When the sun began to lower in the western sky, he stood to leave. Fireflies sparkled at the edge of the ditch bank by the road. He thanked Rosemary for her kindness, especially for preparing a meal that must have taken all day to cook. Faith and Marie both gave him an extra long hug. He had seen their furtive glances in his direction at the dinner table, especially Faith’s. Each of them was as beautiful as the other, and would make some man a great girlfriend or wife. That man just wasn’t him.
With a blush, Faith handed him a box of stationary with a book of stamps taped to the lid and her address written carefully below it. She shrugged when she put it in his hands. “Just in case you need a pen pal.”
“You never know. Sometimes a guy gets pretty lonely.” That was probably the wrong thing, but what was a guy supposed to say when a pretty girl hands him a gift?
When he shook Jerry’s hand, Libby was suddenly at his side.
“We’re going for a drive, Dad.” She kissed her father’s cheek even as he looked at the two of them in surprise.
“You are?” Again he asked his question the same time as Mark asked, “We are?”
Jerry thumped him on the back with a chuckle. “I guess us guys don’t know a whole lot, do we? Seems the women in our lives got our schedules all planned out for us. Well, you kids run along now. Don’t be out too late, and remember. Dinner tomorrow. 5 PM. Sharp.” He waved as he turned to go inside.
Libby looked at Mark. “Do you mind if we take your car?”
“Where to?” Mark walked down the steps to his rental and unlocked the doors. His heart pounded with this sudden shift in the evening.
“The lake.” She rolled her window down the minute he pulled out of the driveway. “I need to get out of the house for awhile. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, ma’am.” He set the radio on a local station that played soft music. Night settled dark and quiet through the countryside as he drove through the small town of Spencer and headed west to Lake Wissota. It was a good hour’s drive. He waited for her to talk, but she didn’t say anything.
Mark glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. The summer air filled the car, tossing her hair in a blond stream of curls behind her. She held one arm out the window, letting it undulate in the passing wind the way little kids liked to do. Libby riding shotgun in his car – what a sweet sight.
They passed through the little towns of Colby, Thorp, Stanley, and Cadott. Before long, they were bumping along the gravel road that led to the Clifton cottage.
“You missed it.” She pointed to a spot behind them. “Back up. It’s over there.”
“I can’t see it.” Her open window invited all the dust of the country road inside. He put the car in reverse and his arm over the back of the seat as he followed her directions. A patch of overgrown sumac had hidden the unmarked driveway. All he saw was dust. “Where did you say it was?”
“A little further. There, see it?” Libby pointed to a gravel driveway barely visible in the dark. Only a short post with a red reflector offered any indication there was a road there. “Turn here.”
Gradually, the car parted the brush, its headlights illuminating the narrow way as they left the sumac and dust behind. A two-story, cedar-shingled cottage stood at the edge of the lakeshore, its ghostly windows staring at them in the night. By the time the vehicle rolled to a stop, Libby was out the door and headed to the private dock. With one quick tug on the knotted rope, she untied the wooden raft and jumped onboard.
Mark followed. He stood on the dock, wondering exactly what she was doing, escaping the grief – or him. The notion prevailed. He wasn’t going to follow if she needed space.
“Come on. Jump,” she urged, so he did, easily clearing the distance.
The raft bobbed under his added weight, but it was large enough there was no concern of tipping it over. He looked around the flat deck. “Where are the oars?”
“Where they belong.” She pointed to the sides of the raft where two long hunter green oars rested snug in their holders.
“Just checking. I remember someone lost them the last time I was here,” he muttered.
“I did that, huh?” Libby sat in the middle of the bobbing raft, her arms around her knees as she smiled up at the night sky. “I almost forgot. We had fun last year, didn’t we?”
“We did.” Mark stretched his legs out in front of him, leaning back on his hands as he looked at the sky, too. A wave of stars glittered overhead. It seemed like forever ago. “I still don’t like fish for breakfast, though.”
She chuckled, and it was a very welcome sound in his ears. “That was so bad, wasn’t it? Almost as bad as those fish tacos you made.”
“No, uh huh. The fish tacos weren’t so bad for lunch, but fish and eggs together for breakfast? That really grossed me out.” He glanced at her. It was good to see her smile, even if it was sad.
“You’re right, but the blueberry pancakes were delicious,” she said pensively, her chin tucked into her knees and her hair undone over her shoulders. “I love blueberries and cream.”
“They were blue.” It was his turn to chuckle.
“You guys tricked me.” She punched his arm, and a real, no-kidding smile brightened her eyes this time. “I didn’t know they were on my chair until I sat on them.”
Mark shrugged, grinning. “It was Jon’s fault. He made me do it.”
“You would say that.” She punched him again, but harder. “If you’re so innocent then, tell what did you call me the rest of the time you were here, huh? If you would never do such a thing, then you wouldn’t remember that name either, would you?”
“Smurf cheeks.” He tried to say it without laughing, but the memory of her blue backside was too funny—and too delightful. He couldn’t have stopped looking last year if he had wanted to. There wasn’t enough material in her whole swimsuit to cover the blue stain those berries had left behind—on her behind. Besides, he was a man, not likely to miss an opportunity like that one. “Thanks for reminding me. I’d forgotten.”
“Yeah, right.” She reached over the edge of the raft. “I had a blue butt for a week, and my swimsuit is stained for life. You men are all the same.”
With a dash of her hand, she splashed water into his face. The fight was on. Before long, they were both on their hands and knees, pulling up handfuls of water and splashing each other. It wasn’t enough. Her hands were smaller. She couldn’t beat him. No way. He saw it coming. She sputtered and laughed, blinking lake water out of her eyes. There she is. There’s my girl. Another extra big handful, and she barreled into him. He almost caught her before they fell overboard.
“I’m drowning,” she squealed as he ducked her head under water. “I’m drowning!”
“You, Libby Clifton, cannot drown.” He ducked her again. “You’re not fooling me. You’re the best swimmer in your class. I remember.”
This time when she came up for air, she brought a rock from the lake bottom with her. Thwack. She launched it dead center off his forehead. It bounced.
“Ouch.” He winced and let her go. “You got me. Dang it. I can’t believe I fell for that.”
She giggled and took off in a flurry of kicking legs and splashing water to the other side of the raft. There was no way he could catch her. Libby swam on a competitive swim team in high school. Mark treaded water while he removed his shoes and set them quietly on the raft. Then he resorted to very quiet puppy paddling, trying to make as little noise as possible as he circled for his mermaid. He had to keep a sharp lookout. She was good at sneak attacks, like pulling her adversaries underwater, or grabbing their hair from the safety of the raft, not that he had any to grab.
The night was dark and quiet. No sounds of splashing water met his ears. He was nearly all the way around the raft when—
Ouch! Another small rock bounced off the back of his head. She giggled behind him.
“That’s twice.” He turned to see her arm already cocked and her hand loaded.
“Did they teach y
ou to count in the Corps?” she taunted.
The projectile nailed him on the side of his head, but this time she had come too close. He gave an extra hard shove through the water and instantly had her by her wrists, then the rest of her, too. She took a deep breath, and tried to submerge, but he was having none of it. He’d caught her, fair and square. No way was he losing this fish. Within minutes, he carried her thrashing and giggling out of the water and dumped her butt on the beach.
“You got me.” She blew out a big breath as she slipped out of his grasp. Libby flopped onto her back, still laughing and sputtering in the dark. “I can’t believe you caught me.”
He stood over her for a moment, gauging her reaction to having been in his arms for that brief encounter. If she noticed it, she gave no indication, but he had. The feel of her had enticed more than he should have allowed. He was only here as a friend. That’s all. Yeah, right. Try telling his heart that.
The warm tingle remained, only it had sunk lower and burned hotter. He needed to give his body time to calm down, so he walked back into the water and pulled the raft to shore and secured it to the dock. After he retrieved his waterlogged shoes, he stripped his sand covered socks off and placed the soggy combination on the edge of the dock. The happy foolish moment was over.
Or was it?
Four
“My clothes are wet.” Libby pulled at her soaking wet capris, her eyes sparkling up at him.
The words he should never say sprang to his lips. He bit them back and pulled his shirt over his head instead. With deliberate intentions, he wrung it out over her. “Hey, guess what? Mine are wet, too.”
“Stop.” She laughed, shielding her face from the drips raining down on her. “You’re getting me wetter.”
“N-o-o-o.” He dragged the word out. “I’ve got news for you. You’re already wetter.”
And hotter. And prettier. And everything I’ve ever wanted.
He squeezed the last drips of water from his shirt while she lay there in the dark chuckling, her eyes squeezed tight. An overwhelming urge to lie beside her swarmed his thin hold on common sense. Everything about her invited him tonight. Her laugh, her eyes, even her wet body and long legs were irresistible. Instead, he sank to the sand beside her, shook the wrinkles out of his shirt, and stifled his heart.
“That’s the good thing about clothes. They’ll dry.” He pressed his palms to his dress slacks, wishing he had anticipated the dunking. He had a long drive back to Spencer, and then the return trip to Eau Claire, not exactly what he wanted to do in wet clothes. Still – she had smiled.
“Gosh. I needed that.” She folded her arms behind her head and stared at the sky. “I almost feel like myself again.”
He found a flat stone in the sand and skipped it across the water. It slapped the surface of the lake once, twice, and three times before it sank. “It did feel good, didn’t it? Course we could’ve changed into swimsuits first, and maybe brought a couple of towels with us, too. Maybe we could’ve taken our shoes off, you know, unimportant stuff like that.”
“You always like to be prepared, huh?” she asked. “You don’t like surprises, do you?”
He gave her his most devilish look, his brow raised and what he hoped was a gleam in his eye. “Let’s just say I didn’t plan on squishing around in wet shoes the rest of the night.”
“You’re so serious.”
“No,” he replied. “Just careful. I like to know where I’m going, that’s all.”
“Remember when we were out here last year?” The wistfulness was back in her voice. “Remember what Jon said?”
“Which day? You’ll have to be a little more specific.” He meant it playfully, but she was serious again.
“I was thinking of the night we were lying out here on the raft. Remember? We were looking at the stars and talking about our families. I was telling you guys about mine, and you didn’t say hardly anything at all. Do you remember what he said?”
“Yeah.” Mark sailed another skipper across the surface of the lake. He remembered that night. Being third-wheel to an engaged couple was as full of opportunities as pitfalls. Most of the time, he had felt excluded, but the important thing was that he had met her. That part was all good. “He said the Corps was his family, or something like that.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what he said.” The smile was gone from her voice. “What do you think he meant by that?”
Mark heard the ache inside the question. “I don’t know. You know how he was. Jon was always saying things like that. I think he meant he was a good fit with the Corps. It gave him structure, somewhere he belonged.”
“Is the Corps really a band of brothers?”
“I guess.” He skipped a couple more stones. “It does turn a boy into a man pretty quick, that’s for sure. And there is a bond between those of us who’ve been in combat. It’s hard to explain. It’s just the way it is. Why? What do you think he meant?”
It didn’t take any training to know she had tears in her eyes. “It’s just that, well, the minute he said that, I knew we were never going to be married. He wasn’t ever coming home to me.”
“You’re wrong.” Mark shook his head vehemently. That was the one sure thing about Jon. The man had Libby Clifton on the brain. He never stopped bragging about how beautiful she was, how all his children were going to be girls, and how they would all look like their mother. “He might have loved the Corps, but he loved you more. I know he did. When I first met him, he was the biggest sap on the planet. All he did was brag about you. It was always Libby this and Libby that. No. You’re wrong. Jon loved you more than anything else.”
He pitched a perfect skipper that smacked the water with five strong kisses before he lost the sound of it.
“I used to believe that.” She sniffed. “When he first went to basic, we had a plan. I was already in nursing school. He was going to boot camp, and then onto whatever training he had to get through to finish. We weren’t going to get married until he had all that behind him.”
“Right. I met him at Lejeune.” Mark skipped another perfect five. “That’s the same plan I heard, and I can’t tell you how many times I heard it. It was always the same. Marry Libby. Have a dozen kids. Live happily ever after. He drove the rest of us crazy.”
“That would have been a year ago last September,” she said quietly.
He sailed another rock. It sank. Yeah, Jon loved her all right, just not enough to take care of her in the event of his death, not enough to do a little pre-planning. Most soldiers carried a what-if I die letter in their pocket or helmet for their loved ones. Jon didn’t. Mark had asked about it after the remains were recovered from the crash. The medic searched. He found nothing. It could have blown away or been lost in the explosion, but Mark wondered now.
“He said for sure he would come home in December, but some kind of special training came up. He couldn’t make it.” The sadness in her voice stabbed him. “Not even for Christmas.”
He sailed another stone. It didn’t skip once.
“Each time he called to reschedule, he said he felt bad. There was always something more important going on in the world. He was promoted so fast, and then there was Afghanistan. It was his first chance to see real action. You know how it is. That’s what you guys trained for. It was important. He couldn’t miss it.” She stuck her fingers into the sand beside her, combing four straight lines before she brushed them away. “We rescheduled again.”
There was nothing to say, so Mark sat and listened.
“It’s not like I was rescheduling a dentist appointment. This was our wedding. I had invitations to send out, flowers to buy, and ....” Libby blew out a big sigh. “Jon was in country by January for a six-month deployment. He couldn’t come home even if he wanted to. I stopped getting letters when he left this time. The few times I heard from him, he was excited about everything he had accomplished over there. The people loved him. It was like he hated to leave them more than he wanted to come home to me. We talk
ed about a June wedding, but I could never get him to commit to a date. It was like he had better things to do.”
Mark blew out a slow breath when she paused. He was in Afghanistan by then, too, part of a special operations task force. They were searching out the Taliban in hunter killer teams, one man to spot, the other to shoot. Sometimes they were so far up in the mountains, they could see all the way to Pakistan, but they were never there for so long that they couldn’t get to the rear area and send word to their families. The Corps wasn’t heartless. For the most part, they took care of their men and women. Yeah, life might get real rugged for awhile, but communications weren’t as primitive as they used to be in past wars.
Calling home was never an option for Mark. When he came back to the rear area, bone-weary, disgusted with war and death, there hadn’t been anyone to call. No one cared that he was cold, that his government-issued body armor was a piece of crap, and he could really use something that would actually hold up under extreme conditions. No one cared whether he had been successful for the day, or that he didn’t get shot, that he didn’t die. It galled Mark to know that Jon had called home so seldom. Man, Jon, what were you thinking?
“He left me in June; he came back to me in June. I don’t think he would have come home any other way but in that box.” Libby wiped her face before she rolled onto her side. She came to rest on her elbow, her head in her hand so she was looking at Mark. “He’d already found what was important. It just wasn’t me.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, but you’re wrong. I know he loved you. He did.” Mark tried to sound sure, despite the doubts piling up in his mind. He had trusted Jon with his life. How could that same dashing hero have treated Libby so badly?
“I think he loved me as much as he could.” She drew a heart-shape in the sand with her index finger. “But I couldn’t compete with everything the Corps offered—the adventure, travel, and that band of brothers thing. I really lost him the minute he enlisted, the minute he found his Marine Corps family.” She brought her fist down in the middle of the heart, stretched out her fingers, and brushed it away.
Mark (In the Company of Snipers Book 2) Page 3