21 Marine Salute: 21 Always a Marine Tales (134 page)

He nodded. “It’s personal.”

“Exactly.” Rowan went to ask the next question, but he pressed his finger to her lips.

“Uh uh. My turn.”

Kissing his fingertip, she acquiesced. “Yes, it is your turn.”

“Why aren’t you dating anyone?” The abrupt change of subject from his childhood to her romantic life—or lack thereof--threatened whiplash, but she rode the sharp curve.

“I work
a lot
. I can be up all night troubleshooting a server migration, or travel to other locations to take care of software upgrades. By the time I leave the office, I want to go home and put on my fuzzy slippers, pour a glass of wine, and knit.” She bit the tip of her tongue and made a face. “Of course, that sounds wildly attractive, doesn’t it?”

“I think it sounds comfortable. I don’t get why you haven’t got guys trying to drag you out of your comfy spot though.” He paused for a heartbeat. “I know I’d be knocking on your door.”

Her heart raced at the admission and she dared a glance to meet his. “I’m more me here than I am anywhere else. Outside of circle and festivals, I’m the girl with a braid, her digital tablet, and a lot of work. I don’t flirt well and I don’t always know when guys like me—I’m not any good at that.”

“Fair enough.” The corners of his lips kicked upward. “But in case you’re wondering…I like you. A lot.”

Wow
. All the moisture in her mouth dried at his blunt statement. “I like you, too.” It took considerable effort to find the words to respond.

“So, question number two.” He didn’t look away.

“Yes?” The pound of her heart seemed to thud against her ribs.

“What question do you really want to ask me?”

She chewed the inside of her lip. “The last thing I want to do is spoil this….”

“It’s okay. Ask me. What do you really want to know?”

Trusting him enough to believe he really did want to hear her question, she clasped his hand. Rewarded when he wrapped his stronger fingers around hers, Rowan offered him a small smile. “What hurt your soul?”

Despite having made the request for her to ask the question, Kaiden had to still fight the urge to withdraw. The path to the answer had been washed in blood.

Tension tightened the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes. “Kaiden….”

“Shh…it’s okay. I told you to ask and I meant it.” Flickering images of carnage scrolled through his mind. “War isn’t pretty—whether it’s a military police action or an actual, physical battle. Urban warfare is even uglier, if that’s possible.” Hot and cold flash-fired across him and his stomach cramped, but he shoved it aside. “I’ve been deployed on and off for years. We’ve come home, we’ve gone back, we’ve come home again.”

He couldn’t gaze into the softness of her eyes for this story. To tell it—and he only ever planned to say it once and then never again—he needed the dark. Tipping his chin, he studied the sky and the stars. It wasn’t true darkness, but it would do.

“You don’t always know who the enemy is—so you trust the guys next to you and the guy in front and the guy in back. They’re your team. You rely on their judgment as much as you do your own.”

Rowan stroked her thumb along the back of his hand. The gentle gesture settled him and eased the thundering pound of his heart. One could not be in two places at the same time, but his soul decried the logic in the thought.

“Because you don’t know who your enemies are. They can look like anyone. Men. Women—children.” He fisted his free hand. “They don’t always look like soldiers. The worst of them look like everyday people trying to eke out a living—they go to their jobs, they go home, they feed their families, kiss their mothers, their daughters, their husbands, their parents—and then they strap on a bomb or plant an IED or pick up a gun—”

Pain shackled his heart, and Rowan rubbed her cheek against his shoulder—the rasping sound of the fabric drawing him back from the precipice.

“I had to kill an insurgent—he was tall, but he couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old, Rowan. He had a bomb on his chest and he ran straight at us.” If Kaiden lived to be a hundred years old, he would never forget the split second of helplessness as he realized he would have to kill that boy. They’d been hit at regular intervals—lost good men to IED attacks and others to random sniper fire. The suicide bombers weren’t as prevalent, but they happened.

He had a split second to make a decision and his training saved lives that day by ending another—an act that made reconciling these two disparate sides of his soul impossible.

Somehow, he found the words to keep speaking. Blinking rapidly to relieve the dryness in his eyes, he sighed. “He wasn’t the first person I’d ever killed and I’d like to say he was the last, but—I can’t. Killing isn’t the job, but it is a part of it. I knew that when I signed up. I accept it. It’s on me, my choices, my actions—my consequences.”

“And your loss of faith.” The soft whisper brushed over him like a caress.

“Yeah. So—you could say I’m a little fucked up.” He should watch his mouth around her, but instead of pulling away, she nestled closer.

“I wish I had an answer for that. Something to magick away the pain and the heartache—but I think that you can and do feel it is
your faith
, not your lack of it.”

Wrestling to untangle the words, Kaiden frowned. “My faith says I walk into a circle clean of hidden agendas and false beliefs. That I enter it in perfect love and perfect trust. That it—not harm anyone, no matter what I will. That I leave the world a better place than I found it. Nothing about killing that kid qualifies.”

“Maybe not.” Rowan adjusted her position and he could feel her gaze on him. “But you still feel it—you haven’t forgotten the cost of your choices. Holding onto your pain, barricading yourself with it—that harms you, too, Kaiden. I can’t say that your choices were right or wrong. But a guiding principle is a guiding principle, not a true-or-false test of whether you have the right to feel the way you do.”

He couldn’t tell if she wanted to offer him a way out or if she was merely oversimplifying it. “That’s not what I meant….”

“No, I know that. I know you feel deeply about your actions. But you’re conflicted because, as a Marine, you have to make one choice—protect your men, protect your country, protect your mission. As a man, you have to have faith that the Marine did what was right in that situation, even if he would never have chosen to be put into such a precarious position in the first place.” The hammer she hit the nail on the head with rang through him.

“Ultimately, I did choose to be there. I enlisted.” He almost hated defeating her argument.

“Only if you enlisted with the desire to kill someone else.” Rowan shrugged. “Maybe it’s just how I see it. But why did you enlist?”

Hopefully she hadn’t wanted something deep and meaningful, because his answer was far more direct. “It seemed like the place I needed to be. It fit me.”

“When you say it seemed like the place you needed to be? How so?”

The breeze off the lake came in little gusts of chill, but the heat from the fire warmed them and Kaiden didn’t really notice the cold. He paused only to make sure she hadn’t started shivering again, but she continued to regard him with an intensity that eliminated anything else from her focus.

Oddly, he enjoyed the hell out of knowing the only person she thought about or saw was
him
. “It’s hard to explain….” Or worse, she’d think it was stupid.
Or will she?
At no point in the last couple of days had she reacted in a judgmental manner. “I was filling out college applications and an ad for the Marines came on television. I stopped what I was doing and I called a recruiter. I didn’t need to go to college, I needed to go to the Marines.”

“So maybe you needed to be there that day to save your guys. You saved them, right?”

“I like how you see the world.” Clean and unsullied by the seamier things he’d seen and done.

“It’s not about how I look at the world—it’s how I live my life. I spent years trying to be something I’m not. My mom wanted me to get out of the house more, have a social life—
find friends
. I liked reading, I liked working on my computer, but she told me it wasn’t
normal
and how did I ever expect to be happy? So I made myself miserable trying to achieve her definition of happiness. It didn’t work for me.” Rowan stretched away from him and grabbed the bag they’d carried their stuff down from the house. Opening it, she pulled out the supplies for s’mores and Kaiden let her go, draping the blanket across her shoulders.

“I’m going to grab a bit more wood. Keep talking, I can hear you.”

“My point is, I made myself miserable because everyone else told me what I should feel or should do or what their definition of normal is—you know what I learned?”

“What?”

“Normal is horseshit.”

He’d found the firewood cache the others had made at the edge of the beach under a tarp and paused mid-load to glance at her. “What?”

“Normal is
shit
,” she called out in a louder voice and Kaiden bit back a chuckle. That’s what he thought she said. “Normal is relative to the person. What makes me happy may not make someone else happy. Using their judgment as a barometer won’t work—so I can tell you think you answered a call, maybe it was a spiritual one, or maybe it was a universal way of putting you in a place you needed to be to help others—but ultimately, you’re the only one who can decide that.”

“So if I wanted to crawl on my belly and cry like a little girl, that’s my choice, too?” He knelt to feed the wood into the fire.

“More or less.” Rowan speared some marshmallows on a pair of metal skewers. “In your heart of hearts, would you ever have hurt anyone if they hadn’t been trying to hurt you first?”

“Self-defense is a legal argument, not a spiritual one.”

“Okay, practically speaking, you can’t worship if you’re dead.” She held out one of the pokers to him. “And I rather like having you alive. So answer the question…would you have done it if you’d had any other choice that wouldn’t have cost lives?”

If he hadn’t—his guys, his brothers would have died. He could have. Accepting the poker, he shifted to sit back on the blanket next to her, but stared at the marshmallow as he held it out to the fire.

“It’s only the night and me, Kaiden. Neither of us will hold it against you. Yes, you’ve killed. But you saved more lives than you lost. So maybe you did need to be there that day—and maybe I needed to read all those books and work with computers until I knew them inside and out so I could meet Aaron on a call and end up here. Life—life twists and it turns, and we can’t always anticipate where it will take us. We can only control what we do when we get there.”

“Is that your way of saying ‘suck it up, princess’?” When her eyes widened, he let go of the grin he’d been fighting to keep off his face. “Or maybe ‘man up you little girl and stop whining’?”

“I did
not
say that.” She looked genuinely horrified and a laugh broke loose in his chest.

“No, but you were thinking it.”

“I was not.”

Feeling less sorry for himself than he had in a while, Kaiden squinted at her. “I’m a big ol’ excuse tree, then? Full of excuses? Want to climb me like the excuse tree I am?” Something in his expression must have given him away because Rowan went from wide-eyed and horrified, to simple shock, until she gave way to laughter.

“An excuse tree?”

“That’s what my drill instructor called it in basic. ‘Private Nelson, why is that sock that way?’ I don’t know, sir, I just got back from duty in the mess. ‘Oh, I see. You’re just a big ol’ excuse tree. You want to be a tree? Be a tree!’”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means I stood there at attention for about thirty minutes after he dumped all my clothing on me until he finished inspection and then ordered me to fold my clothes and put them back.”

Skepticism deepened her frown, but she constructed a s’more for both of them. “I think that sounds positively horrible.”

“In the absolute best way.” he said and watched her add a second layer of chocolate to his. “You planning to kill me with chocolate?”

“It’s the next best thing to sex—and I think you could use all the cheering up you can get if you think being used as an excuse tree is wonderful.” But a smile flirted behind her disapproval.

Sobering, he brushed a finger down her cheek. “I’m fucked up, Rowan.”

“I don’t think you’re as bad off as you do. I think you haven’t figured out how to be home yet. It took you time to be a Marine, took you time to be over there—you have to be patient about being here.”

He shook his head once. “No, it’s not about being home.” Kaiden ran his thumb over her lower lip. The little catch of her breath blew away the hard knot of indecision he’d wrestled with all day. “It’s about being here with you and all the things I want to find out about you—and do with you. I’m not a good guy. I can’t make you any promises.”

“I didn’t ask you for any.” The tart response tickled him. “But I do want to eat my s’more, so you can kiss me or you can let me have my chocolate.”

One of the shackles confining his heart buckled under her response and snapped loose. “Well,” he murmured, “if you insist—why don’t I give you both?” Taking a bite of the sticky treat, he locked his gaze on her lips and, the moment they parted, he closed the distance between them and sealed his mouth to hers.

She fisted his jacket and leaned into the kiss, her tongue darting out to sample the melting chocolate. The explosion of sweetness had nothing to do with the treat—Rowan tasted a hell of a lot better than chocolate.

They necked like a pair of teenagers for hours. Kaiden, it seemed, had developed a sweet tooth or so he declared in between nibbling a s’mores before kissing her again. The man’s kiss and touch were addictive, but he added no caresses to the long, slow, luscious exploration of her mouth—and damn did he know what he was doing.

Cuddled together, they’d talked, made out, and talked some more while the fire flickered and they waited for the sunrise. They sat vigil through the longest night of the year as Yule celebrated the return of light to the world, the turning of the wheel. From this day forward, the days would grow a little longer, minute by minute.