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“Listen,” he said, munching on the chip, “it’s the only thing that kills the parasites and bacteria we pick up out here.”
“I think I’ll pass,” Sierra said dryly, liking the piquant and slightly spicy red sauce.
A waiter brought over his ice-cold beer and her gas water with its lime slice.
“Who’s the lucky man in your life?” Mace asked, holding her startled gaze. He assumed that she had someone. She was too damn beautiful and smart not to have men who, at the very least, lusted after her.
“No one,” Sierra said. She saw surprise in Mace’s gray eyes.
“Why so sad?” he asked.
Her heart twinged. She saw that Mace was sincere. It wasn’t a flippant question. He genuinely was trying to get to know her. And last night, she’d almost let him kiss her. She wanted to know everything about him. In the jungle, in the darkness, he’d shared his life with her, about Ana Beth, his baby, both of whom were gone. There was no guile in Mace’s eyes as he sat there, elbows on the table, one hand around his beer, watching her. Waiting.
Taking a deep breath, she said, “I was never married. I mean, I wanted to be, but circumstances prevented it.” her voice quiet. She wanted no one to overhear them. “I met Sergeant Jeb Cantrell, a Marine Corps sniper, when I was twenty-two. We got put out on a two-month op together in Afghanistan.” Sierra smiled softly in memory. “He was a Kentucky boy, grew up barefoot and hated going to school because he had to wear shoes…”
“You fell in love?”
“Yeah, we did, over that year. We were so good together, as a sniper-spotter team, that the Corps kept us together.”
“Good sniping teams are hard to come by,” Mace agreed.
“We were good for one another,” she admitted. “I tried to ignore what was going on between us. I knew it was wrong. I was afraid that how I felt toward Jeb would become a deadly distraction. But he called my hand on it. Told me he loved me after we’d been together for nine months.”
“But you loved him, too?”
“I did.” Quirking her mouth, Sierra admitted, “I was afraid to tell him. Afraid of so much because we were an active military sniper team. And if anyone got wind of it,” and she brushed her wrinkled brow, “It wouldn’t have been good. We’d have been split up and assigned to other teams. I didn’t want that, so I sat on how I felt toward Jeb.”
“I’m sure that was a special hell.”
Giving Mace a quick glance, Sierra saw he understood. “It was… awful. But when he called my hand, I fessed up. After a lot of serious discussion, we felt we were professional enough to work together despite how we felt personally about one another.”
“Did it work?” he wondered.
“Yeah, it did. But we kept it a secret.”
“How long did it last?”
“Four years.” She sat up, pushing back in her chair, staring at the shadowed stone wall. “It was the best years of my life, Mace. I really loved Jeb. He was funny, easy-going, never getting too serious about anything except us. We were good as a team and we were on deployment assignments every six months, and then we’d come Stateside for another six, and go rotate back out. We had an apartment in Oceanside, not far from Camp Pendleton. And we kept how we felt for one another a secret.”
“Didn’t you want to marry?” Mace asked.
“Yes.” Sierra cast her gaze over at his serious-looking face. “But we had another year on our contract. We decided to wait, get out of the Corps, and go on and get married and lead our lives as civilians.” She closed her eyes for a moment and folded her hands on the table, staring down at them. “We had one more deployment… just one more… and he got killed.” She tucked her lower lip between her teeth for a moment, feeling all the old grief come flowing up through her. It didn’t have the raw intensity it used to. All she felt now was a sadness, instead. For what might have been. Pushing through her desire to stop the story right there, Sierra felt Mace deserved to hear all of it.
“We were on a mountain slope waiting for an Al-Qaeda HVT to cross the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan. “Somehow… and I still don’t know how to this day, we got jumped by a small group of Taliban. They were damned good at finding us. Jeb took a hit to his chest. I killed the four of them, but he was mortally wounded.” Closing her eyes, Sierra could still see him bleeding out in her arms. She was sobbing, trying to stop him from dying. She would never forget the moment he’d lifted his hand, gripped her forearm, and looked into her eyes. The moment she’d seen the life go out of his eyes. A lump formed in her tightening throat, and she shook her head. “I-I couldn’t save him.”
Mace reached out, gripping her tightly clasped hands for a moment. “I’m sorry, Sierra. He sounds like he was a damned fine man.”
Just the warmth and strength of his hand over hers, helped her stabilize the emotions flowing, grief-stricken, through her. Opening her eyes, she lifted her chin and held his dark, gray gaze. Sierra saw he meant it, heard the heaviness in his low voice. “Sorry… I didn’t mean to go into it in such detail.” She gave him a slight, one-cornered smile that didn’t quite work. “Seems like we share some things in common.”
Mace lifted his hand from hers. “Not anything to write home about.”
“No,” she whispered, her voice strained, “it’s not. On most days, it doesn’t bother me. I’m twenty-eight now and I’m pretty much over the worst of the grief… the loss of Jeb. But at times like this…”
“It all comes back,” Mace agreed heavily. “It took me years to get out from under the grief I had over my wife and baby dying.”
“That was no picnic,” Sierra agreed, giving him a gentle look. Mace still held so much pain from that time. He’d never gotten it out, discharged it. She, on the other hand, had cried so much, so often that in the first six months after Jeb’s death, Sierra wondered if she’d ever stop crying. But at least, she did grieve for him, for what she’d lost.
“What about you?” she asked, her voice scratchy as she took a sip of water.
