“Come in,” she invited, going to the front door.
By the time she’d unlocked it, he was behind her, holding the screen open.
“How was your day in Billings?” he asked as they went inside.
“Productive—Marabeth found two dresses. The bridal shop is going to hold them for her for a while so she can make up her mind. Of course, the one she really likes costs about four times as much as the other one. We looked at bridesmaids’ dresses—ugh... We had a nice late dinner with her cousin, who’s excited to be a bridesmaid, and then we drove home.” Clairy set down her purse and they moved into the living room, where she turned on the lamp on the end table. “How was your day?”
“Tried to go home and sleep, couldn’t, got up and did Mac’s get-the-girl-out-of-my-system workout that’s followed by a run up to Mason’s Peak,” he answered.
Get-the-girl-out-of-his-system workout? Am I the girl? Does he want me out of his system?
Instinctively, Clairy took refuge in the self-protective mode she’d learned as a child to help deal with her father’s attitude toward her and his ever-looming departures.
She didn’t ask Quinn to sit and didn’t sit herself. Instead, she stood behind the easy chair at the opposite end of the room, gripping the back of it. “And now here you are to tell me you got the girl out of your system,” she declared.
Quinn shook his head slowly and let out a small chuckle. “Not hardly,” he muttered more to himself than to her.
“But you came to tell me something. That you’re cutting your leave short?”
“Not that, either. The exact opposite—”
“That you’re going to stay longer?”
“Forever—if you’ll have me.”
“Come on...” she cajoled, thinking that he was joking but not quite getting the joke.
“I mean it,” he said, moving to the arm of the sofa nearest the easy chair she was using as a shield. He dropped onto it, his thick thighs spread, his hands clasped between them.
Seeming more relaxed than she felt, he went on. “You know your dad was my idol and five months ago I sort of watched that idol crumble. It left me with a lot to think about. A lot about the way I’ve thought of and treated women myself, about how they did—or didn’t—fit into my life. It’s been weird,” he said with the air of someone who had finally worked things out for himself.
“I was starting to figure I needed to just do what Mac did,” Quinn went on. “I was thinking that playing at having relationships where I had one foot out the door didn’t amount to treating women any better than he had, so I should probably just skip relationships altogether, find women who wouldn’t get in any deeper than I did, and give my all to the marines without any regard to anything else, the same way I basically always have. Then our paths crossed, yours and mine...”
He paused, gave her a soft smile and explained all he’d thought about during his workout, during a rest before he ran down Mason’s Peak.
“The thing is, Clairy,” he said once he’d told her everything that had gone through his mind, “since I was a kid, I wanted to be what your father was. But I realized that maybe that isn’t true anymore. He wasn’t the man I thought he was. There were some big flaws that I was blind to. But now that I’ve seen them...” Quinn shook his head. “Those aren’t footsteps I want to follow in, and I think I’m back to looking at following in my father’s, in Micah’s and Tanner’s—I’ve served, I’ve made my contribution, and now maybe it’s time to come home...”
He paused again for just a moment before he stood and moved to the back of the easy chair, where she was, where she had to turn to face him.
Looking into her eyes, he said in a soft voice, “I’ve been the marine I’ve wanted to be. But you make me a better man, Clairy. You make me more the man I want to be now. And being with you, making a life with you, having a family with you, is the future I want. I love you.”
Oh, those three little words...
Initially it stunned her to hear Quinn say them. To hear him say them with so much sincerity that they rang as deeply true. The words sent goose bumps over the surface of her skin, made her pulse race and excitement wash through her.
Until she recalled another time when those words had swept her off her feet. When Jared had said them.
And she also recalled that she’d sworn never again to let them override her common sense or her better judgment.
She closed her eyes, forced herself to be rational, reasonable and analytical, rather than emotional. And only when she thought she had a tight grip on those things did she open them again.
“Maybe you don’t want to be like my father. You think you want to follow in your father’s and your brothers’ footsteps. Maybe it’s time to come home,” she said, reiterating his own words, mounting an argument. “Maybe and you think equals you’re not sure, you have doubts.”
“I had doubts as I headed up Mason’s Peak. I didn’t have them by the time I came down.”
It was Clairy’s turn to shake her head. “I don’t trust that,” she said flatly.
“You don’t trust me?”
“You were a little bitty boy when you came here, so sure of what you wanted to be, what you wanted from my father, and that has never wavered—”
“Until five months ago.”
“When it wavered even more toward being who my father was and only making women recreational. But before that, before you had your faith shaken, for all these years, for what amounts to nearly your entire life, you only ever wanted the life my father had, to be the marine my father was to his dying day.”
“I admit that,” Quinn acknowledged.
“And that’s it? Boom! All of that, a lifetime’s goal, a lifetime of work, and it’s over? It’s done?”
“It’s changed,” he insisted.
“It’s taken a hit. For now. But—”
“And you think what?” he asked. “That I’m trying to suck you in like your ex did with that flashy whirlwind courtship? That I’m trying to get you to say you love me, too, that you’ll marry me, have my kids, but ultimately I won’t come through for you any more than that other guy did? Any more than Mac ever did? You think I’ll decide to stay a marine and you’ll be stuck in the same boat you grew up in and then married into, too? That you’ll just be incidental to me?” he said, repeating her own description of what she’d been to both men.
“Yes,” she said with a staunch raise of her chin and no question in her voice.
Quinn nodded calmly, patiently, not at all like her father would have in the face of being denied something he was putting himself on the line for.
Then he said, “I understand that you’re afraid of a future, or having kids with someone like your ex or Mac, with someone whose career is more important to them than you are. And you’re right—that has been me. But that isn’t how I want the rest of my life to be. I don’t want the rest of my life to be the way Mac lived his. Marabeth believes Brad grew up, grew out of who he was before—just give me that much and let me take it from there.”
“If Marabeth is wrong—”
“She isn’t. Just give me the same chance, Clairy! I know now how much I took away from you when we were kids—let me spend the rest of my life giving back to you. Giving you what you deserve, not only because you deserve it, but because I love you with my whole heart, my whole being. And I want you to have what you deserve. Because I love you as much as it’s humanly possible to love anyone. And I want to spend the rest of my life proving it to you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, by your side, with you by my side. I don’t want to sweep you off your feet—I want both of your feet planted firmly on the ground right beside mine.”
“My feet are firmly planted on the ground.” So firmly that she couldn’t help remembering the awful teenager he’d been and fearing that that might have carried over somewhere
in the man, that even if it wasn’t obvious now, it could still be lurking behind the scenes to reemerge, the way Jared’s obsession with work had.
Her feet were planted so firmly on the ground that regardless of how sweet his words were now, she couldn’t let go of the memory of how hard Quinn had worked to become what he’d wanted to be, to become the marine her father was.
So firmly that she couldn’t take the step Marabeth was taking.
She shook her head a second time, stubbornly. “I won’t take the risk, Quinn. I didn’t really know who Jared was until after I married him. But I do know who you are. I know what you’ve put into becoming who you are. I know what you’ve always wanted. And it’s all the more reason I can’t believe you can just say never mind and change.”
“Not even for what we’ve had since I got to town? Not even to have what we could have?”
A third, even more resolute headshake.
Quinn stared at her as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, what he was hearing. But she resisted seeing what was just before her in that handsome face filled with raw emotion. Instead, she saw him as the image of her father, as the image Quinn had striven for. She saw the die-hard marine. She saw another man devoted to something she could ultimately never compete with.
“You can’t deny how good we are together,” he said, daring her.
“Or how bad it was when we were kids, or how bad it was for me with my father, or how bad it was with Jared,” she countered.
“It won’t be any of that from here!” he said, frustration raising his voice.
“I won’t take that risk,” she said so definitively there was nothing else to be said. “You should go,” she urged.
“Clairy—”
“I mean it. You should go!” she said in a louder voice of her own, because as much as she believed all that had just made her decision for her, she could still feel the soft spot she had for him and she didn’t know how much longer her will to resist him could last.
“Don’t do this. Don’t let what’s nothing but water under the bridge cost us both everything we could have together.”
For a moment, Quinn went on looking into her eyes as if he still couldn’t grasp that she was shutting him out.
So she raised her chin even higher to confirm that she was, and said in a voice she’d intended to be forceful but that instead came out with painful determination, “Go.”
Quinn did another round of headshakes. Took a deep breath and exhaled in frustration that was now tinged with what she thought was anger.
“I’ve always meant what I said—when I said I wanted to be a marine, I did what I had to do to be a marine. What I’m saying now is that if you’ll have me, I want to be here, with you, for you. I want to be your husband, father to your kids, until we’re two ancient, wrinkled white-hairs who die together in our sleep.”
What she took from that was that if she wouldn’t have him, he would go back to his original course, back to his career in the marines. Back to what he’d always wanted to be and seen himself as.
So it wasn’t as if he was committed to ending his career.
If a different kind of life was what he genuinely wanted, wouldn’t he be doing it with or without her?
One more time she shook her head in refusal, then said, “Go now.”
For a long moment, he stared at her, and Clairy met those blue eyes, fighting the thought that he was giving her the opportunity to stare into them forever, to have the sight of that staggeringly handsome face with her day in and day out.
Why did you have to come to talk tonight? Why didn’t you just come to take me upstairs again so we could have had at least one more night together...
“Go,” she said so softly it was almost inaudible. She felt her willpower slipping and needed him to be anywhere but there when she couldn’t hang on to it any longer.
She saw his jaw clench. But this time he didn’t say anything. He just turned and left her safely behind her chair.
She tried not to, but couldn’t help turning enough to watch those broad shoulders as he aimed for the door.
And maybe that was when her willpower snapped altogether.
Because in that instant, something happened to Clairy. Something that took her away from the part of her that saw how handsome he was, how sexy he was. Something that wasn’t connected to that urge to be back in bed with him.
It was something completely different that came over her as it registered that he really was doing what she’d told him multiple times to do—he was leaving.
But it was Quinn who was leaving—not the little boy who’d stolen her father’s attention. Not the teenager she’d hated. Not the marine fashioned after her father. Not Jared.
Quinn.
Quinn, who had absorbed the worst of her resentment toward him, repeatedly apologized and bent over backward to make it up to her rather than striking out, the way he could have. Quinn, who Mim had said wasn’t altogether responsible for Clairy’s lack of a relationship with her father and been right.
Quinn, who had so gently shown her more clearly who her father had been and in the process taken away the burden of thinking she’d somehow failed as a daughter.
Quinn, who had redeemed himself, worked himself out of the hole he’d been in with her—the bad blood, the obstacles, the ugly history—and made her feel things for him that she’d never felt before for anyone.
Quinn, who had done that by listening to her, by showing an interest in what she had to say. Quinn, who had been suffering his own grief, his own letdown by her father, and had still been understanding of her.
Quinn, who had just told her that he meant what he said.
That was her father through and through. The General had always said what he meant and meant what he said.
If that was true of Quinn...
Was she taking the wrong thing from what he’d just told her? Should she have taken from it that when he said he was ready not to be a marine anymore, to make a life with her, that was as true for him now as his determination to be a marine had been for him before?
He wasn’t indecisive—that was the last thing that could be said about him from the time they were small children. He knew his mind. He knew what he wanted.
And tonight he’d been telling her that she was what he wanted.
A life with her. A family.
And she was too afraid to believe it...
He reached the front door and raised a hand to the frame of the screen door to push it open.
He was leaving and he’d be gone and this would all be over.
And she wouldn’t have him.
“Wait...” she whispered.
He stopped. Hand still against the screen, he turned only his head to look at her over his shoulder.
“It’s all happened so fast, faster even than with Jared,” she whispered again.
“We’ve known each other since we were kids,” Quinn reminded her.
So while what had happened between them might have had an even shorter timeline than she’d had with Jared, there weren’t likely to be any surprises. If she could accept that Quinn was ready to stop being a marine and start being devoted to her alone...
“What would you do if you resign?” she asked tentatively.
“I like the idea of helping vets the way you do,” he answered with no hesitation, no question, clearly having thought it through. “I was hoping I could go to work with you for Mac’s foundation.”
He removed his hand from the door and turned to face her again from that distance. “I also like the idea of coming home to Merritt, being with my brothers again, with Big Ben. Being here if he needs me now and as he gets older.”
“When is your contract up?” Clairy asked, knowing that after so many years in the service, his commission was continued by way of contracts.
�
��About five weeks. But I have more accumulated leave that I could take to run it out.”
So he didn’t have an obligation that would take him back for months, when he might decide to stay after all.
“I just... How could being a marine be as important as it’s always been to you and now just...change?” she asked.
“Looking at Mac through a clear lens started it. It went further while I was questioning myself, realizing that I had two choices—to have Mac’s life or the life I can see having with you. Last night, feeling the way being with you felt—the way I felt—and knowing when I sorted through it all today that that was what I want from here on...” His eyebrows arched. “I just knew. I love you, Clairy,” he repeated even more firmly. “Nothing is more important than that to me now. The thought of not having you, of ending up like your dad...as nothing but a marine? That’s the worst punishment you could give me for the things I’ve done to you.”
It sounded so much like the truth.
And it came down to trusting that he really did mean what he said. And that he honestly had changed.
Marabeth knew Brad when he’d been a not-so-nice teenage boy, but she wasn’t letting herself be held back by who he’d been in the past. She was looking at him in the present.
Should I follow in those?
There was nothing about Quinn that had ever left a doubt that he knew what he wanted. If what he wanted had changed, why shouldn’t she believe it? Why couldn’t she trust that he did know himself, know his own mind?
“There’s nothing for me to punish you for,” she said. “I know now that I wouldn’t have had a relationship with my father even if you’d never come around—it was something in him that made him see me as less because I wasn’t male.”
Quinn took a few steps back into the living room. “I wasn’t nice to you when I was a smart-ass teenage boy,” he reminded her, as if he needed to be sure she could move beyond that.
“No, and I hope that isn’t still somewhere inside you. But I haven’t seen any signs of it.” In fact, she’d seen the opposite in his patience, his consideration, his calm even when she’d lashed out. “So it doesn’t seem like I should punish you for that, either.”
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