by Emerson Rose
“The kids…” My protest is pathetic, mostly spoken out as a motherly obligation. I know they’re being taken care of and I want him as much as he wants me.
He ignores me, thank God, and pushes the dress off my shoulders peeling it from my skin until it’s on the floor in a heap. It’s going to be a wrinkled mess. I won’t be able to wear it to dinner if we even make it to dinner.
“Did you pack the handcuffs?” he whispers kneeling in front of me to remove my lace panties.
“Yes.” I hold his muscular shoulders for balance when I step out.
“Zip ties?”
“Yes.”
“Rope?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a shame, I’ll have to wait until we’re on the ship to tie you up.”
I snap from my relaxed trance-like state, “You’re taking me on a cruise?”
“Yes.” He places a kiss on my navel. “I’m going to make love to you on the high seas, Mrs. Valentine.” He kisses me again a little lower and I reenter my trance. “And the low seas.” Another kiss on my mound and my knees wobble. “And every sea in between.” His last kiss is more than a kiss and I collapse against his body, but he’s got me.
He’s always got me.
The End
Her Marine
By
Emerson Rose
Copyright
COPYRIGHT 2017 PRISM HEART PRESS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
COVER DESIGN: Coverluv
EDITING: Rebelle Proofing
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This is for my sidekick Sophia. I love you.
Description
Caleb left me broken, alone, divorced and… pregnant.
Finding Julián was the best thing that ever happened to me… to us.
Now all I want to do is start our lives together.
But starting over isn’t always easy.
Moving back to my hometown carries a burden of the past—
A past full of betrayal and heartache.
But Julián would never leave me.
He would never walk away.
He’s loving, trusting, honest and honorable.
Always a man of his word,
Almost always…
When his past comes back to haunt us
It’s my duty to protect my son
I have no choice
I have to walk away.
He isn’t about to let his past keep us apart
but a future together is too dangerous for my son.
But Julian is a Marine.
He doesn’t give up,
He doesn’t walk way.
He fights for what’s his,
and I am his.
Chapter 1
Kimber
I’m standing in the middle of my new living room in Jewel Falls, North Carolina, alone, with an enormous puddle of water under my feet. I’m assuming that I still have feet. I haven’t exactly seen them in a couple of months.
Today I was supposed to be putting my professional interior decorating skills to work. Change of plans, now I’m going to have a baby.
I don’t even have time to set up the nursery or wash baby clothes. The furniture, including this kid’s crib, won’t be delivered until Friday and it is currently Monday. On the upside, we just arrived yesterday and my suitcase is still packed.
I reach into my bra, where I keep my phone tucked away so I won’t lose it in this mess, and dial my soon-to-be-husband Julián, better known as Garcia. He’s on the base today filling out paperwork and getting things settled… twenty minutes away.
The hospital is also twenty minutes away. Julián is closer to it than I am. Even my pregnant brain can do the math, forty minutes until I see a doctor. That should be okay, right? Labor can’t possibly set in faster than that with a first baby. That’s what all the books and classes say, first babies take a while.
The line rings four times while I chant to myself over and over, everything is going to be fine, everything is going to be fine.
Julián picks up out of breath and smiling. I know he is smiling because I can hear it in his voice every time he speaks to me. The man is unmitigated happiness, which in turn has made me a happy woman.
“Hey, baby, how’s my beautiful mami this fine afternoon?”
“Um, closer to being a mami for real, I’m pretty sure.”
He was breathing hard into the phone when he answered. Now he’s silent and I can’t tell if he’s breathing at all? “What?”
“My water just broke, can you come home?”
“You’re not due for a week, are you sure?”
I hold the phone out and take a picture of the puddle on the beautiful hardwood floor and press send. I hear the phone ding when it’s finished.
“Check for yourself.”
I hear him shift the phone in his hands to see what I’ve sent him.
“Holy shit, that’s a mess. You’re going to clean that up before we leave, right?”
“Julián! This isn’t the time to be goofing around. I’m having a baby.”
He laughs for a moment and then I hear him yell, “We’re having a baby today!”
“Okay, now that everyone on the base knows, can you come get me?”
“Sure, baby, I’m on my way to the car now. I’ll be there in fifteen.”
“Don’t speed, it’s going to be a while. I’m going to take a quick shower and change my clothes.”
“And toss a towel on that puddle, right?”
Even though he can’t see me, I roll my eyes. “Yes, slave master, I will clean up my mess.”
“I’m kidding, you know that. Leave it, somebody will clean it up… eventually.”
“Yeah, probably me in three days when we come home from the hospital.”
“Nah, I love you more than that. I love you more than pudding, remember?” Pudding was Julián’s favorite thing in the world, until he met me. The first time he pledged his love he compared his feelings to his love of pudding. That was how I was supposed to know how much he loved me and he’s never let me forget it.
“Yes, I remember, now hurry up, come home.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m all over it like bees on honey.”
“Julián?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re corny, you know that, right?”
“Yeah I know. Kimber?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you, you know that, right?”
“I do, more than fuzzy socks.” Fuzzy socks were my favorite thing before Julián.
“Can’t wait to hear you say those words soon, minus the fuzzy socks.”
“Me either.”
We hang up and I tiptoe across the room weaving in and out of boxes until I reach the st
airs where I stop when a slow cramp spreads across my belly. Contractions, yep, this is it.
When I’ve showered and cleaned up the trail of amniotic fluid I left through the house, I’m thinking about calling ahead to the hospital and asking to have an epidural ready the moment I arrive.
This contracting shit is for the birds. I was feeling mild period like cramps but now I want to throw things and it’s only been thirty minutes. Where the hell is Julián?
I hear the front door open and close, “Baby? You still pregnant?” he calls up the stairs. Thank God. I grip my pillow and try not to moan.
“Up here,” I call out and pull my knees up as far as my belly will allow. My black maxi dress is tangled around my feet from all the wiggling around I’ve been doing trying to escape the pain.
He takes the stairs at least two at a time, maybe three with his long legs and finds me in my pathetic state. He crawls onto the bed and lies down facing me in his Marine uniform. God, I love how he looks all perfectly pressed and put together. Even laboring and gushing fluid every five minutes with contractions I can appreciate his whisky brown eyes, bronze skin and chiseled jawline. He’s my Latin lover, a ray of warm sunshine. He rescued me from a dark, bleak time in my life when I felt abandoned and very much alone.
He reaches over and tucks a stray piece of my dark hair behind my ear tenderly and cups my cheek. Concern replaces the laughter in his eyes and he scoots a little closer. “You don’t look so good, trooper. This is really it, huh?”
I nod and close my eyes pressing my face into his hand.
“Does it hurt?”
As soon as the words are spoken another contractions starts and I grab his wrist and squeeze it tight.
“Wow, I’ll take that as a yes. Okay, we know what to do. We took a class. Try to relax and breathe, find something to focus on and blow the pain away.”
Garcia is probably the only man on the planet who took notes during Lamaze class. He has taken everything about my pregnancy seriously and assumed complete responsibility for my unborn child who is not even biologically his.
“Fuck Lamaze, I want drugs.”
A that’s my girl smile spreads across his face and he sits up and gathers me into his arms.
“You gonna leak stuff all over me?”
“You gotta problem with that?”
“No, Ma’am, not at all, leak away.”
He stands and carries me down the stairs and outside to deposit me into his Range Rover. He opens the door and pauses before he places me in the seat. “Do I need a garbage bag?”
“No, Julián I’m wearing a pad, your seats are safe.”
Relief washes over him and if I weren’t starting to have another contraction I would have given him shit about loving his Rover more than me.
“In ya go. I’ll go get our bags, don’t go anywhere.”
I look up at him through my eyelashes and lift my top lip in a snarl when the pain peaks. Where the hell does he think I’m going to go?
“Oh yeah right, you’re not going anywhere until I take you to the hospital, huh? You’re having a baby, shit. Sorry, my brain kind of short-circuited. This is so exciting,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. He’s talking a mile a minute and switching his weight from foot to foot.
Yeah, exciting for him, painful for me. “Garcia, stop rambling and get our stuff.” His mouth pops open and he stops and stares at me.
I don’t snap, ever, and I certainly don’t make it a habit of telling him what to do. It’s what makes our relationship work, a sort of unspoken understanding. But, he’s freaking out and since I can’t give him a slap across the face to snap him out of it I use my voice instead.
It’s actually adorable that this resilient man who risked his life for his country in a war killing people and leading troops of men around in the desert, is nervous about me giving birth. It’s sweet but that’s my Julián. He’s the best man I’ve ever known - he’s honorable, tender, supportive, sexy, he adores children and he’s surprisingly complicated in the best ways. He is everything my baby’s biological father is not.
Garcia fell into my life when it was a torn up disaster and made things good for me, better than good, he made my life damn near perfect. We met at my friend’s wedding when I was five months pregnant, swept me off of my swollen feet and asked me to marry him six weeks later.
I’d only been divorced for two months. Some people said he was my rebound guy, others said I was using him, but every one of them is wrong. My wounds were deep but Garcia healed me faster than the Wolverine with his honest smile and his corny jokes. I love him like I’ve never loved anyone before, including my ex-husband Caleb.
Garcia closes the car door and springs into action bounding up the porch stairs and into the house to get my suitcase and lock the doors. When he returns he settles in behind the wheel and I reach out to take his hand.
“Sorry.”
“Sorry? For what?”
“For snapping like that…” My words trail off when a contraction hits again and I squeeze his hand so hard he grunts in pain.
“No apologizing about anything today, you have a big fat get out of jail free card for the next three days.”
When the pain subsides I look at him sideways and correct him. “You mean for the next eighteen years, don’t you?”
“You’re gonna be crabby and snappy for eighteen years?”
“If things continue to be this painful, yes, maybe.”
He shakes his head, “No way, baby, I’m going to work my ass off to make the rest of your life pain free. You’ll be as happy as a clam at high tide.”
“Juliàn?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re nutty.”
“You love it.”
“I do. Now step on it, I want an epidural.”
Chapter 2
Garcia
This is it, the day I’ve been dreaming of for years. This is the day I start my own family, one that will be absolutely nothing like the one I was born into.
When I was seven years old I realized my family wasn’t like other families. Jacob didn’t have a shadow on the edge of the playground at recess, watching his every move, with a hand poised at their hip ready to draw a gun. And Cindy didn’t get dropped off at the curb in an armored Maybach and escorted to the front doors of the school by a man who looks like secret service.
When I asked my father why we were so different he didn’t even bother to lie. He told me he was a criminal and he had to protect his family. I knew being a criminal was wrong but for years I never asked exactly what kind of criminal. I didn’t want to know.
I wish I never had. But all of that is behind me now. I became the protector, although, I haven’t been protecting my family for the past nine years. I’ve been protecting my country from the evil of the world. Becoming a Marine is my way of balancing the scales. I know it won’t right all of my father’s wrongs, I don’t think anything can do that. But it feels good to do good. Not to mention that it drives my father crazy knowing that I would gladly give my life, the very life he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars protecting when I was growing up, for the good of my country.
I’ve always known what I wanted in life. When I was in elementary school, I knew I wanted to play football and I went on to be the star quarterback in high school. When I was in high school, I met a recruiter for the US Marines and I knew that’s what I was going to do. I also knew the second I laid eyes on Kimber West that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her raising a big family.
People told me I was insane dating a woman who was pregnant but I saw it as a head start. Her ex-husband Caleb must have fucking brain damage. What man voluntarily walks away from a Megan Fox look-alike who has his child growing inside of her?
A fucking idiot named Caleb, that’s who. He didn’t want a baby, not now anyway. He claimed Kimber got pregnant on purpose without his permission and divorced her over it. They were married for God’s sake, who does that?
So it wasn
’t planned, so it wasn’t the perfect time in his career for a baby, so it might spoil her figure temporarily, although, I think that’s a load of shit. Kimber is the hottest pregnant woman to ever carry a baby. Every part of her is soft and round and curvy, she’s femininity on steroids.
I can’t keep my hands off of her. If she weren’t already pregnant when I met her she would be by now, with my baby. I can’t wait for that. She wants to wait a while between kids so we can get the hang of this parenting thing but I disagree. The more the merrier is my motto, bring on the soccer team.
The sharp pain shooting up my arm brings me back to the situation at hand. Kimber is going to crush my fingers if I don’t get her to the hospital soon. We’re almost there and her contractions are getting closer and closer together.
“Hey, baby, is there anybody you want me to call? I know you didn’t want anyone there for the delivery but should we let people know what’s happening?” By people I mean her parents and her douche bag ex-husband. Even after all that’s happened she wants Caleb to be a part of this little guy’s life. He’s half his even if he doesn’t want him she said to me when I asked her if she wanted him to be involved in the baby’s life.
I’m happy to step up and be a father to this little man, but somewhere deep inside I think Kimber still holds out hope that Caleb will change his mind. Not to say she wants to get back together with him. I’d never let that happen. I love her too much. It would make her happy if Caleb made the baby a part of his life, even in the smallest way.
Her fingers slowly relax in my hand before she can answer. “No, I don’t want anyone to know yet. Let’s wait until he’s born to call.”
“Sure, whatever you want, you got it.”
“Julián?”
I know she’s being serious if she’s calling me by my first name, so I listen carefully.