Unraveled (Woodlands)

by Frederick, Jen

  Unraveled

  Twenty-five-year-old Sgt. Gray Phillips is at a crossroads in his life: stay in the Marine Corps or get out and learn to be a civilian? He’s got forty-five days of leave to make up his mind but the people in his life aren’t making the decision any easier. His dad wants him to get out; his grandfather wants him to stay in. And his growing feelings for Sam Anderson are wreaking havoc with his heart…and his mind. He believes relationships get ruined when a Marine goes on deployment. So now he’s got an even harder decision to make: take a chance on Sam or leave love behind and give his all to the Marines.

  Twenty-two year old Samantha Anderson lost her husband to an IED in Afghanistan just two months after their vows. Two years later, Sam is full of regrets—that she didn’t move with her husband to Alaska; that she allowed her friends to drift away; that she hasn’t taken many chances in life. Now, she’s met Gray and taking a risk on this Marine could be her one opportunity to feel alive and in love again. But how can she risk her heart on another military man who could share the same tragic fate as her husband?

  Unraveled

  Woodlands, Book 3

  Jen Frederick

  Dedication

  To C. Sherrill, you'll probably never know the influence

  you had on my life but that junior year of high school

  when you made me read everything

  from Beowulf to Shakespeare to Ayn Rand

  changed me forever. Thank you.

  To my family, as always, thank you

  for allowing me time to write.

  Your understanding and patience is endless

  and I love you both for it.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Gray

  “YOU SURE I CAN’T GIVE you a ride, Sgt. Phillips?” the sixty-year-old woman I’d sat next to on the airplane asked for the fifth time.

  “No ma’am,” I replied promptly. “Where can I put these for you?”

  “Right here is just fine.” She pointed to a luggage cart.

  “I’d be happy to carry them to the car for you.” The cart might be easy for her to maneuver but lifting the heavy luggage into her trunk by herself? Not happening.

  “My son is picking me up and I promise I won’t lift a thing.”

  I looked around skeptically but didn’t see anyone but my own ride. I gave Bo Randolph a chin nod of acknowledgment but held on to the carry-on bag that looked like someone had puked flowers all over it.

  “What’s up, man?” Bo bumped my fist in greeting and then pulled me in for a hug.

  “Just making sure Mrs. Kremer gets to her car in one piece.”

  “We’re waiting for my son,” she chirped. “And there he is now.” Mrs. Kremer’s son looked to be balding and forty. One glance from Bo and we silently agreed that despite her son showing up, we’d still be helping them out. Over both their protests, Bo and I picked up the luggage and placed it in the back of the four-door sedan. Mrs. Kremer gave us both a kiss, leaving behind the smell of lilacs and baby powder.

  "Always the good Samaritan,” Bo joked as we walked to his crackerjack box of a car.

  “You helped.”

  He just shook his head. “Only because I’d have looked like a fool standing there while you hauled her luggage around.”

  “She looked frail,” I protested. “Besides, you and I’ve both carried far more weight over much longer distances. Enough about the woman, let’s talk about your damn car. Will my pack even fit in there?”

  “Yes, princess, it will. How come you didn’t ask Noah to pick you up if you hate my baby so much?” He hit a button and a sorry excuse for trunk space appeared at the rear of the vehicle.

  “I didn’t want to make you cry. You’re an ugly crier,” I said. I threw my seabag and pack into the trunk and wedged myself inside the even tinier interior.

  “True that. Seriously, forty-five days? How'd you manage that?"

  "How do you think? I'm a lucky fuck."

  "So The Honorable Dennis Phillips came through?"

  "Guess so." My old man was on the House Armed Services Committee and had pulled some strings to get special dispensation for me to take forty-five consecutive days of leave at the beginning of summer. The fact that it went through was helped by the fact I'd taken almost zero leave for the past six years and that I possessed a spotless record, but it was still a big deal. Other Marines would have killed to have even half that many days off in the summer. Literally knifed me in the gut. I shifted in the seat, which was too narrow for my six-foot-one, two-hundred-and-five-pound frame. "This car is too fucking small for you."

  "I like 'em tight." Bo stroked the leather dash of his sports car.

  "Given your dick is so tiny, it's no wonder you need 'em small. AnnMarie's still a virgin then?"

  "What?" He jerked his hand back and glared at me. "No talking about AnnMarie and sex. Besides, I saw you staring at my junk plenty while we were in A-stan."

  "Because you whipped it out every five seconds."

  "Can't help that my dick's so big my regulation pants couldn't keep it in."

  I shook my head but knew I was grinning like a loon. "Missed you, man."

  "You too," Bo said, smiling back. "Forty-five days is going to be gone in a blink of an eye."

  "I know." My grin dimmed a little. This wasn't entirely a vacation. My exact orders from Congressman Phillips were to pull my fucking head out of my ass and sign my re-enlistment papers or start applying for college. He wanted me out and my grandfather wanted me to stay in. I felt a little like a sorry bone between two angry pit bulls.

  I had eight years under my belt, a new meritorious promotion to staff sergeant that I wasn’t sure I deserved, and some serious doubt about whether being a career Marine was the right choice for my future. During our family Christmas, I had made the mistake of mentioning that evaluating everyone’s “knife hands” while running during physical training didn’t hold a lot of meaning—and Dad had pounced.

  “There’s plenty of room for you outside the Corps,” he’d said.

  Then Pops had bristled. “Corps was good enough for me and good enough for you. No sense in planting doubt in the boy’s head where there was none before.”

  Match to kindling, the two had gotten into one of their heated arguments. Having two career Marines scream at each other like they were trying to make the other break first had resulted in Mom leaving the table in tears and my two older brothers glaring at me. I’d wanted to sink under the tablecloth but since I’d started it, I sat there and took it like the man I was supposed to be.

  Since then I’d told Pops that my commitment was as sound as ever and Dad that I’d think about college. When Bo and Noah, two former Marines in my platoon, invited me to spend my leave at their posh pad with a bevy of college coeds at the ready, I fled before the yelling could start again.

  “You really in a tizzy about whether to re-enlist?” Bo asked, surprise evident in his voice.

  “Marines don’t get into tizzies,” I scoffed. “We get angry. Also drunk. Shitfaced. Tired. No tizzies, though.”

  “Which one are you?”

  “Tired. I’m supposed to shit or get off the pot.”

  “Is shitting staying in or getting out?”

  “We all know that re-enlisting is for the motards who can’t stop wearing all their USMC gear off the base, have more than one Marine tattoo, and can recite the Marine Hymn by heart.”

  “So you, essentially.”

  I slunk down in the seat and pressed a thumb to my temple. “Which is why I should get out before I become one of those Marines that we all made fun of when we were lance corporals.”

  “What’s the real problem?”

  I pressed harder. “The real problem? Let’s see. I didn’t
sign my re-enlistment papers yet, causing Captain Billings to call my dad, who then decided to gleefully tell Pops he had lost. They yelled. Mom cried. Oh, and my ex is sniffing around again.” And it sucked being responsible for people instead of just equipment, but I didn’t admit that last one out loud.

  “Do whatever you can to make your mom stop crying,” Bo advised. “If mama isn’t happy, ain’t no one gonna be happy.”

  “Maybe.” The sad truth of it was that someone was going to be unhappy. Because I cared about all of them, that sucked. Hoping to change the subject, I said, "You fuckers better have something good planned for me every day."

  "We said you could come stay with us and hang out, not that we'd be your cruise directors."

  "All I want to know is whether AnnMarie and Grace are bringing some single friends over. I'm a Marine on leave. I need some special attention."

  "AnnMarie's neighbor's got a thing for guys, I'm pretty sure."

  "Yeah.” My interest was piqued. Both Noah and Bo had been single in the Corps and for two years after they separated. The minute they’d moved up here to go to Central College, they’d each hooked so tightly to a girl that neither could move without the other feeling it. I hoped it wasn’t something in the water. I didn’t need or want that kind of complication. But hot girlfriends meant hot single female friends and that was all good in my book. “Hot? Good personality? What?"

  "He's bi-curious, according to AM."

  I groaned. "Sorry. Gray don't play that way. What about AnnMarie's roommate? Seem to remember that she had a tight ass and body.”

  "Taken."

  "Do you know any single women?"

  "I'm not a pimp either."

  "You suck."

  "That was your fantasy, wasn't it?"

  "How did you end up with such a classy piece like AnnMarie?"

  "Dunno but if you fuck it up for me, I'd have to kill you." He was dead serious. That was another thing that just didn’t make sense in my world anymore. Bo had once been the biggest skirt chaser in our platoon. It didn’t matter if the girl was big, small, or Martian, he’d do them. Now all he could talk about was one chick. And if that didn’t set a lad’s mind spinning, I didn’t know what would. It confused me because all I knew of women was that they’d cheat on you the second your back was turned. I learned that lesson early on and that cheating girlfriend had been my last.

  “You’ve discovered my evil plan. I’m here to lure your girl back to San Diego with me.” I rolled my eyes. He knew, like all the guys in my platoon, that I didn’t believe a relationship with a woman could ever survive repeated deployments or a twenty-four-month unaccompanied tour to Okinawa or some other overseas duty station.

  “You still believe in the no-relationships-while-serving thing?” This time, it was Bo rolling his eyes.

  “It’s not a thing. It’s a truism. Semper Fidelis only matters within the Corps. Feel free to fuck your brother’s girlfriend, sister, mother, so long as you’re true to the Corps.” The bitter taste of infidelity always sat on the back of my tongue no matter how many times I tried to swallow it away.

  “That’s healthy.”

  “Thanks, Oprah. I’ll let you know when I need more relationship advice.”

  “Just pointing out that the odds aren’t much better outside the Corps, if that's one of the reasons you're thinking of not re-enlisting.”

  “Does Noah have to suffer your Dear Abby musings?” Noah Jackson and Bo were my kind of Marines. They fought hard and didn’t complain, but they knew how to have a good time when we weren’t busy picking sand out of our asses.

  Noah was the more serious of the two and I’d thought he would have made a career of the military, but his ambitions were different. He wanted to build an empire and you couldn’t do that on a military salary—no matter how much combat pay you received. We’d both signed up for every possible tour we could in all the most dangerous places. My burning ambition was to have as much adventure as possible. Unlike Noah, I didn’t need to own the world to be happy. These days, though…I wasn’t exactly sure what I needed.

  When I was ten, Pops had given me a knife engraved with Semper Fidelis on the blade. He’d retired after thirty years in the Corps, and my father had made it to twenty. But neither of my two older brothers were interested, and so it had fallen to me to carry out the tradition. After years of hearing whispered stories of bravery and honor and brotherhood, I couldn’t wait to wear the dress blues and the white gloves and carry that damn sword. Because I enlisted during war time, I got to do things that had meaning.

  Since the troop drawdown, though, I’d felt…unmoored, to borrow a Navy term, as if I was standing on ever-shifting sand. People I’d known for a long time were changing. All around me, guys were settling down, picking out furniture, and going to flea markets on the weekends. They did couples things, like couples’ showers and shit like that, and while I didn’t want to go to those damn things, I felt like everyone else was moving on and that I was just stuck, spinning my wheels like I was some stupid groundhog that should be put out of my misery.

  I don’t know what it was, but every time I had gone to sign those re-enlistment papers, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. On one side, I had my pops and my commanding officer, Captain Billings, warning me about how boat space was shrinking and that even for an exemplary Marine like myself I could be squeezed out if I didn’t hurry my ass up. On the other side sat my dad, who sang an entirely different tune—that I should get out now while I still had time to go to college, find a job, settle down.

  Then there were the men in my platoon. Good men who would place their lives in my hands. I wasn’t just making sure that my weapon was ready now but that theirs were too, and that was a responsibility you didn’t take lightly.

  “Nah, you know Noah doesn’t speak unless it is absolutely necessary,” Bo said, answering my earlier question. “His frozen yogurt palace is always stuffed full of estrogen. We could swing by and scope out the women there.”

  “I thought you’d said that the only females in Noah’s shop were a mess of teenage girls and soccer moms.”

  “So? They’re still females.”

  “My choices are to be a pedo bear or cougar bait?”

  “Better go cougar. They’re in their sexual prime. They could teach you something.”

  “Let’s just head to your place.” Upon arriving, I pulled my gear out of the trunk and followed Bo into the home he shared with Noah and three other guys—one complete with full floor to ceiling plate glass windows at the rear that overlooked a pool. The weather was great here. I'd missed the beach back in San Diego, but I needed to get away. The more distance I put between the base and me, the better I felt. Right then, I wanted to pound some beer, ogle some women, and relax.

  A loud noise like a gunshot echoed, and I immediately ducked down to my knees, throwing my bag in front of me. I looked for Bo, but he was propped against the counter, crying with laughter.

  "I'm so sorry." AnnMarie leaned over me—her long dark hair nearly touching my face. "We just popped the champagne."

  I looked around and saw a group of people with shocked faces and a few girls in front holding a sign that said "Welcome, Grunt." One of Bo's roommates (whose name I didn't remember) stood frozen with the bottle in question, champagne dribbling from the open neck like he was pissing all over the floor. Noah broke from the group and pulled me to my feet because Bo—the asshole—was still laughing.

  "Sorry, we weren't thinking." Noah tried to look repentant, but I could see he was fighting a big-ass grin too. The crowd had recovered, and he started introducing me around.

  "You fuckers." I laughed, because it was funny. You could take the Marine grunt off the base, but you couldn’t eliminate his reaction to close-quarters fire. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you planned that."

  "Bo would've had to frisk you to make sure you didn't draw on us." Noah shook his head. "We both know he'd have liked that far too much."

  One little blon
de who’d been part of the sign committee murmured a few words I didn’t catch. I thought her name was Alice or Amy or something like that. I’d met her before when I’d come up for a weekend to see Bo and Noah’s set up.

  “What’s that, sweetheart?” I had to double over to talk to her. Some guys loved a good height disparity. I preferred a taller women. Easier to have sex standing up.

  “You guys are all so mean to each other. Noah made us write grunt on your sign.” She stuck her lower lip out, which might have been an invitation to do something, although I wasn’t sure for what.

  "Grunt is a good thing for a Marine. You have to pass infantry school, otherwise you're in the rear with the gear," I explained. After eight years of being enlisted, I spent most of my time with other Marines or Marine wives and Marine girlfriends. I didn't love explaining things to civilians but part of why I’d come here to see Bo and Noah in the Midwest was to get away from the military folks, clear my head, and come up with a life plan. God, I sounded like Dr. Phil.

  "What's infantry school?"

  I reined in my impatience and started to explain when Grace came over and rescued me.

  “Amy,” Grace said. "Leave the pretty Marine alone. His glass is empty and you know how guys get when their glass is empty."

  "They get thirsty?" Amy asked.

  I kind of wanted to hear Grace’s reply, but her eyes were silently telling me to get while the getting was good. I fled to the group out at the pool, which included Bo’s girlfriend.

  “AnnMarie, you got any cute, single girlfriends available for me?" Truthfully, I planned to keep my pants zipped the entire time I was here, but I figured people expected me to be a horndog—and I didn’t like to let anyone down.

  “There's a whole bunch of single women here." She waved a hand at the ever growing crowd. "We held this party just for you."

  "I appreciate that, but I'm only here for a short time. Pick one for me. I want to use my time wisely."