by Cathie Linz
Kelly was bossy, too. Maybe Prudence was right, maybe it would be better to get a woman’s perspective on the situation. So he laid out the facts as best and as briefly as he could.
“Barbie walked in on you and Kelly kissing, and when she accused you of using Kelly to get back at her you didn’t defend yourself? Why on earth not? Bad move. Very bad move.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” he growled before remembering she was pregnant and should be spoken to politely. “Look, there’s no point in rehashing the past. I need advice on where to go from here.”
“I’ll say you do. Just showing up on her doorstep and saying you love her…that sounds like something Joe would do. But it’s not enough, Justice.”
“So you’re saying…what? That I should have brought flowers and candy as well?”
“That’s not going to do it. You have to explain your actions to her.”
“She slammed the door in my face.”
“When I wouldn’t listen to Joe, he kidnapped me from the school where I teach. Swept me right off my feet.”
Justice frowned. “You liked that?”
“I hated it. The only good thing about his idea was that he made me listen to him. Good luck, Justice, I need to go eat more saltines now. Morning sickness. Talk to you later.” She handed the phone back to Joe who closed with, “One more thing, big bro. Never give up. Fight for the woman you love, it’s worth it in the end.”
Justice called Mark next, who was much more sympathetic to his quandary. “Hey, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand the female mind,” Mark said. “And I never thought love would get me. I told myself I didn’t do love.”
“Me, too.”
“I mean, we’re guys, we don’t talk about that stuff. About touchy-feely stuff like emotions.”
“Yeah, I know.” Justice had always kept his innermost thoughts and emotions tightly locked up, believing they shouldn’t be tampered with. And now look at him. Calling his brothers and talking about personal stuff instead of sports.
“But then you meet the woman and she opens up the whole can of worms.”
Mark’s reference to worms reminded Justice of Kelly freeing the worm she’d named Fred along with his crawly cohorts. He remembered the light in her eyes as she smiled at him that day. He’d probably fallen for her right there and then, only he’d been too stubborn to admit it.
“So how did you convince your wife that you loved her?” Justice asked.
“For one thing, I asked her to marry me,” Mark replied.
Marriage. For once the concept didn’t make Justice’s stomach plummet. When he’d talked to Kelly about most women not understanding the demands of being married to a Marine, she’d told him to wait for a woman independent and strong enough that she wouldn’t have to depend on him being with her every second of the day. And when he’d asked her if she was a woman strong enough to be married to a Marine she’d said, “Absolutely.”
She was such a jumble of contradictions, sure of herself in some ways and uncertain of herself in others—most notably in her ability to be seductive. Justice wanted to change that. He wanted to woo her, to make her feel special. And he wanted to win her, to bed her, and yes…to marry her.
“How did you propose?” he asked Mark.
“I got down on one knee in the garden behind her father’s palace and asked her. I was wearing my dress blues uniform at the time. I started out with a dorky Prince Charming costume earlier that night, which should have convinced her without my saying a word that I loved her. But women seem to want to hear the words, so I would go with that and forget the costumes. I dumped the costume ASAP. The dress blues uniform added a nice touch, though. But, hey, like I said, I’m no expert. Maybe a grand romantic gesture would be better.”
“Or maybe I should cover my bases by doing both—go with the romantic-gesture thing and the spilling-my-guts-talking-to-her thing.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Mark said. “Good luck and let me know how it goes.”
Justice had a plan, all right. A few more phone calls should put it into action….
Justice arrived at Kelly’s house the next afternoon. Today he took the time to notice his surroundings. The neighborhood was quiet and well maintained. Unlike many developments, this one had a number of mature trees in the area, including one in her compact front yard. A kid’s bike lay on the driveway next door and the smell of newly mowed grass was in the air. And there, tied to the tree in her front yard, was the aforementioned canine, who looked up and greeted Justice with what he could have sworn was a doggie grin.
“At least you’re glad to see me,” Justice told the dog, rubbing one of the animal’s floppy ears. “I still say Chocolate is a silly name for a dog. Devil dog would be good. That’s a nickname for a Marine, you know. Not that you have what it takes to be a devil dog. No, maybe you’re better as A.C.” He used the abbreviation for aforementioned canine. “So fill me in here, A.C. Do you think Kelly will be more receptive today? Do you think she’ll listen to me this time? I spent half the night trying to come up with a fancy speech and all I ended up doing was sounding like an idiot. So I’m just going with the truth. And the truth is that I love her.”
Woof.
Justice rubbed the dog’s other ear. “Yeah, I know it sounds pretty lame, especially after I talked to my brothers and asked for their advice. I’m sure they’ll hold that over my head for the rest of my days. Me, the oldest one, making a fool of myself over a woman. But she’s not just any woman, as you know, A.C. She’s pretty damn special.”
Woof.
“I know, I know. Swearing shows a lack of discipline. Don’t tell her about my momentary lapse. It’ll be our secret. I couldn’t believe she took you with her when she left. I should have known she would, though. She’d already told me that she would never abandon someone she loved. She left me pretty darn fast, though, which made me wonder if maybe she didn’t love me after all.
“But then, well, let’s just say we shared some stuff before her sister walked in on us…Kelly isn’t the kind of woman who’d do that if she wasn’t serious about a guy. Can you believe she doesn’t think she’s sexy? How idiotic is that? I mean just looking at her makes me hot. Her smile burns me up. Remember how lean and hungry you were when you first came to the beach house? Well, that’s how she makes me feel. Being with her makes me feel…complete, I guess. Sounds sappy, I know.”
Justice paused to glance over his shoulder at her front door before turning his back once more and continuing. “She’ll probably laugh at me when I try in my stumbling way to tell her all this, to tell her again that I love her. And then she’ll probably kick me out, but I’m not giving up. If any woman is worth fighting for, Kelly is. Because she’s special, and she’s definitely worth waiting for. You know when I knew it was serious? I knew she was trouble from the moment she showed up on my doorstep in that storm.
“And, okay, so I admit that for a brief moment I did consider the fact that she might be using me as a way of getting back at me for the divorce with her sister. And because of that, I thought about the possibility of using her before she used me. But that went out the window the first time we kissed. I should have told her that when Barbie walked in on us and started hurling accusations around like hand grenades. But I panicked.
“Dumb I know, but there you have it. I’m not trained in handling situations like that. Going behind enemy lines, that I can manage. But this emotional stuff, well, I’m doing the best I can here because I do love Kelly and she means more to me than…” His throat tightened and he couldn’t get the words out. It took him a moment before he could gruffly continue. “Well, let me put it this way A.C., I realized that Force Recon is no longer the most important thing in my life. Kelly is. And that pretty much says it all.”
“Yes, it does,” Kelly said.
Justice whirled around to find her standing a few feet behind him. He noticed that her formerly closed front door was now open.
; “How much of that did you hear?” His voice was rusty and his stomach felt greener than when he’d been stuck in a force-nine gale off the North Sea in a small fishing boat.
“All of it. I was upstairs. My bedroom window faces the front of the house and I had the window open. I heard you drive up, I heard you talking to A.C., and I heard you say that you loved me.”
“I told you that yesterday.”
“Not the way you told A.C. today.”
Nothing he could have done would have convinced her that he loved her or made her feel more seductive than overhearing his rough confessions to her dog, an animal Justice had tried to keep his distance from. The walls she’d built since leaving the island had come tumbling down around her, leaving her with two unalterable facts—that she loved Justice and that he loved her. Everything else could be worked out if those two facts were true.
And she was willing to believe he did love her. It had been there in his voice, even if he had been talking to Chocolate instead of to her. And it was there now, in his eyes. Had it been there yesterday, and her anger and pain had blocked her from seeing it? She wasn’t sure. She only knew that no one had ever looked at her this way, as if she were the center of their universe, as if she were more important than air, as if she were a precious resource to be protected and cherished.
Justice was also staring at her as if unable to grasp that she wasn’t ordering him off her property or threatening to call the cops on him. “You don’t think I planned it this way, hoping you’d overhear me?”
“Did you know I was upstairs?” she asked.
“Hell, no. If I had, then I wouldn’t have made such a big fool of myself by talking to a dog like I did.”
“Which is what I figured.”
“Yeah, but I’m Force Recon. We’re used to being devious.”
“Which is why I know you’d have come up with a better plan than talking to Chocolate.”
He nodded. “Good point. As for Force Recon, you made me realize that I needed to concentrate on what I have, not on what I’ve lost. So I talked to my C.O. this morning about instructor duty to prepare other Marines for Force Recon. He thought the idea had a great deal of merit.”
“I’m glad.” She knew how important the Marine Corps was to Justice, it was as much a part of him as his blue eyes or his rare smiles.
“I meant to court you, to woo you. I considered sweeping you off your feet like my brother Joe did with the woman he loves, but that’s not going to happen with my bad shoulder. So then I considered making some sort of grand romantic gesture like getting some buddies who were former members of the Marine Corps Band to serenade you with your favorite song. Nashville is Music City and these guys work here because they’re musicians. Then I realized I didn’t even know your favorite song.”
“It’s a tie between Faith Hill’s This Kiss and Breathe,” she said with a smile that made him believe this might work out okay.
“And then I thought how pitiful is that, not even knowing Kelly’s favorite song? But I know so much more about you. Like the fact that you know stuff about Spanish moss and Blackbeard, that you’re always learning, that you prefer the red M&M candies over the green ones, that you like comforting others but somehow don’t think you’re worth being comforted yourself. You are, you know. I love you for who you are, for all your strengths and stubbornness. I love you because you make me a better man. So then I thought maybe the situation wasn’t so pitiful after all.”
Blinking away tears of happiness, she moved closer and put her hands on his chest. He was wearing another one of Striker’s Hawaiian shirts. The cotton was soft, wrinkled and warmed by his body. “You know what I think?”
“No, what?”
“That it’s about time you kissed me.”
His mouth found hers in a kiss that was a merging of souls as well as lips. She’d once told him she wasn’t the kind of girl that got the guy, but he was clearly set on convincing her otherwise. He told her without words that she was the most seductive woman he’d ever met, that touching her was a slice of heaven, that she possessed a feminine power that matched his masculine need.
It didn’t matter that she was wearing her oldest pair of running shorts, or that her T-shirt was thin from so many washes in the machine. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t wearing makeup. Every electrifying stroke of his tongue against hers, every erotic thrust of his hips was a physical expression of his love for her.
Exhilaration raced through her veins as she responded. Fluid and feverish, she melted against him, her heart beating like a huge drum. Vaguely she realized that wasn’t her heart, someone was playing a huge drum. In fact, there were a number of someones, enough to make up an abbreviated version of a marching band heading up the street and directly into her driveway. She broke away from Justice in astonishment.
“Uh, I guess in all the excitement I forgot to cancel the grand-romantic-gesture band thing.”
She had to laugh at his sheepish expression. “Is this what life will be like, married to a Marine like you? Filled with unpredictability?”
“Affirmative,” Justice replied, cupping her cheek with his good hand. “But the one thing you can always count on is my love for you.”
Once again tears welled in her eyes. “Oh, Justice…”
“I was going to wait until later tonight, after taking you out to some romantic place for dinner, and I was going to be wearing my dress blues uniform…oh, what the heck. I can’t wait any longer.” Taking her hand in his, he dropped to one knee, there beneath her maple tree, there beside her dog. “Kelly, will you marry me? I won’t lie to you, we both have strong wills, and being married to a Marine isn’t the easiest thing on the planet.”
She placed a trembling finger on his sexy lips. “I already told you, I don’t do easy. I know it won’t always be smooth sailing between us. But I also know now that what we have is worth fighting for, despite the complications. So, yes, I will marry you, Justice Wilder. Not because you serenaded me with a marching band, but because you’ve entrusted me with the most precious thing of all—your love and your heart.”
Epilogue
One Year Later
“I can’t believe this day has finally arrived,” Kelly said.
“Your wedding day.” Mrs. Wilder smiled at her in the mirror.
“And everything is coming together just as planned. The weather is perfect…all our friends are here. Justice and I have come full circle. We’re back where it all started. At Striker’s beach house on Pirate’s Cove, about to get married on the beach. With Chocolate acting as our flower dog.”
“I don’t know how you trained him to carry that basket of flowers so well.”
“He’s an exceptionally smart dog.”
“The dress rehearsal yesterday went quite well.”
“Aside from Chocolate bumping into Big Bertha.”
“An unusual wedding decoration, I must say,” Mrs. Wilder confessed with a laugh.
“That half-naked figurehead helped bring Justice to me.”
“So you both have said.”
“When he first told me he was on a boat with Big Bertha I thought the worst. I told him he should show up on her doorstep instead of mine.”
“I’m so glad you and Justice worked things out.”
Kelly turned to hug the older woman. “Have I told you how much I appreciate all you’ve done for me over the years? Not the least of which was sending me out here to look after Justice.”
“And you’ve been looking after him ever since.”
“We’ve been looking after each other. Justice has done as much for me as I have for him. He’s made me a believer in myself in ways I never thought possible.”
“I’m so glad.” Mrs. Wilder blinked away tears.
“Don’t you start,” Kelly warned her, wiping at her own eyes. “We’ve already redone my mascara once.”
“That was because you and your bridesmaids had a laughing fit reading those medical jokes.”
“A gi
ft from my co-workers at the hospital who couldn’t be here today.”
“I’m so glad you settled in so well in Norfolk.”
“So am I.” Kelly had continued working in Nashville until Justice had been deployed to the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base in Norfolk, Virginia, after his medical leave. She’d taken a job eight months ago at a Norfolk hospital, where she fit in as if she’d been there for years. Julie Mc-Murphy and Cleo Penn were her bridesmaids, co-workers and friends. Both were in the other room, waiting for Kelly. “The thing I miss the most is my town house in Nashville, which is why I’ve rented it instead of selling for now. Justice proposed to me beneath the maple tree out front.”
“Moving frequently is one of the downsides of marrying a Marine,” Mrs. Wilder said. “I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve moved over the years.”
“I’ve learned to deal with the unpredictable. Like my sister getting pregnant with twins. They’re due any minute now, which is why she couldn’t attend the wedding. Actually she confessed that she was worried Justice and I would get married before she did and steal her thunder, so to speak, and was so relieved when we didn’t do that.”
“Has she accepted your relationship with Justice?”
“I think she has. I know my father has, although it has taken time.”
“Where is he? Shouldn’t he be here with you since it’s almost time to start?”
“He said he wanted to talk to Justice for a minute.”
“So we’re understood?” Roger Hart stared Justice right in the eye as the two men stood on the beach house deck. “You hurt my little girl’s heart and I’ll break both your legs, Force Recon Marine or not.”
“Understood, sir,” Justice said with a smile.
“You’re not supposed to smile when you say that, Justice.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just that every single time I see you, you feed me the break-your-legs line.”
“I mean it each time.”
Justice nodded solemnly. “I know you do.”
Mr. Hart slapped him on the back in an awkward sort of hug that guys did. Quickly moving away, he added, “Did I tell you I appreciate not having to dress up in a tuxedo for this wedding?” Roger was wearing a summer-weight suit.