Joe demanded into his cell phone.
“Nice avoidance technique, but you called me, remember?” Curt said.
“Yeah, I remember,” Joe said irritably, staring at the distant horizon. Sunlight beat down on his head and the warm humid air washed over him, filled with the smell of the ocean. He wasn’t exactly sure why he’d been drawn to the beach…something to do with the water. The image of water and drowning had crept into his nightmares and now here he was, sitting on a stupid sandy beach like some kind of lost kid. “Have I ever seemed strange to you?”
“All the time,” Curt instantly replied with a dry humor he’d never possessed before becoming a father. “So what else is new?”
“The fact that I can’t get rid of these damn nightmares.”
“Is it the helo crash?” Curt asked, his voice dead serious now.
“It was. In the beginning. But now I’m getting this weird nightmare about drowning. And there’s a kid there. A real little kid. Younger than Blue even.”
“Have you talked to anyone?” Curt asked.
“I’m talking to you,” Joe irritably replied.
“Where are you?”
“I’m on weekend liberty.”
“Where?”
“On some deserted beach watching the ocean.” Joe filtered a handful of tiny seashells through his fingers. The sand here was gritty and rough—not conducive to welcoming sunbathers and swimmers. Which was a good thing. He didn’t want to be around a lot of other people right now.
“I mean where exactly are you? You’re still in North Carolina, right?”
“Affirmative. What, did you think I was going to go UA?” The acronym stood for Unauthorized Absence. In his dad’s day, it was known as going AWOL.
“Negative,” Curt replied. “I just wanted to place you, that’s all. And I wanted to identify that strange noise in the background.”
“It’s the ocean.” He paused a minute to stare down at his bare feet, clenched in the sand as he sat on the beach and stared at waves coming in. “You remember boot camp?”
“Sure I do. It’s where we met.”
“It’s where we became Marines,” Joe added.
“You were always a Marine,” Curt said.
That’s what Joe used to think. Now he wasn’t so sure. About anything.
“Talk to me, buddy. What’s going on. You want me to come down there?” Curt asked gruffly.
“And have your wife shoot me? I don’t think so.”
“She’d understand.”
“Maybe, but I don’t understand.” Joe tossed a broken shell aside. “I did something really stupid.”
“Stupider than putting Heat in my jock strap?” Curt inquired with a teasing laugh.
Using humor as a shield was a well-honored tradition in the Marine Corps, and Joe recognized it as such. “Yeah, stupider than that.”
“This I’ve gotta hear.”
“I kissed my commanding officer’s daughter,” Joe admitted. “We were snowbound together in this cabin…”
“Whoa, slow down a minute there,” Curt interrupted him to order. “I thought the schoolteacher had a bunch of her students with her.”
“She did. And we all got snowbound by this unexpected snowstorm. Something like twenty-four inches fell in twenty-four hours. It was that thick, heavy kind of snow that accumulates quickly. Anyway, I got the VCRs—”
“VCRs?” Curt interrupted him again to ask.
“Vertically Challenged Recruits. That’s how I thought of her students. Not as kids, but as very short recruits, or vertically challenged recruits, or even as preadolescents. Made me feel better about the situation.”
“Hey, whatever works.”
“So I got the VCRs and Prudence, that’s the Sergeant Major’s daughter, I got us all to a rangers’ cabin. They took the kids out by helo the next day, but Prudence and I were left behind for the next trip. Only the storm moved in again and our rescue was delayed for another twenty-six hours.”
“So you were counting the hours, huh?”
“Yeah.” Joe shifted his brooding gaze from the horizon to the shore, where sunlight reflected off the incoming waves. “We got…close.”
“You had sex with your commanding officer’s daughter?”
“No, I did not have sex with her. But I wanted to.”
“And what did she want?”
“The same thing.”
“Oh, man.”
“Yeah,” Joe agreed glumly. “Oh, man, is right.”
“Does the Sergeant Major know?”
“I don’t think so,” Joe replied.
“Are you afraid she’s going to say something to him?”
“I don’t think she will. I saw her today. She scared ten years off my life by going bungee-jumping, even though I told her not to.”
“Sounds like quite a lady. I can’t wait to meet her.”
“You don’t understand. Nothing can come of this,” Joe insisted, knocking over the pile of seashells he’d accumulated. “I’m dealing with stuff and I’m not fit for much of anything right now.”
“The nightmares,” Curt noted quietly.
“Yeah, the nightmares. And the regrets. The guilt.”
“I hear you. No excuses no exceptions. That’s the Marine way. But it sucks sometimes.”
“Yeah, it does.” Joe frowned at a seagull that got too close. It quickly hopped away before swooping back up into the sky.
“You know,” Curt said, “Jessie told me something that I’ve never forgotten. It hit me damn hard, especially that time when Blue went missing from her preschool. I was explaining to Jessie that warriors never cry and she said that sometimes warriors make others cry.”
“You’re saying I’m going to make Prudence cry?” Joe said. “Believe me, I’ve already thought of that, even though she was raised in the Corps and should be used to warriors by now.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Curt denied. “I’m saying that sometimes we get so focused on battening down our own emotional hatches that we lock out the people who care about us the most. You know I basically tried to raise Blue by the Marine Corps Procedure Manual. The Corps taught us some damn good values, like respect and honor, commitment and loyalty. And those are all great things, valuable things. But so is love.”
“I never said I love Prudence.” In his book, not saying it meant it wasn’t so. He’d put a lot of energy into building an emotional wall around himself since the accident, and he wasn’t going to let one incredibly stubborn and incredibly sexy woman smash it down. She’d already gotten too close to him, and he couldn’t love her.
Curt’s tone was wryly sympathetic as he said, “Hey, when I was courting Jessie and asked for your advice, I never said I loved her, either. As I recall, you told me that romance is a battlefield filled with land mines, so you’ve got to tread carefully or get blown to bits. That was your Wilderism for the day.”
“Yeah, well, I seem to have run out of Wilderisms,” Joe confessed in a low voice. “Did I tell you that I actually met Prudence when we were kids? We didn’t realize it until we were alone in the cabin and she talked about her past. We spent part of one summer together. Small world, huh?”
“The Marine Corps is one big family.”
“That may be, but I don’t think the Sergeant Major would be very pleased at having me join his family. You know how the Marine Corps is about the subject of dating within the Corps. That’s allowed in the Navy and Army, within certain guidelines. But it’s not allowed in the Marine Corps. And like I said, I’ve got to get my head straight first, before I do anything else.”
“I’m here for you, buddy.” Curt’s steady voice resonated with rock-solid conviction. “Whenever you want to talk. Night or day.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that.” But after Joe ended the call, he couldn’t help wondering if the nightmares were permanent. Maybe there was no cure. Maybe this was as good as it got. Or maybe it just got worse.
It had been years since Joe had stepped foot in a middle school principal’s office. Despite that fact, not much seemed to have changed. Oh sure, there were more computers, but the place still smelled the same—a unique combination of old gym shoes and badly cooked cafeteria food. Lasagna must be on the menu today.
Actually the smell reminded him of “Mess and Maintenance Week” during book camp when he and Curt had been assigned to mess duty, working fifteen hours in the mess hall—washing pots, scrubbing trays. Real glamorous work. But it taught him team work, because if the guys didn’t work together, the work didn’t get done.
He was on his own here, though. No fellow Marines to back him up.
A young woman behind the high counter gave him an appreciative smile before moving forward. Joe was wearing his dress blues today. Best uniform of any branch of the Armed Forces, with its high-necked navy-blue jacket with red piping and brass buttons and sky-blue trousers. White gloves. White cover—or hat in civilian terminology.
The uniform never failed to get to the ladies. Not that that’s why he wore it. He wasn’t trying to impress any female, certainly not Prudence. He was here representing his beloved U.S. Marine Corps and therefore he needed to put his best foot forward. Hence the dress blues.
“May I help you?” the young woman inquired with a Southern drawl native to most North Carolinians.
Prudence hadn’t picked up a drawl like that yet. And still she was sexy, even with a schoolteacher’s voice.
“Sergeant Wilder here to see Principal Vann, ma’am,” Joe stated.
“I’ll take him,” Prudence said from behind him.
He pivoted to find her standing in the doorway from the hallway. Her cheeks were flushed and her breathing was fast as if she’d just been running. He felt the same way himself.
She looked great. Since when had teachers looked this good? She was wearing a skirt. He’d never seen her in a skirt before. It was black and it ended far too high above her knees. What was she doing, showing off that much leg? Air whooshed out of his lungs and blood rushed to forbidden body parts.
A second look told him that her skirt wasn’t a macromini, after all. It was actually longer than the skirt of the young assistant behind the counter. It just packed a powerful punch, that’s all. She re
ally did have awesome legs. Even her sandals were sexy.
And then there was that top Prudence was wearing. It was the pink of the inside of a seashell and it clung to her body, outlining her breasts. Surely in his day his middle school teacher hadn’t had breasts. How was a kid expected to get any work done with a Victoria’s Secret seductress like her around? How was a Marine expected not to drool?
The principal’s office was air-conditioned, but Joe felt hot. Very hot.
“I’ll take him,” Prudence repeated.
And I’ll take you. The thought shot through his brain like a rocket. He wanted to just toss her over his shoulder and head out, like a conquering hero.
“Ah, there are you, Sergeant.” A man’s voice distracted Joe from his fantasies. “I’m Principal Vann.” The man stepping out from an office in the back was in his late forties, the same age as Prudence’s father and Joe’s commanding officer. But where the Sergeant Major had the physically fit body of a warrior, Principal Vann had the body of a civilian, though he had a firm handshake. Principal Vann’s eyes reflected intelligence and his smile reflected the people skills of a good politician. “We’re so glad you were able to come visit our school today. We’ve got the entire school gathered in the gymnasium for a special assembly.” Principal Vann checked the time on the large clock on the wall. Another thing that hadn’t changed—those black clocks with white faces. “We’d better get along down there or we’ll be late. I certainly wouldn’t want to be accused to detaining a U.S. Marine. After you, Sergeant.” The principal ushered him through the door leading back out to the hallway.
As Joe took that long walk down the hallway, he was reminded of the long walk he’d taken back at the base to the conference room where Prudence had been waiting for him. She walked beside him now.
He kept his gaze straight ahead, refusing to allow himself to be distracted by the hauntingly familiar scent of her perfume. Where was this damn gymnasium, in Georgia?
Finally they reached their destination. The place was decorated up the wazoo with streamers and bunting. A long banner was painted in red, white and blue—Dixon Middle School Welcomes…Sargent was crossed out and replaced with Sergeant Wilder.
