Moonshell Beach: A Shelter Bay Novel (32 page)

“At least you’re not making me wait until New Year’s Eve,” she said.

“I’d never make it that long,” he admitted. “But as you undoubtedly figured out, I’ve been drifting since I came back home. There are some things I need to settle before we talk about the future.”

She sighed. Heavily. With resignation. “Fortunately for you, Fionna was right when she told you we Joyce women would never be happy with a man we could push around.”

“Two weeks,” he repeated. “Then you can push me around all you want.”

“That may be the first lie you’ve told to me, J. T. Douchett,” she complained. “But two weeks it is. And not a day longer.”

“I promise.” He touched his mouth to hers as the sun set behind the castle ruins.
“A chuisle mo chroi,”
he murmured against her lips.

Mary’s head came up so fast, it hit beneath his chin, causing his teeth to bang together. “What did you say?”

He had been as surprised as she looked to hear those words coming out of his mouth. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t speak Irish?”

“Not a word.”

“Yet you called me the pulse of your heart.”

“Well…it definitely fits. Because you are.”

“But how did you know that?”

He smiled, a slow, satisfied smile, as he gave himself up to this place. To her. “Easy.” He took her lips again, this time taking the kiss deeper. Longer. “Magic.”

Coastal Community College was set up on a bluff high on a hill overlooking the harbor. While certainly not the largest college in the state, it was one of the most charming, set in a grove of fir trees, its buildings painted lighthouse white and topped with a red cedar shake roof.

Inside, colorful Native American art lined walls painted the same buttery yellow as the hospital in Castlelough, the color designed to bring in sunshine during the darkest of rainy Pacific Northwest days.

J.T.’s meeting his first morning back in Shelter Bay was with the president of the college, the vice president of instruction, the human resources director, the dean of college relations, and the director of the college foundation.

“Well,” the president, a dark-haired woman who appeared to be in her late forties, said, after going through the file he’d brought with him, “your credentials are definitely impressive.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Which makes me wonder,” the human resources guy broke in, “why, after teaching at the War College,
you wouldn’t consider a community college a step down.”

“That’s not the case at all,” J.T. said. He’d had plenty of time to think about it on the long flight home from Ireland. “As your brochure states, community colleges are the way forward into the future. Especially these days with so many people out of work, they offer the opportunity for a quality education close to home. In the community, thus their name.”

“Yet what’s to prevent you from getting bored and moving on to greener pastures?”

“I like the pastures just fine, here,” J.T. said easily. “This is, after all, my hometown. I have family here. Three generations of connections.”

“We have a great many ROTC students.” The vice president of instruction pointed out what J.T. had already unearthed for himself online. “I have no doubt that you’d be a great help preparing them for any deployments they may experience.”

“I like to believe my wartime experience would prove helpful,” J.T. said. “But there’s more to fighting wars than what happens on the battlefield. I believe a strong grounding in war history also helps in decision making. Both at the command level and on the ground.”

“Well put,” the director of the foundation said. “I was with III MAF at Khe Sanh.”

Although the Marine Amphibious Force had landed in the tactical victory column of the Vietnam War, what became known as the hill battles, J.T. knew it had been a hairy time.

“Then you’d know that Marines don’t quit.”

Although he was responding to the director, he shot a look at the HR guy.

“I also believe that military history serves everyone,” J.T. added. “Not just those fighting our wars.”

“Well put,” the fellow Marine, who was obviously on his side, said.
Semper Fi.

The rest of the interview went well, and thirty minutes later, J.T. left the administrative building an employed civilian.

His next stop was at Take the Cake bakery. Not because he was in any need for a cupcake, although he had to admit the German chocolate was the bomb, but Sax had said that, having been a CPA before turning to sweets, the baker was the best person in town for financial advice. Which turned out to be true.

“So, what do you think?” he asked his brothers, as they stood on the piece of property overlooking Moonshell Beach.

“I think you’re going to be teaching a lot of classes to pay for this,” Cole, always the pragmatist, warned.

“You guys know there’s not a lot to spend your money on when you’re deployed,” J.T. said. “I could cover the land. And the cottage.” He pointed toward a small cottage he’d decided he and Mary could live in while building their own home. Then they could turn it into a guesthouse for when her family visited from Castlelough.

“Have you even asked her if she wants to live here?” Sax asked.

“Not yet. But Sedona—and thanks for telling me about her, because she’s brilliant—said that since this is a buyer’s market, the seller would give me time to change my mind if she doesn’t go along with
the deal. It’s been on the market over a year and I’m the first bite the seller’s gotten.”

“The cottage is, to put it mildly, a wreck,” Cole pointed out.

“It just needs a little TLC,” J.T. argued. “I figured we could do the painting and repairs, while our women took care of the inside. Getting furniture and all that decorating stuff.”

“Which will probably cost more than a new roof.” Cole glanced up at the moss-covered roof in question.

“I can handle it,” J.T. said yet again. Sometimes it sucked being the youngest brother. Especially when Cole got into elder mode.

“Well, then,” Sax said, giving his brother a one-armed man hug, “I’d say, since you promised Mary you’d be back in two weeks, we’d better get our asses in gear.”

While setting a romantic meeting place and time might work very fine in the movies, Mary was finding, yet again, that the movies were far different from real life.

After her agent returned home from Peru with the revelation that she’d once been an Inca queen who’d lived in a mountain city above the clouds—which had immediately had Mary thinking of the Neil Young song—she’d gone on to confirm that although Pressler could hire writers to create a mermaid/vampire story, he could not use either her world or her characters.

Which was a relief on more than one level, since Mary had only ever seen the story as a trilogy, from the first. To her mind, once her selkie queen gave up her kingdom to live on land with the human she’d chosen to mate with for life, the story had its happy ending.

So, trying not to go crazy while she was waiting for J.T. to return to Castlelough, and her, she began work on the story of the fisherman and the selkie that had been stirring in her mind for so many months.
And while writing somewhat took her mind off the stubborn Marine she’d fallen in love with, the problem was that since she’d told the story to him that day on the boat when he’d first kissed her, it did nothing to ease the need that was growing exponentially with every passing day.

Then finally, it was time.

After tiring of her pacing a path in the floor, Nora had finally shooed Mary out of the house, causing her to arrive at the lake early.

Where she waited.

Then finally(!) he was coming over the hill, his hair as dark as a moonless night over the Burren, eyes the color of rain. But much, much warmer.

He was striding toward her on long, determined legs that ate up the ground.

His jaw was wide and square, his rawboned face as chiseled as the stone cliffs into which the lake had been carved by glaciers eons ago.

Although clad in jeans and an Aran Islands sweater, he was still every inch a warrior.

Having grown up in a country that had suffered centuries of hostilities from battling factions, Mary still hated war.

But she loved him.

He stopped in front of her, eyes so warm as they looked down into hers, she felt her body melting, like a candle left out too long in the summer’s sun.

“Do you have any idea how much I’ve missed you?” he asked.

“And wasn’t that your own doing?” she countered, placing her hands on her hips when she wanted to fling them around his neck.

He laughed. “Your grandmother was right. You
Joyce are strong-willed females.” He skimmed the back of his hand down the side of her face. “And ooh-rah for that.”

“We’re also known for getting straight to the point,” she reminded him. “So, what have you decided?”

“What I’d already decided before I left. That I want you.”

“Leaving was an odd way of showing that.”

“I needed to get a life back. A life I could ask you to share.”

This was still not the romance she’d been hoping for. But he was getting closer.

“First I need to know something.…Are you going back to Malibu?”

“No.” She’d already decided to return to making the films she loved. The films that had first garnered her an audience. Which might be smaller, but her work would be her own.

“What would you say to spending part of the year in Shelter Bay?”

“I’d say, if you’re asking me to be spending it with you, yes.”

“Okay.” He let out a long breath, and suddenly she realized that she wasn’t the only one who’d come here today with nerves all in a tangle.

“I have a job. Teaching history at the community college. Most of the students will probably be ROTC, on their way to the military, who I think I can help. As for the others, who’ll be going into civilian life, I still believe it’s important for them to know more about their country’s past, too.”

“Coming from a country with a great deal of past,
you’ll be getting no argument from me there,” she said.

“And I bought a house. Well, not exactly a house. But some land with this cottage I thought we could live in while we built one large enough for our family. And then we could use the cottage for a guesthouse for your family. It’s on the coast. Overlooking Moonshell Beach.”

“Our beach?”

“Yeah. Our beach. Because I knew, after making love to you there, I’ll never be able to think of it any other way.”

“That’s so lovely. And romantic. And where would we be spending the rest of the time?”

“I was thinking here. Well, not exactly
here
,” he amended as he looked around at the lake and castle. “But in Castlelough. So you’ll have your family around you. After all, it’ll be good for our children to know their cousins.”

He tightened his arms, drawing her closer. “I know this all happened fast, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned during my time in the corps, it’s that since life doesn’t come with a time guarantee, we shouldn’t waste a moment. I love you, Mary Joyce. With every fiber of my being. And I want to spend the rest of this life, and any others we might be gifted with, together. So…will you marry me?”

“Well, since my entire family would undoubtedly disown me if I didn’t…I believe I have no choice but to let you talk me into it.”

And wasn’t this the romance she’d been waiting for? “
Failte abhaile
, Captain Douchett.” She lifted her smiling lips to his kiss. “Welcome home.”

Tech sergeant Dillon Slater’s business was bombs. And in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, Dillon’s business was booming.

The landscape he was driving his armored mine-disposal vehicle through could have come right from the pages of the Old Testament. Years of baking beneath the hot Afghan sun had made the mud of the compounds as hard as concrete. Unlike some of the royal palaces he’d seen while deployed in Iraq, these dwellings boasted no gaudy exterior decoration. Uniformly putty colored, they were purely functional.

Children waved as the twenty-six-ton vehicle bounced over what felt more like a goat trail than a real road.

In earlier deployments, he’d been lucky if his
EOD bat phone rang a dozen times a week. But the enemy was nothing if not adaptive, and since the country had turned into the Wild West, they’d figured out that it was a lot easier to blow up coalition forces from a distance than to take them on in a shoot-out-at-the-O.K-Corral gunfight situation.

In the past month alone, 212 IEDs had been discovered and detonated.

“Crazy,” he muttered as he pulled into the area where a Ranger unit was standing around waiting for him.

He’d been called to this same spot yesterday to remove a crude pressure-plate device next to a basketball court he’d helped build. Together with other unit volunteers, he’d cleared the space and poured the surface, using Quikrete donated by some Navy SEALs. One thing Dillon had learned early on was that SEALs could get their hands on just about anything. Another thing he’d learned was to never ask them
where
they’d gotten it.

What really chapped his hide was that whatever cretin had planted that IED had been willing to take out children who used the court every day. Often with troops who’d play with them. The pickup games were more than just a way to burn off energy; they served as yet another attempt to win hearts and minds. Which personally Dillon wasn’t so sure was working—more people kept trying to kill him every day. But hey, military war policy and nation building was way above his pay grade.

Unlike the previous day, when the square had been filled with civilian onlookers, the place was deserted.

Which was not good. One of the first things Dillon
had learned in training was to look for the absence of normal and the presence of abnormal. Both of which they definitely had here.

Did everyone but them know what was going on? Had the kids who were usually playing roundball on this court been warned to stay away?