“We usually eat around six o’clock—is that too early for you?”
Were his eyes always this sexy when he looked at a woman?
“It’s fine. I’ll call you if I end up working.”
“Great.” She forced a smile but didn’t have to force the warm tingles that danced on the surface of her skin and continued to her midsection, inviting more of her to wake up and join the fun.
“Let’s set this tree up on the porch.”
In one smooth motion Jonas hoisted the tree onto the ground and began to pull it up the walkway toward the porch.
“We always kept it on the front porch for a few days in a bucket of water. Do you have a different place for it?”
“No, I have the bucket out, the green one to the left of the door.”
“Roger.”
“Pepé, can you go open the door and let Ronald out?”
“Roger!” Pepé grabbed her keys and shot toward his mission.
“He loves being around military jargon.” She spoke her thoughts aloud, trying to remember she needed to protect Pepé from forming bonds with men who weren’t going to be permanent in his life. He’d had enough loss.
“I did, too, as a kid. G.I. Joes were my favorite toys.” Jonas didn’t glance at her as he complimented Pepé, his breath in great clouds in front of him as he hauled the heavy tree up the three steps to the wooden porch that ran the length of the house.
“He’s always been that way. Right after Phil died, I worried about him so much—he withdrew into himself in a way I’d only ever seen in adults. It was scary when he stopped talking to everyone except me. But we got through it, and he’s thriving.”
“I saw in his chart you took him to BTS.” His easy reference to the Beyond the Stars resort for Gold Star families didn’t surprise her. No doubt he’d referred patients from the hospital there.
“You read his entire chart?”
Jonas set the tree down and leaned it against the side of the house. He turned to face her and smiled.
His smile must have encouraged a lot of women to get undressed....
“I make a point of going over every patient’s chart thoroughly. It makes diagnosis easier, and hopefully more accurate.” He raised her chin with his finger.
“I wasn’t prying, Serena. It was in the comments from his last yearly checkup—that he’d greatly improved since his week at BTS.”
Trust me.
He didn’t have to say it; it was in his expression, in the clear blue sincerity of his eyes.
“Oh.” Embarrassment reddened her cheeks. She prayed Jonas would chalk up her blush to the cold.
“You have the most beautiful eyes,” he said. “Pepé has them, too.”
Jonas’s tone was clinical in his appraisal but his eyes were lit with a warmth that had already started a fire in Serena’s belly.
When he bent toward her, she heard the inner voice that warned her to step back, to avoid any connection with this man. She heard it and ignored it as she closed her eyes. His breath was warm over her lips and she smelled mint, cinnamon and his scent—the scent she’d had difficulty getting out of her memory after their searing kiss at the Fords’ Christmas party.
“Ronald!” Pepé’s yell was followed by the vibration of Ronald’s four paws hitting the deck. He ran through the front door and launched himself into the yard, grateful for the chance to relieve himself after being home alone all afternoon.
Serena opened her eyes to find Jonas had dropped his hand from her face and turned to watch the antics of a boy and his dog.
When he faced her again, Jonas grinned.
“We’re not done here. Anticipation can be fun, though, can’t it?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Camp O’Donnell, Philippines
Early 1944
DAYS NO LONGER had meaning, but they were a means to an end for Henry. A way to get back to Sarah.
Tommy had been paroled to his Filipino family only three months after they’d arrived at Camp O’Donnell. Bill had died last year, in the middle of monsoon season. It wasn’t cold, but the constant dampness, be it from rain or sweat, had been the death of many of his fellow prisoners.
Henry wasn’t sure why he’d made it this far. It had to be because he was going to see Sarah again. Soon. He felt that he was going to be on the move again, and trusted his gut. He only prayed it was back to the States.
When the guards rounded them up and forced them to walk out of the camp together, Henry realized they were going to kill them. Why else allow them to leave their well-controlled prison?
The view of the ocean and the Japanese container ships gave him hope and dread in equally painful amounts. Not again. Odds were against him that he’d survive a second trip in one of the tin cans.
Where were the Allies?
By the end of the day he was in the bottom of one of the dreaded Japanese merchant cargo ships. He could hardly breathe and had to fight the anxiety and fear that threatened to close his throat or stop his heart. Until now he’d been able to look past the pain, to see that if he was still breathing it was a good day.
Not any longer. This was hell on earth, no matter that it was at sea.
He’d thought the acrid stench of human feces, sweat and fear after the march from Bataan was horrible. This was excruciatingly worse. Nearly every prisoner threw up the little they had in their stomachs as the lack of windows and fresh air mixed into the most potent cocktail for seasickness. Raw bile and sewage covered their bodies as they stood pressed against one another, holding each other up over the long tortuous ocean crossing.
Their captors had to be taking them to Japan. This was a good sign, he thought. The Allies must be moving in, coming back to the Philippines to save them all.
So of course the enemy soldiers were taking their labor force to safety.
Just kill us now.
It was getting harder to ignore the insistent possibility of freedom from the interminable suffering. Long hours passed when Henry could no longer conjure up Sarah’s or Dottie’s faces.
“God save us!” Jersey’s voice reached him in the darkness. “Henry?”
His friend’s call shook him from his purgatory.
“I’m here, Jersey.”
“We’re going to be dead, man. We’re not going to get out of here alive.”
Groans turned to grumbles as his fellow sufferers agreed.
Henry didn’t reply. Anger and complaining were signs of life. He worried about the men who weren’t making any noise. Worried about when he’d become one of the quiet ones. When he, too, would let his spirit go.
Sarah. He closed his eyes tight, trying to see her face, smell the scent of her skin. He couldn’t—as if his heart didn’t want to mark her with where he was, in this pit of hell.
And Dottie, his dear little girl. What kind of world had they borne her into, that allowed this?
September 1945
Japanese prison camp
IT TOOK THE prison guard three hits with the handle of his baton to Henry’s backside before Henry’s vision cleared and he remembered where he was.
The vision of climbing over Fort Casey with Sarah vanished. He cried out at the anguish of losing her, if only his memory of her.
Reality had become too hard.
The guard yelled at him and Henry didn’t try to make out the Japanese. He’d given up on that months ago. At first he’d taught himself the language, little by little, as he put together what the guards said to them.
He looked at where the guard pointed.
Buck lay on his side, his eyes unseeing. One of the last men he’d come to this hellhole with two years ago had died.
Lucky bastard.
No.
He owed it to Buck and every other G.I. who’d died in
this labor camp to get back to Whidbey. To live the life he’d set out to have with Sarah a decade ago.
A world, a lifetime, away.
He wordlessly picked up the small spade the guard pointed at and carried it over to his colleague. His brother-in-arms. Jersey hobbled over with a woven bamboo tarp of sorts. Together they lifted Buck’s thin, lifeless form onto the makeshift litter, trying to keep as much dignity in what they did while the Japanese guard yelled at them and no doubt shouted obscenities at them the entire time.
They made a slow funereal walk to the outer parts of the camp, where their captors had forced them to bury one friend after another. No thinking was involved. If Henry stopped to think, he’d die. Thinking brought too much despair.
He dug the shallow grave. Shallow was all that was possible in the rocky soil with such a poor tool and his failing strength.
Would Sarah reject him when she saw him? Would Dottie run in fear?
No thinking.
Only surviving.
He focused on the spade, the pitiful amounts of dirt each motion moved.
He breathed.
* * *
“IT’S TOO HARD.” Jersey’s whispered observation reached Hank’s ears as the two lay side by side on the dirt floor that had been their sleeping area for the past year.
“No. Hang on. They’re getting more and more desperate. We have to be close.”
“Maybe.”
“Did you see the guard’s eyes today?”
“I try not to look at the bastards.”
“He’s afraid. They’re hungry, too. They’re losing. Our boys will be here any day now.”
“Do you really believe that, Henry?”
“I do.” He had to.
“You have a wife, a family. It helps.”
“You have your girl, Jersey.”
“We were engaged. I can’t expect her to still be waiting for me.”
“Why not? There aren’t any other men at home. Everyone’s off fighting.”
“Maybe. Maybe.”
They lay in the darkness, staring at the meager roof over their heads, shivering in the cold night.
When Henry first heard the rumble, he thought it might be one of the Japanese vehicles that carried the guards from point to point around the large compound. Or maybe Jersey was having a bad case of diarrhea.
But they hadn’t eaten in days and their bodies had nothing to eliminate.
Only after a boom shook the ground did Henry allow himself to start to believe.
“There’s our boys, Jersey.”
“Do you really think so?” Jersey’s normally gruff voice was faint, his eyes closed. Henry saw his expression with the light from the moon that spilled through the slivers of open roof.
“I know so, man. Stay here, Jersey. Don’t go. Hang in there.”
“My girl, she’s probably with another man by now. I don’t blame her.”
“You don’t know that. And so what if she is? You’ll find another girl.”
As Henry forced those words of comfort through his chapped lips, a sharp pang of compassion went through Henry. Sarah could have found someone else, too. Did she even think he was still alive?
He couldn’t begin to imagine his Sarah with another man. Another father for Dottie?
No.
He had to get out of this hell.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING Henry was awake before the guards came. He’d made a game of waking before they did. He hadn’t slept that well, thanks to the cold. No matter how many nights he got through, he didn’t take one for granted. And he’d never adjusted to the harsh temperature swings in this country. The summers were like Dante’s fires, especially since their captors didn’t see a need to provide them with regular water breaks. As a boy in Texas he’d thought he knew what it meant to be thirsty. He’d never felt real thirst before the Japanese had interned him.
Only winter brought relief, at first, from the unbearable heat. Until the thin uniforms they wore weren’t warm enough, and they were lucky to earn a paper blanket to try to conserve their body heat.
The cold did more damage to them than the heat. As if their bodies recognized the long, dark frigid days were going to be too much to bear they started to shut down, catching dysentery or other illnesses without any strength to fight them.
Henry looked over at Jersey, whose chest was still rising and falling. He’d made it another night, too.
“Hey, Henry!” Tom Osbourne, a Brit who’d been brought in as early as Henry almost three years ago, crouched next to the plank he and Jersey shared.
“Are you trying to piss them off and make them even madder, Tom?”
“They can get as mad as they want. The Americans are closing in. We’re going to be liberated.”
“How can you be so sure of that?”
“Bugsy climbed into the south guard tower last night. Says he saw our boys with their equipment on the way in.”
The guard who manned the south tower was known to enjoy his sake a bit more than he should. The past several months he’d taken to drinking until he passed out. The prisoners whispered among themselves, planning escape after escape, even though they all knew it was for naught.
“Don’t you want to wake up Jersey and tell him?”
“Naw, let him sleep while he can. He’s fighting it.”
“Fighting it” was code for fighting against the inevitable death that awaited all of them if the damn war didn’t end soon. As long as the Japanese continued to work them to death, there was no hope. Without a forced Allied liberation of the camp, they were dead. In the event of a Japanese surrender, Henry knew in his gut that their captors would conduct vengeful executions of all of them, anyway.
“Tell him to fight it for a few more days. They’re waiting to make their strike, I know it.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Henry went through the rest of the day fighting his own demons. Visions of Sarah and Dottie had started to appear to him when he was in the midst of breaking stones with the primitive tools they’d been given. He had to be alert to avoid the wrath of the guards, but he couldn’t stop his mind from wandering. His mind had grown muddled from years of hunger and thirst, years of not knowing which of his colleagues would be the next murdered. When was it going to be his turn?
But his wavering thoughts had never been this unpredictable. He kept Sarah and Dottie in a quiet, safe room in his heart and took them out only when the horror of his life was least likely to intrude upon them.
His growing mental weakness couldn’t be a good sign.
Was this the start of his giving up?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Whidbey Island
Two weeks before Christmas
“WHEN I SUGGESTED you be nicer to her I didn’t mean a full-on seduction. That’s not fair to you, her or her son. With your anti-marriage stance, it can only lead to disaster for both of you.”
Jonas listened to Doc Franklin berate him as he eyed Jonas over the mug of coffee he’d poured from the office pot. The doctor lifted the carafe toward him.
“Want a cup?”
“Sure.” Jonas grabbed a mug emblazoned with the NAS Whidbey insignia off the cart and held it out.
“I could get used to this, Doc. You make a good waitress.”
“Watch it.” Doc Franklin put the carafe back on its burner and sank into his executive office chair.
Jonas laughed as he lowered himself into one of two matching sling chairs across from Doc Franklin’s large oak desk.
“Back to you and Señora Delgado.”
“Yeah.” Jonas sipped the brew and grimaced at the spicy flavor. “What’s in this?”
“It’s called ‘Christmas Spirit.’ The new owner of the coffee stop ne
ar the gate is selling it. I like it—cloves, nutmeg, maybe some star anise.”
Jonas shook his head. “I never pegged you as a coffee connoisseur.”
“I have my nuances.”
Both men laughed.
“I’m not avoiding your question, Doc. There isn’t an answer—there’s nothing serious between me and Serena. I want my house back. You told me to play nice about it. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying to convince her that what’s best for her and Pepé is to get a newer place that won’t require as much upkeep. She’s a lawyer and once she gets busy with her career again she’ll figure it out.”
“Maybe I was wrong.” Doc Franklin had a smug gleam in his eyes that went perfectly with his smirk.
“About what?”
“Would it be so bad if things got interesting between you and Serena? Let’s say you’re perfect for each other. Why not check that avenue out? You might end up with the house, after all. Maybe that’s what your stepmother planned all along.”
Jonas gripped the mug as tight as he could without worrying about smashing it to bits in his hands.
“She has a son. He can’t be toyed with, Doc.”
“Who’s toying? If you’re willing to think about something more than a passing fling with his mother...”
Was he?
Jonas had enjoyed his bachelor freedom more than most. There had been a serious fling here or there, and of course his most recent un-relationship with Joy Alexander. Great lady, but not for him.
Lately the only woman he thought about was Serena.
For him, settling down had meant living in the farmhouse, working on Whidbey as a civilian once he retired, taking overseas assignments on contract for the government if he felt the urge to travel abroad again.
A permanent relationship with a woman hadn’t entered the picture, not ever.
A woman and a child, that was entirely outside his scope.
“She’ll never see me as anything other than the man who wants to take her home away from her.”
“Unless she falls for you. And you for her, of course.”
Harlequin Superromance November 2014 - Box Set 2 of 2: Christmas at the CoveNavy ChristmasUntil She Met Daniel Page 42
