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“He must have really made a mess of their relationship,” Staci, ever the realist, said.
Big-time, Alysse agreed. But that didn’t change the fact that he was trying to make up for it. That earned him major points in her book.
“Probably. Would you take a guy back if he planned a dinner for you at the Coronado on the beach?” Alysse asked her friend.
“Not sure. I guess it would depend on the guy,” she said with a shrug. “I’m not much on forgiving.”
“Me, neither,” Alysse said.
Maybe that was why she had said yes to delivering the dessert. She wanted this couple to have a second chance at love. A second chance at making their relationship work—because her own lover had never even tried for a second chance.
Even if he had she would have said no, she thought. She left the store area and went back into the kitchen. It was time for her to do the one thing that she was genuinely good at—taking ingredients and mixing them into something edible, something mouthwatering and delicious. It wasn’t lost on her that she used her baking to escape from the real world. In here she was in charge and if anything went wrong she could toss it out and start over.
She weighed and measured the cocoa and the flour and sifted them together, taking a kind of comfort from the mixing. She tried to keep the image of Jay from her mind but she couldn’t. The memory of the tough-as-Pittsburgh-steel Marine Corps sniper was hard to ignore. She knew that was why she’d failed at blind dates and speed-dating. She measured every man she met by the yardstick that was Jay, or by what she’d thought Jay was when she’d married him, and no one, not even Jay, would ever measure up.
* * *
JAY MICHENER TOOK a swallow of his beer and leaned back against the wall behind him. The bar was more open than he felt comfortable in; since he’d gotten back from Afghanistan he couldn’t relax. There were three other guys at the table with him.
Lucien he knew well as they’d been in the same unit for two tours. They’d been to the Middle East and back several times. Lucien had gotten out of the Corps two years ago and had started his own security business with the other two men at the table.
Jay didn’t know either man well, but they felt like guys he’d known before. But then, Jay had spent all of his adult life in the military so there weren’t many enlisted men he couldn’t relate to. The two men got up to play pool and Lucien took a sip of his beer before turning to Jay.
“Why don’t you come by my office tomorrow and I’ll give you the tour? Show you what life is like on the outside,” Lucien said with a wry grin.
“The outside? It’s not like I’ve been in prison,” Jay said. The Corps was his life not because he had no other choices but because it was where he wanted to be.
“It sort of is. You’ve been in since you were eighteen and you’re pushing thirty now. Isn’t it time you tried something else?” Lucien asked.
“Maybe,” Jay said. “I’ll try to swing by tomorrow.”
“Don’t ‘try to,’ be there around ten, Lance Corporal,” Lucien said.
“Okay,” Jay told him, giving in. It couldn’t hurt to check out Lucien’s place.
“You free for dinner?” Lucien asked.
“Why?”
“I want you to meet my girlfriend,” Lucien said. “She’s always bugging me to bring home the guys I talk about.”
“I can’t tonight,” Jay said. Or ever, he thought. He couldn’t think of anything more torturous than spending the night with Lucien and his girlfriend talking about the old times.
“I’ve gotta go,” Jay said, glancing at his watch. He wasn’t a guy who normally took gambles, so this one with Alysse was odd. But she had always made him feel differently than other women did, which was probably why he’d married her four years ago. That was probably also the chief reason he’d left her after only one week.
He was dressed casually in a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt but he felt naked without his rifle in his hand. How was a man supposed to live when he was always on edge? With Alysse, he had hoped to find something more normal, but the week they’d spent together had made him realize that he felt even more vulnerable with her.
Now he was stationed at Pendleton in Oceanside, California, about a twenty-minute drive north of San Diego. Pendleton had an idyllic setting right across
the 5 from the Pacific Ocean and it was easy sometimes to forget that there was anything else but the beach and an endless horizon.
