The miles flew past. Sam kept his gaze on the road and his mind on the problem at hand. Finding shelter. If he’d been by himself, he’d have pulled off and parked by now. All he really needed was a place to pitch his tent and ride out the storm.
But with Karen along, things were different. He needed to find a motel. Something sturdy enough to stand up to the growing winds. The trees on either side of the road bent nearly in half, stretching out their twisting limbs as if trying to grab the car hurtling past them.
He had passed exit after exit, knowing they were still too close to the coast and determined to get far enough inland that Karen would be in no danger. But judging by the strength of the wind, he was running out of time.
And then he saw it. A squat cinder block motel at the side of the highway. A dozen or so cars sat nestled in its parking lot, but the broken green neon sign out front still blinked VA C NCY.
“The Dew Drop Inn?” Karen asked as he took the off-ramp and headed for the place.
He grinned. “Sounds cozy, doesn’t it?”
“Cozy?” she repeated, staring through the rain-swept windshield. “It looks like it’s a hundred years old.”
“Good. Just what we need.”
“Huh?”
He parked in front of the office and turned off the engine. Facing her, he shrugged and said, “If it’s that old, it’s survived a lot of hurricanes. It should make it through this one.”
Sure, Karen thought, but the question was, would she?
Three
She watched him through the windshield. Waves of rainwater made his image blurry, as if this was all a dream and she was really safe at home in her own bed, with her mind tormenting her with visions of Sam.
But, as the motel owner stepped up behind the counter, scratching his dirty-tank-top-covered hairy chest, the dream notion was shattered. An older man, he had a well-rounded stomach that looked as though he hadn’t missed many meals, and his gray hair stood out in spiky tufts all around his head. He grinned at Sam and turned the registration pad toward him.
“Oh, this place is obviously the Ritz,” Karen muttered as their host picked at his teeth with a thumbnail. Her gaze briefly strayed from the dimly lit office to the motel itself. It looked like something out of a fifties horror movie. Dingy block walls, stained with years of traffic exhaust and neglect. A solitary tree stood in the center of the parking lot and was now bent almost completely in half as the wind pushed and shoved at it, trying to rip it right out of the small patch of earth it claimed. Here and there a lamp gleamed from behind threadbare draperies, and the cars that huddled side by side looked forlorn and abandoned.
“Okay,” she told herself firmly, turning back to keep her eye on Sam, “now you’re getting weird. There’s nothing wrong with this place that a nice little A-bomb wouldn’t cure.”
In the office, Sam shook the other man’s hand and the two of them shared a jovial laugh. “Hmm. A meeting of the minds,” she said wryly.
A moment later, Sam was sprinting through the wind and rain toward the car. He opened the door, jumped inside and shook himself like a big dog coming out of a lake.
“Whew!” he said as Karen wiped droplets of water off her face. “Man, this storm’s really something.”
“So I noticed,” she said, and took the registration paper from him when he handed it to her. “Where are our rooms?”
He sniffed, scooped one hand across his militarily short black hair and turned to look at her. “Well, that’s the thing,” he said.
“What?” she asked warily as the broken vacancy sign blinked off and the motel owner disappeared into his own room.
“Jonas says it’s been a busy night.”
“Jonas?” Good heavens, had he really had time to bond with the man?
“Yeah. Jonas.” Sam looked at her and shook his head before reaching for the key and turning it. The engine leaped to life, and he dropped it into gear and steered the SUV down past the line of parked cars. In the last available slot, he pulled in, parked and turned the engine off again.
Rain hammered at the car and the wind shrieked around them as she waited for him to finish. She didn’t have long.
“Anyway, he only had the one room left,” Sam told her.
“One room,” she repeated.
“Yeah,” he said, and, wincing slightly, added, “and, since this is a small southern town and since I didn’t much like the things Jonas had to say, I, uh…”
“You what?” Karen asked, giving him a wary look.
He shrugged. “Look at the registration slip.”
She tipped the paper up toward the stingy light of the dashboard and read it. Amazed, she read it again. Then, turning her gaze on Sam, she accused, “You registered us as Gunnery Sergeant and Mrs. Paretti?”
Well she didn’t have to sound so damned insulted, Sam thought. He hadn’t intended on registering them as man and wife, but seeing the leer in the motel owner’s eyes had decided him. He wasn’t about to let a guy like Jonas turn his sleazy imagination loose on Karen.
And what did he get for his protective instincts? A woman appalled at even pretending to be his wife.
Perfect.
“Relax, Karen,” he said tightly. “It’s not like I’m asking you to love, honor and obey.”
“I know, but—”
“It’s no big deal, all right?” Sam looked at her. “It’s a simple lie to make things easier.”
“For who?” she asked.
Frustrated now, he asked, “What happened to our truce?”
A long minute passed before she nodded and said, “Okay, you’re right. Truce. After all, how long can a stupid hurricane last, anyway?”
As she gathered her chocolates and her purse, Sam actually thought about that for the first time and realized that he and Karen would probably be together…alone…for the next three days. And nights.
Oh, man.
He had a feeling this hurricane was going to make boot camp look like a Tahiti vacation.
The inside of the place lived up to the promise of the outside.
Karen stood just inside the door and stared at it all in mute fascination. The walls were painted a soft orange and the rust-brown shag carpet set them off beautifully. Two lamps were bolted to tables on opposite sides of the one double bed. A closet with no door boasted three wire hangers on a bent rod, and the bathroom just beyond it looked small and seafoam green.
She plopped down on the edge of the mattress and heard the bedspread crunch beneath her. What did they make those things out of, she wondered, and gave the garishly flowered spread an amazed stare.
“Well,” Sam said, dropping her bags just inside the door. “It’s dry.”
“Mostly,” she said, and pointed to the far corner where a water stain had already begun to pool and spread across the ceiling.
He squinted up at the spot. “I can fix that.”
Naturally, she thought. That was his attitude about everything. If it was broken, Sam could fix it. Like he’d tried to fix what had happened between them. But that was the one thing no one could fix.
“Okay,” he conceded, “House Beautiful it ain’t. But it’ll stand up to the hurricane, and that’s all we should be worrying about.”
She looked up at him, and as her gaze locked on his strong jaw and slightly curved lips, she knew damn well that the hurricane wasn’t all she should be worrying about. Sharing a tiny motel room—and its one bed—with a man who could turn her inside out with a single touch scored pretty high on the worry meter, too.
He looked down at her, and it was as if he could read her mind. She saw the flash of desire spark quickly in his eyes, then disappear behind the wall of hurt she’d put there two months ago.
“This is only temporary, Karen,” he said, his voice gruff with an emotion she didn’t want to identify. “A few days of togetherness and we’ll be back to our separate lives. Just the way you want it.”
“A few days?” she asked. Good Lord.
He s
norted a choked-off laugh and shook his head. “There was a time when a few days in my company wouldn’t have made you look like you’d just been sentenced to twenty years’ hard time at Leavenworth.”
The sting of his words slapped at her, and she winced at the direct hit to her heart. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. Didn’t he know that she had been hurt, too? Couldn’t he see how difficult it was for her to push him away when her every instinct told her to snuggle in close to him? To recapture the magic she’d found only in his arms?
“Sam,” she said, and pushed herself off the bed. Tilting her head back, she looked into those pale brown eyes of his and said, “It’s not you. It’s—”
“Yeah, I know,” he interrupted her, and held one hand up to keep her from finishing that sentence. “It’s something you can’t explain. I seem to remember that speech, and if you don’t mind, I’d rather not hear it again.”
She flushed. Karen felt the warm rush of it fill her cheeks. Blast it. “Fine. Sorry.”
He nodded briefly, then said, “I’ll go get the rest of our stuff.”
“You want some help?”
“No, thanks,” he said tightly, already turning for the door. “I can manage.” Glancing back over his shoulder, he added, “Why don’t you call your folks before the power lines go down? Save your batteries.”
She watched him step out into the windswept rain and disappear into the darkness. When she was alone, she walked to the closet, peeled off her jacket and hung it up. But as soon as she set the wire hanger onto the rod, the wooden bar collapsed, hitting the carpet with a thump. She stared at her jacket, crumpled beneath the rod, for a long moment, then sighed and left it there. If this was a sign of things to come, she really didn’t want to think about it.
Figuring things couldn’t get much worse, she resolutely walked to the phone, picked up the receiver and started to dial. Now all she had to do was keep her mother from doing handsprings over some imagined reunion between her and Sam.
Martha Beckett desperately wanted grandchildren and wasn’t above using the age-old weapon of guilt in an attempt to convince her only daughter to provide said babies before she was too old to enjoy them.
Karen half turned on the bed to watch as Sam came back into the room, and at the same time her mother picked up the phone on her end.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mom,” Karen said, swinging her gaze back to something safe. Like the wall. “It’s me.”
“Honey,” her mother crooned, “I’m so glad you called back. You’re out of the storm, I take it? Safe?”
“Yeah,” she said. Safe from the hurricane, anyway.
“Good. Now, I want to hear all about you and Sam. You didn’t tell me you were back together!”
“We’re not, Mom,” Karen said, knowing it was useless but giving it the old college try, anyway.
“I was just telling your dad the other day that I just knew you two would work things out eventually!”
Karen groaned, and lifted one hand to rub the sudden throb that had leaped up dead center of her forehead.
“Now, the way I see it,” Sam said, stalking around the tiny room like a caged tiger, “we’ll each have our own areas.”
“We will?”
“Yeah.” He glanced at her, sitting on the bed with her back up against the headboard and her long legs crossed at the ankle. Even in the dim light of the pitifully low-wattage bulbs in the bedside lamps, Karen’s blond hair shone like sunlight. Her blue eyes watched him, and one corner of her mouth lifted in a half smile that teased him with memories of other times. Happier times.
Instantly, he remembered lazy Sunday mornings in her bed. Waking up with her cuddled up beside him. The soft hush of her breath on his chest, the lemony scent of her hair, the tantalizing magic of her touch.
“Sam?” she said, loudly enough to tell him it wasn’t the first time she’d called his name.
“Huh? Oh. Yeah.” He shoved one hand across the top of his head and reminded himself that those days were over. Karen had called a halt to what they’d had, and if he had an ounce of sense, he’d remember that and forget all the rest.
Or at least try to.
“Anyway,” he said firmly, “I figure you can have the bed. I’ll take the floor.”
“Deal.”
One eyebrow lifted. “That was fast.”
“Well, the feminist in me wants to argue that we should at least take turns sleeping on the floor. But…”
“Yeah?”
“The girl in me thinks the bed is pretty comfortable and really hates sleeping bags.”
He laughed shortly. “I remember. You really weren’t much of a camper.”
“It rained.”
“We had a tent.”
“Yeah, and every bug in the county came inside to get out of the rain.” She smiled, and just for a moment the problems between them dissolved in the memory of their last good weekend together.
They stared at each other for a long, tension-filled moment, then Karen abruptly ended the spell by leaping off the bed to grab up one of her bags. “Might as well settle in, huh?”
“Right,” he muttered, and mentally pushed his desire for her into a tight, hard knot deep into a corner of his soul.
A half an hour later, their respective “camps” were set up. At the foot of the bed, Sam studied his area, making sure all was as it should be. Against the wall, he’d stacked his MREs—meals ready to eat—bottled water, a battery-operated radio and a lantern. His sleeping bag lay open on the floor in front of his supplies, and he kneeled on it while he unrolled his poncho.
“What are you doing now?” Karen asked.
He glanced at her over his shoulder. Both of his eyebrows lifted as he said pointedly, “I’m getting ready for a hurricane. Unlike some people…”
“I’m ready,” she argued, not looking at him.
“Yeah,” he said wryly. “I can see that.”
Once she’d finished painting the last of her toe-nails, Karen looked up to meet his gaze. “Hey, I finished unpacking twenty minutes ago.”
“You unpacked your cooler.”
“I was thirsty.”
“Karen…”
“Lighten up, Sarge,” she said. “It’s not like there’s anything we can do beyond sitting in this room and waiting for the darn storm to hit.”
“But we can paint our toenails a lovely shade of pink?”
One blond eyebrow lifted into a high arch as she smiled at him. “Want me to do yours next?”
Appalled, he stared at her, then saw the twinkle in her eye. “Real funny.”
“Pink could be your color.”
“Maybe I should suggest that to the Commandant of the Corps. Get him to make our daily uniform something in pink.”
“Be more cheerful than those ugly jungle things you guys wear.”
“Yeah,” he said as he stood up and carried his poncho over to the drapery-covered window, “but a pink Marine might stand out in the actual jungle and that’s something we usually try to avoid.”
A moment of silence passed before she asked, “Been to many jungles?”
He shot her a quick look. “Not lately. Why?”
“No reason,” she said with a shake of her head. Sam wondered about that, but decided to let it go for the moment.
“So what’re you doing now?” she asked as he swept the drapes back and out of his way.
Sam stared out the window, but instead of the storm raging outside, all he saw was her reflection in the dark glass. She’d changed into a pair of loose white shorts and a blue tank top with thin spaghetti straps. Her long, bare legs were stretched out in front of her and cotton balls separated her freshly painted toes. Her blond hair hung loose around her shoulders, and when she turned her head to watch him, he could have sworn he actually felt her gaze slide over him.
“Sam?” she called, and he shook his head, focusing not on her reflection, but the darkness beyond the window and the wind-driven rain hammering at the glass.
>
“Yeah. Uh…” He lifted one corner of the poncho, held it up above the window frame and attached it there with a thumbtack. Moving along the edge of the window, he secured it with a series of tacks until the fabric completely covered the glass. “Just in case,” he said. “If the window glass breaks from the wind, those drapes won’t stop many shards. The poncho should slow ’em down enough that they won’t damage us.” You, he amended silently. After all, she was the one on the bed. She was the one who might be hurt by flying glass.
When he was finished, he yanked the drapes back into place for good measure and turned to look at her.
“You’re a regular Dan’l Boone, aren’t you?” she said, but a smile accompanied the words and he took them for a compliment.
“Yes, ma’am, that’s me.”
Damn but she looked good, stretched out on that bed. And there wasn’t anything he wanted more than to lie down next to her, pull her into his arms and kiss her until neither one of them could remember their names.
But since that wasn’t going to happen… “You hungry?” he asked.
“Actually, yes. I am.”
Now, this he could do. Rubbing his palms together briskly, he said, “I just happen to have a fully stocked kitchen.”
“Really? Well, I brought—”
“Nope,” he said, holding one hand up. “Dinner’s on me.”
“What’d you have in mind?”
“Hmm.” He bent down in front of the MREs and read them off one at a time. “Tuna noodle casserole, ham and scalloped potatoes…” He glanced at her and noted the less-than-delighted expression. “One of my personal favorites—macaroni and cheese. What sounds good to you?”
“A hamburger.”
“Sorry, MREs don’t do burgers.”
“Did I mention that I have sandwich fixings in my cooler?” she asked hopefully. “Salami, pastrami, ham, roast beef and cheese. There’s French bread,” she added, her tone coaxing.
Sam just looked at her. “Sounds great for lunch, but this is a hot meal I’m offering you here.”
Marooned with a Marine Page 3
