The Marine's Kiss

He wasn’t a marine anymore, not the kind he’d dreamed of being. And thanks to the bullet that had torn through his knee, he never would be again.

Jenny walked over to her desk, leaving Nate to face the class alone. He pointed first to a little girl with blond hair who seemed to have a continual sniffle. “What’s your question?”

She dabbed at her nose with a crumpled tissue. “What’s a marine do?”

He drew himself up and gave her a nod. “Good question. The grunts are the first ones into the hot spots. For instance, we’d take a beachhead with an amphibious assault and cordon off an LZ, then…” His voice trailed off as he noticed the furrowed brows surrounding him. “Uh, we go in first when there’s a war and make a safe place for planes to land the other troops.” He pointed next to a small boy with glasses.

“What happened to your leg? How come you got to have a cane?”

“I, ah, had some knee surgery.” Not exactly a lie. Not quite the truth, either, but there were some things he wasn’t ready to talk about, Jenny’s advice about being honest be damned.

“Where’s your gun?” Jimmy interrupted, before he could be called on.

“I don’t carry it when I’m not on duty.” He pointed to a girl in the back row who had her hair in twin pigtails. His mother, he remembered, had always done his sister’s hair like that.

For a second, he felt a pang at not having seen Katie since he came home. He missed her and his brothers—Jack, Luke, Mark. All were married now, settled down with families—nieces and nephews he barely knew because he’d been gone from Mercy more often than not.

He shook his head and, with skills honed over years of being apart from his family, Nate brushed the thought away. His mother had been calling and asking him over, but he’d made one excuse after another. He’d see his sister and brothers when he was ready. When he could somehow explain the man he’d become.

He was far from being able to do that right now.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear your question,” he said to the little girl.

“If you’re a marine, how come you’re not dressed like one?” she asked. “How come you’re not wearing your uniform?”

Nate’s grip on the cane tightened. The muscles in his jaw formed into immovable lumps, as if someone had injected them with concrete.

The question wasn’t a hard one. But it required an answer more complicated than he could give to a group of nine-year-olds at eight-thirty in the morning.

“I just decided to wear something else today,” he said finally.

“Can you wear your uniform tomorrow?” Jimmy asked. “I bet it’s really cool. Do you have a lot of medals and stuff?”

He’d had medals. Past tense. He thought of the dark-blue coat, once hung with ribbons and golden pins whispering of past deeds.

But now…

Now he didn’t wear it anymore. It had been far too painful a reminder, so he’d stuffed it into the dark recesses of his closet. A few months ago, that uniform had been his life. He didn’t have the athletic prowess of Mark, the brains of Luke, the business acumen of Katie or the focus of Jack. Nate thrived on action, adventure. And the only thing he seemed to be good at, since the Christmas he got his first G.I. Joe, was battling the bad guys—and winning.

Now that he wasn’t wearing the clothes of a marine, he felt lost, as if he wasn’t sure what uniform he was supposed to wear anymore.

“Can you wear your marine clothes tomorrow? I bet it’s really awesome,” another boy said.

“No.” Nate’s voice came out tight and strangled. He cleared his throat and tried again. “No, I can’t wear it.”

“Why not?”

“Yeah, why not?”

He cast a help-me look at Jenny. She grinned at him and stepped forward. “That’s enough questions for today,” she said. “It’s eight-forty-two. Time to get started on our vocabulary words. Now, everybody copy down…”

While she talked, Nate scooted around the desks and made his way to the back of the room. He slipped his free hand into his pocket and fingered the piece of paper that had arrived that morning on his fax machine. Whether he liked it or not, he had to stay in Jenny’s class for the entire week.

After Jenny had left, he’d called his V.A. doctor, thinking the physician would tell Nate he had a good reason to go on staying at home and off his knee. But no, the doctor had disagreed, and when the story of Jenny’s visit had slipped out, he’d ordered Nate to a week in Jenny’s class as “therapy” for his knee. Whether this was going to be good for him or not remained to be seen.

Looking at the wide-eyed, eager faces around him, he realized Jenny had been right.

These kids were going to eat him alive.

3:04 PM Page 38

Chapter Three

“I think I should alert the Pentagon,” Nate said to Jenny after morning recess a couple of hours later.

She laughed, the sound of it as light and airy as clouds skipping across the sky. He had always loved the sound of her laughter. There had been a lot of things he’d realized he’d missed when he came back home, but none caused the wrench of longing in his gut the way Jenny’s laughter did. “Why do you say that?”

“You’ve got this classroom running better than a lot of platoons. I’ve never seen such organization, especially with kids.”

She pulled open the door to her classroom and waved the children inside. Nate stayed on the opposite side of the stoop, providing crowd control. “You should see me the first day. It’s all chaos until I get to know the kids and they get to know me.”

“I bet you have a schedule and a routine all set before the first bell rings on opening day. If I remember right, you weren’t the type to like chaos for very long.”

The last child skipped across the threshold, followed by Nate. Jenny swung the door shut and latched it firmly. “No, I didn’t.” Her voice had dropped into a softer, almost melancholy range.

Jenny’s childhood, he knew, had been a topsy-turvy one. She’d never talked about it much, but it had been clear her flighty mother and absent father had made her young life unpredictable. Throughout their courtship, she’d called Nate her “rock,” the one support system she could count on. With him, Jenny had seemed to let loose, live more for the moment, as if she trusted him to be there when she needed to come back to reality.

Inevitably, though, she’d always rein herself back in, focusing on work or homework or whatever else was more important then, as if she’d suddenly realized the consequences of being too spontaneous. They’d had fun when they’d dated, most of the time, when Jenny had let down her hair and really let him into her heart and her world.

He remembered the fights, the days when it seemed there was no way to repair the damage between himself and Jenny, but he also remembered so much more. Laughter over nothing at all. Hugs on the porch. Kisses sneaked behind the shed. Teasing, torturous touches in the lake during summer camp.

“Jenny, I—”

She turned to him, her emerald eyes wide. Waiting. “Yes?”

Save for a slight maturity in her face and a lightening in her hair, Jenny Wright was the same woman he remembered. Her laughter, her smile, her eyes. All of it exactly the same, as if the past ten years had passed in a blink.

But he was different. And he’d be fooling himself if he thought she’d want anything but the old Nate, the strong, can-do-anything man he’d been. That was the man she had loved, not the shell of a used-up soldier he’d become. “Never mind.”

“Don’t do that. You were about to say something. Tell me.”

He looked past her, into the bright and sunny classroom that so captured Jenny’s personality in the vibrant wall hangings and the sunflowers decorating the bulletin boards. “I…I think Jimmy is trying to feed Lindsay a worm.”

“Oh, God, not again,” she muttered and spun away.

Within thirty seconds, she had the offensive invertebrate back outside, Lindsay calmed and Jimmy seated at a desk in the hall. “Exile worked well with Napoleon,” Jenny explained, joining Nate at the back of the room. “And it works well with Jimmy Brooks, too.”

“You’re a genius.”