“All right, you win. What did you get me? Remember I don’t have much space in my bag for—”
“Lots of personal extras, you told me. That’s why I got you this.” She reached into the back pocket of her jeans and produced a silver business card holder. The front panel had a plastic inset of the ace of spades.
He took it reverently, holding it between two careful fingers. She elbowed him gently. “Open it.”
He did. Tucked inside was the closest thing she had to a wedding portrait, a slightly blurry snap of the two of them grinning beside the fountain in the casino atrium. She’d cropped it tightly to cut out all the people crossing through the background, but a stray leg had still found its way into the edge. Chance had his arm around her and they were dressed in their matrimonial finery—jeans and a flannel shirt for him, a short, tight black dress for her, from which one bra strap was protruding onto her shoulder.
“Oh my word,” he murmured, lips stretching into a slow smile. “Where’d you get this?”
“Our so-called preacher took it on my phone. Don’t you remember?”
He shook his head. “Look at me. I’m so drunk I’m practically drooling.”
“I think you look happy.”
“I was happy. Still am.” He drew her against his side and kissed the top of her head. “Thank you. This is a great present.”
“We can get someone to take a photo of us when you come back with Alpha Company in May. Y’know, one of those tearful reunion snaps. Then you can put that in the other side, next to this one.”
“Sure thing.” But he didn’t sound too sure. He guided her over to the couch and tugged her down beside him, shutting the photo case and putting it on a side table. What little mirth had returned to his expression was gone, and Tara braced herself for some kind of grisly, solemn conversation.
“If you think you get any say in how I bury you, you’ve got another think coming. I’m cremating your ass and taking myself to Vegas with the rest of the funeral budget.” She gave him her most infectious grin, but her joke fell flat. His eyes were dark and somber.
“Will you be here when I get back?”
Her jaw dropped. “Chance McKinley, what a thing to ask!”
“Will you?”
“No, I’m going to steal your money and your car and you’ll never hear from me again. Tara Lambert isn’t even my real name.” She rolled her eyes.
“I had to ask.”
“No, you didn’t. I’ve told you I’m in this for the long haul, and I mean it.”
“I did,” he insisted. “You’re so nonchalant about me leaving, I was starting to wonder if you cared at all.”
“Excuse me for trying to enjoy our last night together instead of moping,” she retorted hotly. “If you wanted me to act a certain way you should’ve given me a script.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to enjoy it, it’s—”
“You know what? Screw you, Chance.” Her temper was roaring at full tilt now, and it was almost a relief. Anger was so much easier than sadness. “You think I’m looking forward to six months coming home to this empty house? You think I give a shit about your measly soldier’s salary and your stupid car? I’m sorry it’s so hard for you to believe that I care about you, but that’s the hard truth. I’m here for you. Nothing else.”
She half-stood from the couch, gearing up for a full-on rant when he grabbed her wrists and pulled her back down, scooping her into his lap.
“I love you, Tara,” he murmured, raising his hands to her cheeks. “Why can’t you tell me the same thing?”
All the fight drained out of her like water in a leaky bucket. She sagged in his grip, her heart sinking. “I want to. I just can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I’m scared.” The painfully honest response leapt from her mouth with the ease she wished she could find for those other three words.
“Scared of what, sugar?”
“Losing you. I think it might kill me.”
“You’re not going to lose me,” he soothed, tightening his arms around her.
You don’t know that, she wanted to say. You’ll be dead in an Afghan ditch and I’ll never love anyone else again. Instead she kissed him, pleadingly, hoping he understood.
Soon their tongues were colliding, their hands roaming, their knees bumping in their haste to be closer. Chance shucked off his T-shirt and jeans with such speed that she stilled him with a palm on his chest, needing him to wait and watch.
She undressed slowly, deliberately, baring herself one inch at a time. He sat frozen on the other end of the couch, his eyes never leaving her body. She paused after she removed her bra, and again when she lowered her panties. Then she lay flat on her back and parted her thighs, letting him look his fill.
It was an offering of devotion, of commitment, of a love still unspoken. When he slid inside her she hoped he knew what she meant—when she clenched her legs against his sides she hoped her message was clear. He was inextricable from her, now. She would never be whole without him.
I love you, she told him with the rock of her pelvis. I love you, said the nails dug into his back. And when the end came and she arched and shook and nearly wept with the power of her climax, the ragged, plaintive moan that tore from her lips begged, Come home safe to me. I love you and I’ll never stop.
Chapter Nine
Chance woke long before the alarm set for five o’clock. He lay on his back, one arm behind his head, the other wrapped around his wife, and he watched the shadows that moved on the ceiling every time the wind rustled the tree outside.
This was the first time he hadn’t been full of anxious excitement on the day he left for deployment. Usually he was full of nervous enthusiasm, eager to be on his way, ready to start the next adventure. Instead he was preoccupied and reluctant.
What if the car batteries died in the cold and Tara was stuck out here during a blizzard? What if she rebuffed some guy’s advances during her shift and he waited outside for her to finish? What if someone figured out she was in the house by herself and attacked her in the middle of the night, confident no one would hear her scream?
He held her more tightly against his side, squeezing his eyes shut to banish those thoughts. Tara had taken care of herself for nearly thirty years. She could manage another six months.
Her fingers moved where they were splayed on his chest, and he looked down at the woman sleeping against his ribs. Even unconscious she looked determined, unyielding, her brows drawn together slightly, her mouth a serious line. She was the most frustrating, complicated woman he’d ever met. He couldn’t imagine ever loving anyone else.
And although she still hadn’t said it, he had to believe she loved him too. There’d been something different when they’d made love on the couch a few hours before, something newly intimate and emotional. He had to keep the faith that she wouldn’t leave him, that it would be her smiling face he saw when the bus pulled up in six months’ time. She’d find her way around to the words, like she found her way around to everything else.
Or so he hoped.
He thought about the phone call he’d had with his mother after dinner, the last conversation they’d have before he left the country. Her words were slurred and she was on the brink of tears through the whole thing, interrupting him to recall random anecdotes about his childhood, unwittingly repeating herself, telling him again and again to stay safe over there. He believed she loved him, and he believed she would worry about him, but he wondered how much of that call she’d remember in the morning.
Maybe he was being too harsh on Tara. From the sounds of things she’d had it even harder than he had—at least his mother had come home every night, and he never doubted that he’d be fed or sheltered. Maybe it was too much to ask her to make such an overt expression of commitment. Maybe her inability to say it didn’t mean it wasn’
t how she felt. Maybe he expected too much, too soon.
But damn, he wanted to hear it.
The alarm squealed sooner than he expected, and he silenced it with the flat of his palm. Tara groaned and rolled into his chest, where the flutter of her eyelashes against his skin made his groin twitch. Good God, he was going to miss her.
Neither of them ate much of the scrambled eggs he made, Tara claiming it was too early as she pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, his own stomach too busy doing nervous backflips to digest solid food. They both drank coffee like it was water. They drained the pre-set machine in minutes, and he had to brew two mugs of instant before either of them felt human enough to converse.
He showered quickly and crossed off the last few items on his checklist as he added them to his carry-on. Toothpaste, shampoo, comb, deodorant. Tara watched him draw ominous black lines on the paper with eyes just as dark, just as inscrutable. The final pull of the zipper echoed loudly in the silent room.
They piled his camouflage luggage into the trunk of the Challenger, their breath showing in vapored puffs as he drove through the heavy, pre-dawn darkness to the post. When he passed their IDs to the gate guard the young soldier gave him a needless and borderline inappropriate salute.
“Y’all be careful out there,” he urged before disappearing into the guard shack and raising the boom.
Tara hadn’t said a word since they pulled out of the driveway, and when he parked the Challenger in the gymnasium lot and cut the engine her silence suddenly felt heavy, like a fully loaded field pack strapped onto his shoulders. He took the key out of the ignition, reached for her hand and dropped it in her palm.
“You’ll be the third person, apart from me and Trey, ever to drive this car. Try not to crash it.”
If she caught the humor in his tone she gave no sign. She leaned down to drop the key in her purse, then straightened and stared through the windshield.
He cleared his throat. “It’s fine if you don’t want to go through the whole check-in thing with me, we can say goodbye—”
“Goddammit, Chance,” she shouted, turning on him with fury in her voice and tears in her eyes. She grabbed fistfuls of his uniform, pulling him across the gearshift and pushing him away all at once. “I love you, you stupid grunt. I love you like hell and you’re going to come home to me in one piece, you hear?”
His throat tightened and his arms shook and he pulled her across the car into his lap, squeezing her so hard he thought he might crush her but unable to restrain himself. He’d never felt such elation, such soaring delight as those three words inspired. She sobbed into his shoulder, heavy, heart-wrenching, and he pressed his face into her hair and closed his eyes and tried to memorize everything about her, from the vanilla notes in her shampoo to the exact curve of her hips beneath his hands.
“I love you so much, Tara,” he rasped. “When I get home I’m gonna show you, just you wait.”
“Fuck that,” she muttered, pulling back to smile at him with tearstained cheeks. “Just come home. We’ll deal with the rest when we get there.”
More cars were filling the lot on either side of them. Wordlessly they climbed out of the Challenger and unloaded his bags from the trunk. Tara trailed him into the brightly lit gymnasium, stood patiently at his side while he waited in line to check in, waited for his bags to be inspected, waited for them to be loaded onto an overfilled trolley and rolled away.
Then it was time to go.
The room around them was full of the sounds of sniffling as wives and mothers bit back their sorrow, tried on the brave faces they would wear for the next six months at least. Only Tara stood stiff and strong, her eyes clear, her smile genuine. That’s when he knew he’d underestimated her, doubted the depth of the reserves that ran all the way to her soul. That’s when he knew she was the perfect woman for him.
“I guess I’ll see you when I see you.” She beamed up at him.
“I guess so.”
“Don’t do anything crazy.”
“Crazy’s all I know.”
“Not anymore.” She took his hands in hers, pushed up on tiptoe to kiss him square on the mouth. “Have fun out there. Call me if you need me.”
“I surely will. I love you, sugar.”
“I love you too, Sergeant. Travel safe.”
He inclined his head in farewell and shouldered his pack, then set off across the room to join the line of soldiers readying to board the buses. In a few minutes he’d be on his way to the airfield; in a little over an hour he’d be on a plane headed for some of the most hostile, dangerous territory in the world.
He couldn’t stop grinning.
As he filed out of the gymnasium he took one last look at Tara, his wife, the love he’d always wanted and never dared believe he could handle. She smiled, nodding encouragingly. He winked. She rolled her eyes playfully.
He turned his smile back toward the neck of the soldier in front of him. He couldn’t wait to leave. The sooner he got off the ground, the sooner he could start counting down the days until he came home. Because for the first time in his life, there was someone waiting for him.
He recalled that fateful roulette spin almost a year ago. It must’ve been nearing six o’clock in the morning, and the casino was practically empty, the slot machines beeping and blinking unheeded. They staggered and weaved between the unoccupied poker tables until he backed into the roulette wheel, earning a dark look from the croupier. She maintained her bored expression as Tara cajoled him to make a bet, opening her wallet to see how much she had left to put down.
He plucked it from her hand and dropped it back in the bag. “Those aren’t the kind of stakes I’m interested in.”
She arched a challenging brow. “What did you have in mind?”
He put the five-dollar minimum bet on the table, his eyes never leaving hers. “Let’s make a bet, sugar. If this lands on green, we get married.”
The humor drained from her face. She stood straighter, lifting her chin. She nodded.
“You’re on.”
The croupier spun. The background noise seemed to die away, the electronic music and murmured conversations and a distant vacuum cleaner all gave way to the resonant click, click, click as the wheel slowed. Click, red. Click, black. Click…
He loved his job. He loved his wife. Life had never been better.
Leaving the warm gymnasium behind him, he stepped out onto the blacktop in the endless, freezing-cold darkness.
Epilogue
Tara shifted from foot to foot, trying and failing not to inventory the outfits of the wives waiting alongside her in the echoing, stars-and-stripes-bedecked gymnasium. It was unseasonably warm for mid-May and she’d opted for a short, breezy baby-blue sundress and flip-flops. As she looked around she realized she was the only one not wearing heels—and the only one with a hem above her knees.
Not that it mattered, she reminded herself sternly. By now she knew most of these women, and they were all so kind and welcoming that she’d long given up wondering whether they whispered about her behind her back.
In fact it was Chance’s commanding officer’s wife who’d pointed her toward the community college in Meridian, where she’d just finished the first semester in her nursing degree. She’d taken to it much more quickly than she expected, and was most surprised by her instructors’ praise for her fledging bedside manner. Turned out that more than ten years serving belligerent drunks made even the most irritable patients seem impeccably genteel.
Just last week she’d handed in her notice at the bar downtown, and yesterday was her final shift. Now she had two weeks until she started her new job as an administrative coordinator for Mia’s PTSD-therapy program at Fort Preston, which had recently won an eighteen-month grant.
Tara smiled as she thought about the housewarming dinner Mia and Ethan had hosted two nights ago. Laurel had turned up wea
ring a brand-new diamond engagement ring, but whenever Tara tried to ask about the wedding planning she shrugged it off, turning the conversation to Chance’s imminent return.
“Wedding planning will take the rest of the year, but your husband will only come home once. You must be so excited,” Laurel had exclaimed. “What time does he land?”
“They’re supposed to get to post at ten o’clock on Monday night, but in army time that could be midnight or later.”
“We’re all counting on you to convince him to stay put for at least the next year.” Ethan gave her one of his characteristically quiet, encouraging smiles.
She grinned. “I barely had to say a thing. He’s already talking to the chain of command about starting a pre-med degree. It’ll probably take a while, but one of these days we may be addressing him as Dr. McKinley.”
“God help us.” Grady’s wink undermined his words.
“Remind him to speak to me when he decides to pick an orthopedic specialty,” Laurel joked.
“Or psychiatric,” Mia added.
Grady and Ethan locked eyes across the table, then dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.
“What’s so funny?” Tara asked when they finally got hold of themselves.
“The idea of that crazy son of bitch helping people achieve mental stability,” Grady managed, wiping a tear from his eye.
“He’d prescribe every patient an army contract,” Ethan said, and the two of them were gone again.
She smiled to herself in the gymnasium. These last six months of Chance’s deployment had been some of the hardest in her life, but they would’ve been impossible without the support of this new group of friends.
Not that they hadn’t been without their share of ugly, breathtakingly painful moments. Like her lonely decision to accept her aunt’s invitation to visit over the holidays, which she regretted less than ten minutes into the drive to Arkansas. She spent hours enduring her cousins’ skeptical glances, her uncle’s diatribe on the evils of the military-industrial complex, and her father’s increasingly slurred barbs until she stood up from her post-meal position on the sofa and volunteered to drive him home. He didn’t stop talking through that twenty-minute journey, accusing her of abandoning him, demanding she help pay for his groceries and utilities, finally dissolving into barely comprehensible whimpers about how much he’d always loved her. She dropped him off in front of the trailer and hightailed it to a motel, where she spent Christmas Eve watching TV and twisting the wedding ring on her finger.
Thunder Running Page 11