One More Kiss

“Sounds like a challenge. When do you need it?” Staci asked, wiping down the counter.

“Tonight. I told him I’d deliver it to the Hotel Del Coronado.”

“Why are you delivering it?” Staci asked. “Girl, be serious here. We don’t do this kind of thing.”

“He had a really sexy voice and he said please,” Alysse said. It sounded lame as a reason even to her.

“He’s taken,” Staci said, shaking her head as she walked across the room. “He wants a dessert for his lady.”

“I know. I just … It’s romantic, isn’t it? That he’d go to that much trouble to get her back,” Alysse said.

“He must have really made a mess of their relationship,” Staci, ever the realist, said.

Big-time, Alysse agreed. But that didn’t change the fact that he was trying to make up for it. That earned him major points in her book.

“Probably. Would you take a guy back if he planned a dinner for you at the Coronado on the beach?” Alysse asked her friend.

“Not sure. I guess it would depend on the guy,” she said with a shrug. “I’m not much on forgiving.”

“Me, neither,” Alysse said.

Maybe that was why she had said yes to delivering the dessert. She wanted this couple to have a second chance at love. A second chance at making their relationship work—because her own lover had never even tried for a second chance.

Even if he had she would have said no, she thought. She left the store area and went back into the kitchen. It was time for her to do the one thing that she was genuinely good at—taking ingredients and mixing them into something edible, something mouthwatering and delicious. It wasn’t lost on her that she used her baking to escape from the real world. In here she was in charge and if anything went wrong she could toss it out and start over.

She weighed and measured the cocoa and the flour and sifted them together, taking a kind of comfort from the mixing. She tried to keep the image of Jay from her mind but she couldn’t. The memory of the tough-as-Pittsburgh-steel Marine Corps sniper was hard to ignore. She knew that was why she’d failed at blind dates and speed-dating. She measured every man she met by the yardstick that was Jay, or by what she’d thought Jay was when she’d married him, and no one, not even Jay, would ever measure up.

JAY MICHENER TOOK a swallow of his beer and leaned back against the wall behind him. The bar was more open than he felt comfortable in; since he’d gotten back from Afghanistan he couldn’t relax. There were three other guys at the table with him.

Lucien he knew well as they’d been in the same unit for two tours. They’d been to the Middle East and back several times. Lucien had gotten out of the Corps two years ago and had started his own security business with the other two men at the table.

Jay didn’t know either man well, but they felt like guys he’d known before. But then, Jay had spent all of his adult life in the military so there weren’t many enlisted men he couldn’t relate to. The two men got up to play pool and Lucien took a sip of his beer before turning to Jay.

“Why don’t you come by my office tomorrow and I’ll give you the tour? Show you what life is like on the outside,” Lucien said with a wry grin.

“The outside? It’s not like I’ve been in prison,” Jay said. The Corps was his life not because he had no other choices but because it was where he wanted to be.

“It sort of is. You’ve been in since you were eighteen and you’re pushing thirty now. Isn’t it time you tried something else?” Lucien asked.

“Maybe,” Jay said. “I’ll try to swing by tomorrow.”

“Don’t ‘try to,’ be there around ten, Lance Corporal,” Lucien said.

“Okay,” Jay told him, giving in. It couldn’t hurt to check out Lucien’s place.

“You free for dinner?” Lucien asked.

“Why?”

“I want you to meet my girlfriend,” Lucien said. “She’s always bugging me to bring home the guys I talk about.”

“I can’t tonight,” Jay said. Or ever, he thought. He couldn’t think of anything more torturous than spending the night with Lucien and his girlfriend talking about the old times.

“I’ve gotta go,” Jay said, glancing at his watch. He wasn’t a guy who normally took gambles, so this one with Alysse was odd. But she had always made him feel differently than other women did, which was probably why he’d married her four years ago. That was probably also the chief reason he’d left her after only one week.

He was dressed casually in a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt but he felt naked without his rifle in his hand. How was a man supposed to live when he was always on edge? With Alysse, he had hoped to find something more normal, but the week they’d spent together had made him realize that he felt even more vulnerable with her.

Now he was stationed at Pendleton in Oceanside, California, about a twenty-minute drive north of San Diego. Pendleton had an idyllic setting right across the 5 from the Pacific Ocean and it was easy sometimes to forget that there was anything else but the beach and an endless horizon.

But his mind hadn’t let Alysse go as easily as Jay had hoped. Every night she sneaked into his dreams—and the sexy ones weren’t the problem. It was the normal-life ones that really disturbed Jay. The ones where he pictured Alysse in an apron with a few kids at her feet were the worst because he didn’t believe he was ever going to be the man who gave her those things.

“You’re on leave, Lance Corporal, I didn’t think you had anywhere to be,” Lucien said.

“I do tonight.”

There was a lot of laughing at the table as the men all made some comment about women and hot dates. He smiled and let them think it was just a casual hookup. He waved goodbye and walked out of the bar in San Diego’s Gaslamp district.

He got on his Ducati 1100s motorcycle and drove to the Hotel Del Coronado. He didn’t make a lot of money as a sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps but Jay didn’t spend a lot of money either. He didn’t have an apartment or house of his own, preferring to stay in hotels when he was on leave. Since he had always planned to be a career military man, he used base housing and stored his Ducati when he was deployed.

But something had changed in him on this last deployment. He had no idea if it was the fact that he’d turned thirty or the fact that he was at a crossroads. He could get out of the Corps now, find a civilian job and maybe have a shot at normality. Though he wasn’t convinced he was cut out for normal.

Tricking Alysse wasn’t the answer, but the last time he’d had a shot at a real life had been with her. His commanding officer would say he was being a, well … a coward, for lack of a better word, and Jay knew the CO would be right. But he wanted Alysse back.

His plan—and he always had a plan—was to spend his leave here with Alysse Dresden and figure out if he was meant for this life or if he should stay being a warrior.

Still, he needed to make up for how he’d left her. He hoped the romantic setting and the surprise of the grand gesture would be enough of an olive branch to persuade her to give him a second chance.

He pulled his bike to a stop in front of the villa he was renting and went inside and showered and changed. He’d spent a lot of time thinking up this strategy. He knew better than just to call and ask Alysse out. He’d hurt her and he knew it. The fact that he’d thought of nothing but her for the last four years had sent a strong message to him that he needed some kind of closure with her.

He took his time setting up the area, just as he would to get ready for a target. Planning and execution were the keys to success and he never forgot that. The staff had laid out a bamboo rug and then set the table up on that. Twinkle lights hung from the ceiling of the cabana. There were curtains which had been drawn back to let the breeze flow through the structure.

Jay was a little wary of having so much open space around him, but he was on leave and he tried not to let it bother him. He hated how on edge he always was when he came in from the field. And tonight he was doubly edgy because of Alysse.

He scanned the beach and the area where he was standing looking for the best strategic advantage. He sat at the table but felt stupid just sitting there, so he got up. He checked the wine chilling in the freestanding ice bucket and then walked to the edge of the cabana to lean against a palm tree.

Just as he decided he looked like someone in an all-inclusive resort commercial, Alysse appeared. He realized all at once he wasn’t as prepared as he’d hoped to be, because he’d forgotten how beautiful she was.

She arrived just as the sun was starting to set. She wore a casual skirt, and a blousy shirt. But it wasn’t the clothes—more the body underneath it. She was tall—almost five-foot-seven—and had an athletic build. She moved with grace and confidence and he couldn’t tear his eyes from her.

He had his sunglasses on. Her long ginger hair blew in the wind, a tendril brushing over her cheek and her lips. She moved with fluid grace and ease. She stopped on the path and glanced at the cabana. Was she wary of coming out here on her own?

“Hello? Marine?” Alysse called out.

Jay stayed where he was, watching her, feeling a little like a voyeur, but this was probably the only chance he’d have to observe her before she recognized him. He could turn around and walk away from this beach and this woman, just walk back to his Ducati and get the hell out of here.

“Hello?”

There was a catch in her voice and he knew he couldn’t just leave. He didn’t want to. There was a reason he was here and the reason had everything to do with this woman.