The Marine Makes His Match

by Victoria Pade

  With the nighttime routine finished, Kinsey headed for the door. But before she got there, the colonel said to her, “I was told I could invite someone to the Camdens’ dinner tomorrow so I asked Sol. He’s coming along.”

  Ooh, Sutter was going to hate that!

  But Kinsey kept quiet on the subject. “That’ll be nice for both of you.”

  “He says Sundays are the longest days of his week, so I thought I’d give him something to look forward to.”

  Kinsey smiled at the excuse that deflected the fact that the colonel might want her neighbor along for her own sake. “That’s nice.”

  “Sutter won’t think so. Take care of that, will you?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” she assured, suppressing a laugh.

  Sutter was in the living room when she went downstairs. He was propped on the edge of the sofa doing his physical therapy exercises but stopped when she joined him.

  It had been a few days since she’d examined him—in the medical sense anyway—and she’d told him earlier that she wanted to check on his shoulder and maybe add a few new exercises to his regimen. She assumed he was in position for that so she went to stand in front of him to begin.

  “Clothes on?” he asked with a crooked and devilish smile.

  “Clothes on,” she said, resisting the temptation to insist he take off the sweater.

  “Too bad,” he muttered.

  You’re telling me? she thought but didn’t say it.

  Instead she began her exam. “How’s it feeling?”

  “Better every day. Stronger.”

  Kinsey tested his range of motion and his strength and found them both improved, though not at a hundred percent yet.

  “Have you seen Jack?” Sutter asked as she was working. “Or is he getting into trouble?”

  “Your mother is letting him sleep on her bed.”

  Sutter’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Damn...you think she’s warming up to him finally?”

  “Looks like it. We just have to hope he doesn’t blow it by chewing her sheets or stealing her book...again.”

  Kinsey paused, then said, “It was the second invitation she extended tonight. Apparently the first was to Sol when she said good-night to him—she asked him to the Camdens’ Sunday dinner tomorrow.”

  The scowl returned. “And you’re going to tell me that’s progress, too. And that it’s all part of what I wanted—companionship for her and backup and a support system and all that—so I should be thrilled about it.”

  “Do you need me to tell you that?”

  Sutter took a deep breath, exhaled, clasped her hand to halt her exam and pulled her down next to him on the couch. “I need you to sit and help me not think about it.”

  “How would you like me to do that?” she asked with a hint of suggestiveness in her tone.

  That only made him smile before he sat back at an angle that faced her and stretched his good arm across the top of the back cushions.

  “Satisfy my curiosity,” he instructed.

  Curiosity was not what she’d been thinking about satisfying...

  “Curiosity about what?” Kinsey asked as she made herself more comfortable on the sofa and angled to face him, too.

  “About why you’re single—you are single, right? Or do you have a husband I haven’t heard about?”

  “Single. Engaged once, but never married,” she confirmed.

  “Okay. But you’re beautiful and smart and sweet and funny. And I get that you don’t want anybody in the military. But you’re determined to have family—so why not just get married and have one of your own with a nonmilitary guy?”

  “Because I don’t want to make some rash choice out of loneliness or desperation,” she answered frankly.

  “And you figure step one is to connect with the Camdens and then you won’t be lonely or desperate,” he surmised.

  “If I have family around me, and a support structure in place, then I’ll know that when I meet someone and it feels like I want to be with that someone every minute of the day, it will only be because I want to be with that someone every minute of the day. Not because there’s nothing else in my life.”

  “Has that happened to you before?”

  She made a pained face, hating to admit it, and he interpreted it.

  “It has.”

  “There was a guy I met in Northbridge when Hugh got sick, and it lasted until right after Mom died—although it wasn’t serious, we never spent the night or anything.” She didn’t know why she’d felt the need to clarify that but there it was. “Duncan Cain. He was the bank manager there. He would ask me to dinner whenever I was in for a weekend, and that got to be a regular thing—he wanted to move to Denver and liked asking me about living here.”

  “It was the excuse he used to get to see you,” Sutter informed with some humor, as if she’d missed that Duncan’s intense interest in Denver had been mostly a ploy.

  “Maybe,” she conceded. “When I moved there to take care of my mom full-time, he came around more, asked me out more. And he was good with Mom—he’d bring her candy and flowers and she liked that, which was nice.”

  “But you still never slept with him?”

  Kinsey laughed at the tone in his voice that said that was beyond his comprehension. “Because he brought my sick mother candy and flowers?” she said facetiously. “No. I kind of kept him at arm’s length even then. There was just no...you know, chemistry. Even though there should have been. He was attractive and kind, a decent guy—”

  “And a stable, nine-to-fiver like you’re looking for.”

  “Right.”

  “But?”

  “Whenever I was with him...” She made the face again, feeling guilty for this part of her past. “He was really boring and I always felt like I was just going through the motions. Using him a little, I guess, to get out some when I was in Northbridge,” she admitted, not proud of it. “But—especially after Mom died and I was so alone—he’d call and I’d still say yes to another date just to be with someone.”

  “To not be alone,” Sutter said kindly. “Did he know you weren’t into him? Or care, if he did know?”

  “I don’t think he knew—or maybe he thought he was gradually winning me over. At first, when I was just in and out of town, it was pretty casual—friendly dinners, an afternoon at a town festival or something. Then, when I moved to Northbridge, I saw more of him, but he knew I had so much going on with my mom failing and the stress of that, and I think he decided that I just wasn’t up for...anything too heavy. So he didn’t push me. After my mom died, I was grieving and he knew that, and was understanding...”

  Duncan had been so understanding all the way around. Recalling that only made her feel more guilty and it sounded in her voice.

  “He kept saying that he was a patient man, that he was willing to wait,” she said, not adding that Duncan had said she was worth waiting for.

  “Then he got hired at a bank here,” she went on. “And he was so happy about it. Not only was he getting a higher position and more pay along with the move he wanted, but he seemed to think that when we both got back to Denver, things would be different and our relationship would kick into high gear.”

  “Meaning you still hadn’t slept with him and he figured that would happen here,” Sutter said with a hint of his mother’s directness.

  “Right.” Kinsey made the shame face once more. “And he seemed like such a smart, safe choice that I started to try to talk myself into liking him more than I did. To consider having a future with him, so I could come back here not alone and have a white-picket-fence life, a family. I started to try to tell myself that not every marriage has to be based on passionate love. That there are arranged marriages in
the world that last forever, based on respect and shared goals. And that at least then I wouldn’t be—”

  “Alone,” he finished for her with that word that kept cropping up over and over again.

  “I actually started to think so seriously about it that it scared me a little to realize how simple it would be to just settle for something less than marrying a man I truly loved, how tempted I was.”

  “What made you not do it?”

  “Things my mom had said at the end. About Mitchum Camden. About how much she’d loved him. I wanted that—not with someone else’s husband, but that kind of feeling. And what I didn’t want was what she had with Hugh.”

  “Did they have a bad marriage?”

  “No, they didn’t. I know he was happy enough and I think my mom was...content. But their marriage was more gratitude for him taking us all on than the kind of love a lifetime should be built on. When she was telling me about her feelings for Hugh, compared to her feelings for Mitchum Camden, I couldn’t help thinking that poor Hugh had gotten the short end of the stick. It seemed so unfair to him. And it would have been unfair to Duncan if I’d gone through with a committed relationship with him. Plus I didn’t want to end up in one of those situations where I was still lonely even with someone in my life—and listening to my mom, I’d had that sense about her.”

  “So you decided to pursue the Camden connection instead.”

  She shrugged. “I did. And hopefully things will work out with them. Then, when I meet someone, it will only be about that person and feelings I’ll be able to know are real and only for them.”

  “So Duncan wasn’t the guy you were engaged to,” Sutter said then, a prompt to go on.

  “No, I was engaged to someone just before that—Trevor Aimes. I was with him from right out of nursing school until slightly before Hugh got sick—about four years. We were engaged the last six months.”

  “That must have been the relationship you were in that left you a lot of time on your own to do that pro bono physical therapy for vets.”

  She’d mentioned that quite a while ago. She was surprised he remembered.

  “That would be the one,” she confirmed. “Trevor worked for Doctors Without Borders.”

  “I don’t know much about that. Was that his actual job? I sort of thought doctors took time off their everyday practices and just did a stint with that organization here and there.”

  “It can go either way. Some doctors do it once or twice, some are hired on by the organization.” Kinsey sighed. “I met Trevor when he was a month from finishing his residency. He was at the same hospital where I had my first job as a nurse but he’d already interviewed with Doctors Without Borders. He said he wanted to give back for the privilege of his education. I thought that was noble.”

  “Sure.”

  “His plan was to do locum tenens when he finished his residency—that’s what it’s called when doctors substitute for other doctors. Then he’d have a stint with Doctors Without Borders, and when he came back, he’d start his own practice. That didn’t send up any red flags for me. But then he came back from the first trip and decided to do locum tenens again until he could do a second stint with Doctors Without Borders. I was still okay, we weren’t serious yet. But then he wanted to do it all a third time. And a fourth...”

  “Uh-huh...” Sutter said as if he was getting the picture.

  “Trevor kept saying just one more trip,” Kinsey said. “That then he’d practice here.”

  “But one more—and one more and one more—wasn’t enough.”

  “No. He decided he wanted to be on staff with them permanently when he came back after the fourth trip. He’d proposed just before that fourth round, swearing that it would be the last time.”

  “But signing on permanently would be like being deployed over and over again.”

  “Exactly,” Kinsey said.

  “Did you ask him not to do it?”

  “How could I do that? There was a need for his skills that not that many people can—or are willing to—fill. I have a tremendous respect for the people willing to make that sacrifice.” She sighed again. “With my brothers and then with Trevor, I looked at it the way you said your dad looked at his role—staying here, taking care of things here, was my way of serving, of doing good so that they could do what needed to be done.”

  “I know you took care of your parents, did you have to take care of something for Trevor, too?”

  “His family. He was an only child of older parents and his mother had a lot of health problems that his dad couldn’t handle alone.”

  “So you helped out in Trevor’s place while he went off and did his stuff. Thinking that it was only going to be for one trip. Then two.”

  “Because Trevor kept promising that the next trip would be the last. I’d told him why I wouldn’t marry anyone in the military, that I wanted someone in my life who would be around, so he knew how I felt.”

  “But it didn’t stop him.”

  “When he proposed he said that the fourth trip would absolutely be the last. He even wanted to set a wedding date before he left to convince me of that. We settled on seven months away—a month after he was scheduled to come home. I believed him and while he was gone, I did all the planning, all the preparations for the wedding on my own, sure that it was the last thing I would have to do that way. And about the time he got back there was an opening for a position at the hospital. So I suggested that Trevor apply. That was when he said that he intended to do what he was doing forever.”

  “And there you were, looking at the same kind of life you would have had as a military wife—holding down the fort while he was gone for long periods of time, year after year.”

  “Yes,” she said sadly, revisiting some of the pain and disappointment she’d felt when she’d come to that realization.

  “So you ended it rather than asking him to stay home,” Sutter said.

  “I ended it,” she said softly. “I’d been taking care of everything since high school—”

  “Back up—what did you have to handle in high school? There was the end-of-life stuff for Hugh and your mom but that wasn’t that long ago.”

  “No. But all of my brothers were gone by the time I was fifteen. Even when they were at the academy they rarely came home so they might as well have been overseas. By my junior year it was as if I was an only child—I worked the farm with Hugh, I did all the chores my brothers had done. Then, just after my senior year started, Mom and Hugh were in a car accident that they were lucky to have survived, but they were both in a hospital for weeks and came home needing care, and I was all there was for that, and for running the farm completely on my own.”

  Sutter flinched. “And you did that, too? Senior year when everyone was having a good time, a last hurrah, and even though you had three brothers, you were the only one taking care of injured parents and a farm? Jeez, Kinsey...”

  “And it didn’t end there. Even after I went to college, even after I was working here, I needed to go back and forth to Northbridge to help out with the farm. And along the way I just started to think—to know deep down—that I didn’t want to always be—”

  “The only one carrying the full load. Yeah, I can understand that. And it left you with a big, fat, firm no to marrying someone in the military—or any other kind of job that would mean your spouse was away most of the time—and ending up in that position for life.”

  “So when Trevor and I finally hashed things out, I had to stand my ground when it came to my own future. I made it clear to him that I want someone who comes home at night. Someone I can look forward to weekends with. I want the kind of closeness that comes from being together all the time—because that’s a different kind of closeness than what you can have when you’re together and then far apart for a long time.”

  “So you parte
d ways,” Sutter concluded.

  “So we parted ways,” Kinsey confirmed, suddenly feeling exposed by having said so much.

  Sutter smiled a small, knowing smile. “You get to want what you want for your own future, you know? It sounds like you might think there’s something selfish about it or something.”

  He was very perceptive.

  “It isn’t easy, when someone is out doing good, to complain to them about how hard it is on me,” she confessed. “It does seem selfish.”

  The small smile he gave her was kind and understanding. “Still, you’ve got the right to have your own life be the way you want it to be. And I think you’ve put in more than your fair share of being the one left behind while other people go off and do good. I think it’s earned you the right to say enough, that from here on you want someone who sticks around.”

  Which wasn’t Sutter, she reminded herself yet again.

  But he was here now...

  And now was something, she thought when she looked into those eyes that his sweater made even more vibrant, when she saw that kindness and understanding in them, and—like the previous Sunday at the Camdens—more of the support she was always in such short supply of. It all went to her head and she didn’t care that he wouldn’t be around forever, she was just glad he was there at that moment.

  “I do get to say enough, I want someone who’s around,” she reiterated with some audacity, as if she’d been empowered.

  That made him smile again. “You get to have whatever the hell you want,” he added.

  “Except chocolate cake,” she joked to get off this topic. “You let the colonel and Sol eat all of that.”

  “That was bad,” he agreed. “I turned my back for one minute and it was gone! And I had such good plans for it...”

  But Kinsey didn’t need any cake to entice her to kiss him and he obviously knew that because his hand came to the back of her head and guided her into the kiss she’d been craving since last night. The kiss she’d been craving far, far more than cake.

  There was some familiarity to kissing him now, but that in no way blunted the glory of it. She had to struggle not to lose herself, to keep her wits about her and make sure that kissing him didn’t become something she couldn’t live without.