Marg’s heart took a tentative step toward his words, wanting to believe him. Thane was one of the few men who was tall enough to rest his chin on the top of her head. Over the years, he’d done it to tease her, but today it was to tell her that he was her strength. An umbrella of protection she could always run under when life pelted shrapnel at her. She hadn’t lost everyone.
“You know I love Kayla more than any woman I’ve ever set eyes on.”
She swept the tears away. Jealousy bit at her, knowing Kayla still had Thane to hold her at night. “I know that.”
“But what you don’t know is when you and I and Patrick were twenty-one and our lives were nothing but blank pages, I loved you first, but when I saw how Patrick looked at you the night St. George’s burned down, I knew then, only he had a real shot with you.” Thane pulled back and brushed the hair away from her face. “He became a better man because of you. Everything he did, in service or out of it, was for you. Don’t lose that determination now. Be brave.”
Marg’s heart twisted. “Be brave,” she murmured, remembering those words uttered from someone else’s mouth. Someone she’d never met, but had reached out from the grave to tell her the same thing so many years ago. The small fire in her soul kindled. “I want to go back, Thane.” She nodded and let out a whisper of breath. “I want to go back and live it all again.” She nodded jerkily, tears raining down her cheeks. “I’d do it all again, even though I know I’ll lose him.”
Thane pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Me too, Mrs. Cobbs. Me too. Maybe second time around I won’t let Patrick have you.”
She stuck her tongue in her cheek. “Wouldn’t happen, Ghost,” she said, using his old team name. “You didn’t have what my husband had.”
Thane tilted his head in question, a teasing glint in his eyes, knowing he never had a chance.
“Faith. He knew he could make the world a better place. Not always by force, but by the strength of his heart. I used to think his silence was doubt, but he was listening to his heart. While you used a single focus to win every battle, Patrick made his decisions judged against a moral code and never lost sight of humanity.”
Thane chewed on his lip, considering her answer and gazed toward the sea. Eventually, he nodded. “You’re right. Kayla helped me find mine. I dominated everything in my path as the years progressed. Pat had you to come home to. It grounded him. Gave him a good reason to always make it back here. All I ever had was warfare. Either I won, or I lost men. If it wasn’t for Pat, I would have died many times over.”
“You did the same for him.” Thane’s thumb caressed the Trident that hung on a chain around her neck. The one Patrick had placed there on their wedding night.
“Yeah,” he said wistfully. “Long ago, he made the ultimate decision, the hardest choice any man can make, and he did it for me.”
Only five people knew what he spoke of, but only three were left alive to remember. “He would have done it again. He loved you that much,” she said.
Thane’s eyes flashed open. “You…you know what I’m talking about?”
She nodded. “If you mean what happened the first year you were SEALs, then yes.”
“How?”
“Patrick kept your missions, at least many of them, to himself but he couldn’t hold that in his heart. He wanted to be judged and if I couldn’t accept what he’d done for you, I think he would have walked away from all of us.”
“Marg.” Thane’s eyes slammed shut and he swallowed deeply. “He never told me he’d shared it with you.”
“We agreed to never speak about it again.”
“I failed, didn’t I? When they were clearing the bridge and it blew, that was the moment I needed to be by his side, to pay him back. To be there for him.”
Marg gripped his arm, digging in her nails to get his attention. “Patrick would have answered that in only one way,” she said quietly. “He would have stared at you, until you realized what you just said is utter bullshit.”
Kelsey sat with her little legs bracketing a lopsided mound of sand. “Mommy, Uncle Thane, come help me with my castle.”
They both knelt down beside her daughter.
Kelsey patted the mound. “Mommy, did you and daddy play in the sand when you were young?”
A smile, one of the few since Pat’s death, unfurled a small leaf of hope.
“They sure did,” Thane answered for her.
He remembered, just like she did. Twenty-two years had washed by like water in a fast running stream. She cherished each one. Kelsey’s question sent her memories tumbling back to the start.
Thane’s hands joined Kelsey’s to create the mote around her castle. “Your mom caught your daddy’s eye the second he saw her. She was so beautiful. I think your dad stopped breathing. He fell in love with her right then and there.”
Kelsey rubbed the hair from her eyes, her little fingers covered in sand. Silver gray eyes like her father’s squinted from the sunlight.
Thane looked toward Marg. “Whenever he left her, he always said Forever and Ever.”
“And Mommy would say, Amen,” Kelsey added with a proud nod of her head.
“That’s right. Do you know why?”
Kelsey shook her head.
“Because that’s how long he intended to love her, even if he never came home.”
Chapter Two
July 2nd, 1992
“Margaret Celeste, where are you going with that bag of clothes?”
Marg turned to see her mother fuming on the other side of the ballroom-size entry of their mansion. “To the Veteran’s Service center, Mother.”
“Those clothes are worth thousands of dollars,” Claire Stines-Foster declared.
“Laurene will certainly never wear my hand-me-downs and someone can put them to good use. Women who leave the service need clothes for job interviews. They need them more than I do.”
Her mother marched across the entry, her outrageously priced heels clicking on the marble tile as she grilled Marg with an angry stare. “Then they can buy their own.”
Heat stroked up Marg’s neck. “If they don’t have a job, they can’t buy clothes, Mother. You and Dad support causes all the time. Is there a difference?”
Her mother released a perturbed huff. “There is! We don’t support war or those who participate in it. You’re young and easily influenced. I was dead against your school allowing the military to lecture the students with false propaganda about fighting for this country. Ever since then, you’ve been rebelling against what this family stands for. We are not at war. This family supports organizations with worthy causes. War is not one of them.” Claire’s gaze fell to the bag then gripped a dress drooping from the top. “This is your debutante ball gown,” she said with a shrill pitch. “What’s it doing in here?”
“I’m not going. I told you that.”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed in anger. “Ungrateful! Do you have any idea how many months it took me to get you accepted? Only the best are included in L.A.’s premiere ball. Your father expects you there, and so do I. You—will—go.”
Marg thought for the umpteenth time that she must have been adopted. “I am twenty-one- years old. I’m not standing with a bunch of fifteen-year-olds desperate to be seen and acknowledged.” She reached into the bag, snagged the dress and thrust it at her mother. “The rest I’m giving to the center,” she announced and walked out the front door. Her mother could throw a fit if she wanted.
After tossing the bag onto the passenger seat of her car, Marg took a deep breath and gazed at the elegant landscaped grounds of her home. She’d known nothing other than her Beverly Hills surroundings. Mansions lined the hills and vied for spectacular gardens and glamorous parties. She hated the falseness of it all, even though she’d been raised in its claws.
“Marg!” Laurene ran across the stamped paved driveway to catch her.
“Don’t start,” she warned, knowing her mother had sent Laurene to talk to her. She loved her sisters, but they
caved to their mother’s bidding with just a shrewd look. Only a year younger, she and Laurene had a lot of the same friends and spent more time together than they did with their little sister.
“You’re pissing Mom off again,” Laurene said, giving her a pleading look to submit to their mother’s unhindered hatred against anything military.
“She’s going to be even more pissed when she finds out I’m moving.”
“What?” Laurene’s big brown eyes rounded. “Oh, my God.” Her hands covered her cheeks. “You got the modeling contract, didn’t you?”
Marg smiled at her. “I did, and I’m moving to San Diego.”
“San Diego? Why there, of all places? It’s a Navy town. You know what they’ll say.”
“Because it’s two hours farther than Mom or Dad will drive.”
“They’re going to freak out.”
“Dad’s withering contempt is because of Grandfather, Laurene. Men die in war. They die to protect us, but Dad can’t see past his heart and it’s riddled with grief, even after all these years.”
“You sound like an enlistment poster, Marg. Dad has a point. He lost his father in the Vietnam War. Of course he hates anything military. He was twenty-years-old and just had you. Dad needed Grandfather Stines, but the war took his life. ”
Their grandmother had married a wealthy man from L.A. after their biological grandfather died, but she never stopped loving Lieutenant Braden Stines. He’d enlisted in the Navy and was killed in the early seventies before the fall of Saigon. Marg never knew him, but reminders of Braden Stines sat on her father’s bookshelves in his private office at home.
Marg slid into the white convertible her parents had given her for graduation. She remembered feeling like she’d accepted a deal from the devil when her father handed her the keys. “You’ll look beautiful driving this, darling,” he’d said. “Driving the right car, attracts the right men.”
He’d been wrong. Her status, her address and her car attracted nothing but the sons of wealthy families. Most of them were pompous assholes looking for trophy wives without a brain. She was born with a good one, and she intended on using it. That, and the long legs and features God had bestowed on her. If she didn’t succeed, she’d use her degree, and she’d use it by enlisting in the Navy.
“Can I come and visit you in San Diego?” Laurene pleaded. “Sometimes Mom gets under my skin, too. I know I’m not as rebellious as you, but I need a reprieve once in a while.”
Laurene loved her life of pretty things and being surrounded by wealthy friends. She didn’t mind their father bringing home the next future husband du jour. Marg was sick of it and it made her feel like a side of beef for sale to the highest bidder.
“You’re my sister, Laurene. You can come any time you want.”
“When’re you going to tell Mom and Dad?”
“Tonight.” Pulling out an envelope from her bag, she turned it in her fingers. “I’m mailing the contract back today.”
Laurene closed the driver’s door and bent over, kissing her cheek. “You’re going to be famous. I know it.”
Marg smiled at her sister’s faith in her. “I don’t really care about famous, but I do need a job and this pays pretty good. I can’t live under their roof and their rules anymore. Every time Dad brings one of his wannabes home from the studio to ogle us like well-groomed chattel, it makes my skin crawl.” She gazed up toward the mansion. Its brilliant front pillars and rounded façade a glorious tribute to her father’s success in Hollywood. “Maybe I’m delusional, Laurene, but I want to marry a man who loves and respects me. Whether he has money or not, doesn’t matter, but I’ll never find him in the hills of Hollywood. There’s a big, undiscovered world out there. I want to prove I can live on my own. San Diego will be a good start.”
* * * *
Marg glanced around her bedroom as the evening threw shadow into the corners. Vaulted ceilings with brocade curtains draped to the floor on each of the four twenty-foot-high arched windows. After tonight, this would no longer be her bedroom. Her parents wouldn’t disappoint. They’d throw a parental tantrum when she told them she’d signed the modeling contract. This afternoon, she mailed it on her way to drop off some clothes at the veteran’s clothing outlet. When she got home, her father’s Jag sat in the driveway. Her mother had probably demanded he be home for dinner. Ever since his indiscretion, and her mother’s restrained forgiveness, he allowed his leash to be shortened. Dad had broken his wedding vows to their mother, but he gave his family everything they needed. In his own way, he offered his daughters love through a pampered life.
When Marg spilled the news tonight, her father would blow a fuse. He’d paid for most of her college education, but there were strings attached. Nothing in Hollywood came without them. With a degree in her repertoire of acceptable skills, he could marry her off to one of his film executives. In his mind, she would play the part of intelligent, elegant wife during all the bullshit parties and shoulder rubbing that went on in Glittertown. Her father had her future planned out, but she had another. With a slight bait and switch, she’d used her degree and her photograph to get a contract with the American Sweetheart modeling agency in San Diego.
Marg rolled from her bed and checked herself in the mirror. She’d put on a dark blue sweater and grey slacks with a set of pearls Grams had given her two Christmases ago. Business attire, not sweet and seductive.
“Marg!” A bang on her door was all the wait time she had before her sisters burst in.
Laurene entered, followed by Victoria, her youngest sister.
“Oh, my God, they’re doing it again.” Laurene rolled her eyes.
“Doing what?” Marg gripped the door.
Privacy was more like a guideline than a rule between her sisters. That included everything that hung in each of their ten by twenty walk-in closets. Although it always seemed like her younger sisters borrowed her stuff more than she borrowed theirs.
Laurene pushed the door closed so their voices wouldn’t carry down the hall. “Brought home our future husbands.”
“I think the tall, dark one is cute.” Victoria flounced across the Aubusson carpet and jumped onto Marg’s king four poster bed. “I don’t see why you guys get so bent out of shape when Dad brings home dinner guests.”
“They’re not guests,” Laurene corrected, giving her sister a glare. “Marg’s right, they’re trying to set us up.”
Victoria waved a gangly arm at them, and then hopped over to the wall mirror checking her makeup. “Better than being shanghaied and whisked away on a clipper ship.”
Marg and Laurene shared a look of annoyance. Their little sister didn’t get it.
“You just graduated, Victoria. Now, you’re on the hit list, too,” Marg warned. Marg had turned twenty-one last month, Laurene had turned twenty this year, but Victoria just graduated high school, and her mindset hadn’t jelled into anything beyond parties and friends.
Victoria dug through Marg’s makeup bag and unscrewed the mascara brush from the tube, adding a little to her lashes. “I don’t want to marry some pathetic guy with a lousy paycheck and a one way ticket to a stroke at fifty.” She tossed the mascara back into the bag. “This is a great opportunity to find a rich guy to marry.” She turned on the tips of her toes, compliments of eight years of ballet classes. “We don’t have to do anything, Daddy brings them home for us to peruse. It couldn’t be simpler.”
Marg shook her head. “And what if I don’t want to get married. Or better yet, what if I want to marry a man I love instead of a man’s bank account?”
Victoria strutted past them as if she had the world by the tail. Her dark, curly hair rained across her shoulders and down her back. Although she didn’t act like it sometimes, Victoria was smart with the highest grade point average in her class.
“Marg, I want both.” She turned the knob and glanced at them over her shoulder. “If you two want to marry some guy who’s gonna light your fire for a while, and then snuff out soon after, that�
�s your loss. You won’t have any of this to make it bearable,” she said, raising her arms and gazing around the room. “You’ll live in some shabby, little house with paint peeling on the porch, barely scratching by and changing diapers for the next ten years.” Victoria yanked open the door. “Not me. I’m going to have it all.”
Marg rolled her eyes again and shook her head at Laurene. Together, they strode down the wide hallway, passing bedroom doors on one side and an intricate bannister that led to a massive winding staircase. Gleaming marble floors, which the full time help cleaned daily, made a grand entrance to the massive front doors.
Victoria had some misguided notion that love and wealth always went hand in hand. She should know better. Her parents were the epitome of Hollywood wealth and good graces, but sparse on love. Her mother could throw a soiree like no one else. Claire Stines-Foster had entertained Hollywood’s biggest stars, producers, directors and most importantly, the wives of the important men who ran the movie industry, and all of them complained about their life. Number one complaint? Their husband’s didn’t love them.
Marg and her sisters hung a sharp right at the bottom of the stairs and headed for the dining room, a vacuous space with art deco and dark wood. The dining table stretched out with hand crafted accents and seating for twenty people. Her mother always maintained that having the best artisans build her furniture made a difference in what society thought.
Growing up, Marg had an evil urge to carve her initials into that table. At sixteen, after a huge argument with her mother, she crawled underneath and did it. They strolled into the dining room, past massive glass doors framing the entry. Sure enough, her father stood by the marble fireplace with its white, chunky mantel. Decor set with absolute symmetry mirrored a high-end home magazine.
Code Name: Forever & Ever (A Warrior's Challenge series Book 5) Page 2