The Marine's Kiss. Shirley Jump
She hadn’t been his in such a long time. His brain, though, seemed to forget that fact.
He chuckled a little at the image of her down on her knees, puckered up with Reginald, the kissing pig. The sound of his own laughter startled him, like suddenly hearing a foreign language.
He knew what his mother was up to. Between the cookies and the picture of Jenny, she was hoping he’d come around. Go back to being the old Nate again.
The thing no one understood was that he couldn’t go back to being that Nate. No matter how much he wanted to. He’d left that man behind two weeks ago when he’d opted for an honorable discharge from the marines instead of spending the rest of his service years behind a desk—the only other option the doctors gave him.
The doorbell rang and Nate jumped, dropping the paper to the floor. It fluttered apart, dispersing like feathers. He ignored the cane and hopped the few steps to the door on one foot. Through the glass panel, he could see who it was before he even opened the oak door.
He rubbed at his eyes. Surely, this was too coincidental to be true. Maybe he had been alone too long. Now he was starting to hallucinate. Next, it would be pink elephants.
The bell rang again.
Okay, the sound was real. The person on his porch had to be real, too, not a dream come to life.
Nate turned the knob and opened the door. “Hello, Jenny,” he said, as if it had been ten minutes, not ten years, since he’d last seen her.
God, she looked beautiful. Even more so now with the sophistication of age. Her straight blond hair fell in a shimmering curtain against her neck and shoulders. She wore a suit of soft peach over a white silk blouse and matching pumps, as if she’d just come from church. Knowing Jenny, she probably had. Family and commitments had always been important to her, no matter the day of the week.
The nether parts of his body could care less how she was dressed. All he saw when he looked at her was a memory from ten years ago—Jenny lying on the back seat of his Grand Am, looking at him with a happy, satisfied smile and a love in her emerald eyes he’d thought would never die.
But that had been a long, long time ago. And he’d been wrong about the love part.
She tucked several strands of hair behind her ear. He knew the gesture well. She was nervous. For some reason, that made him feel better. “Hi, Nate.”
“Uh, you want to come in?”
She shook her head. “You’re probably busy.”
“Not especially. I could put on some coffee.” If he had any coffee. He wasn’t sure what was in his cabinets. He had cookies, though, and he could scrounge up something to drink to go with them.
“Okay, but only for a minute. I just wanted to stop by and discuss the game plan for next week.”
He opened the door and waved her in. “Next week?”
She stopped in the hall. “Yeah, that’s when you’re scheduled to come into my classroom and help out, remember?”
He hadn’t been in that deep of a fog, had he? “What are you talking about?”
“Dr. Davis told me you called the school and volunteered to help with my third-graders.”
He shut the door and leaned against the wall so she wouldn’t know how much his knee was hurting him. The last thing he wanted to do was drag out the cane in front of her. “Who’s Dr. Davis?”
“The principal.” Jenny put a hand to her mouth. “You mean…you never talked to her?”
“No.”
“Then how…” Her voice trailed off, confusion knitting her brows.
Nate glanced at the paper on the floor, the cookie tin on the hall table. It didn’t take a master puzzler to put the pieces together. “My mother is behind this. I’m sure of it.”
“Why would she do something like that?”
“She thinks I need something to keep me busy.”
“You?” Jenny let out a laugh. “You’re Type-A-plus. I can’t imagine you ever sitting around doing nothing.” Then she paused, as if her vision had finally adjusted to the darker interior. He saw her note the piles of dirty dishes in the kitchen behind him, the laundry he hadn’t bothered to deal with beside the sofa, the discarded newspapers and empty pizza boxes tossed around the room.
“Ah, excuse the mess, I’ve been—” he cut himself off. What reason could he give? He’d been wallowing quite well in self-pity for the last couple of weeks? He’d lost all sense of direction and purpose? That he’d had a hell of a time knowing who he was since he’d returned to Mercy?
Better to leave the sentence unfinished.
Jenny started backing toward the door. “Well, I’m sorry for bothering you. I’ll tell Dr. Davis it was all a big misunderstanding.”
She was going to leave. If she did, he had a feeling it would be another ten years before he saw her again. And next time, her last name might not be Wright anymore.
“Jenny, wait.” He took a step forward, then saw the cane against the wall, a stark reminder of why he was home in the first place.
She pivoted, her hand on the doorknob. “What?”
He tightened his fists at his side and gritted his teeth. “It was, ah, really nice to see you again.”
A strange look flitted through her eyes. Disappointment? Hurt? He couldn’t be sure. Half of him wanted to take the words back, to say something that would keep her here, but the other half disagreed.
“Yeah, you, too,” she said. “Tell your mother I said hello.”
And then she was gone. When the door shut, Nate turned off the hall light, yanked the cane up, and retreated to the sofa again. But for the first time, his sanctuary offered no comfort. Like a spring that wouldn’t stay down, the memory of Jenny inside his hallway kept popping up and poking at him.
By the time he picked up the phone, he’d already half made up his mind.
Chapter Two
On Monday morning, Jenny came in early. She’d come up with seventeen ways of telling Dr. Davis that Nate had turned her down, but rejected them all. Even if the whole thing had been a scheme by Grace Dole to reunite the two of them, or a grand idea to get Nate out of the house, Jenny knew she had to find a way to make the whole thing work out, for the sake of her class. If she came up with a good enough excuse for his absence, then it could buy her enough time to convince Nate to change his mind.
David Copperfield moved mountains. Surely she could get one stubborn marine to agree to help her class—and her career. She’d already kissed a pig. How much worse could convincing Nate be?
But being around him…all day, every day. In the same room, within touching distance. Could she do that? Ten years ago, he’d been the man she’d wanted to marry. The one she had laughed with, cried with. Kissed as if the world was going to end tomorrow.
Their world did. He’d joined the marines at seventeen and stopped coming home as often. The distance had made their bond weaker, not stronger. And eventually, one of them—she no longer remembered who—had said the words break up, and before she knew it, the dream she’d held for so many years had evaporated like summer rain on hot pavement.
It was better that way. She was happier. Granted, she was alone, but she no longer pounced on the mail truck, hoping for a letter or some sign that he was okay. That he still cared. She’d finally gone back to normal life.
Well, as normal as life could be with pink hair and a pig for a date.
Jenny pulled out a selection of new library books from her tote bag and set them up on a stand inside the reading circle.
“Miss