Marooned With a Marine

He snorted a choked-off laugh and shook his head. “There was a time when a few days in my company wouldn’t have made you look like you’d just been sentenced to twenty years’ hard time at Leavenworth.”

The sting of his words slapped at her, and she winced at the direct hit to her heart. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. Didn’t he know that she had been hurt, too? Couldn’t he see how difficult it was for her to push him away when her every instinct told her to snuggle in close to him? To recapture the magic she’d found only in his arms?

“Sam,” she said, and pushed herself off the bed. Tilting her head back, she looked into those pale brown eyes of his and said, “It’s not you. It’s—”

“Yeah, I know,” he interrupted her, and held one hand up to keep her from finishing that sentence. “It’s something you can’t explain. I seem to remember that speech, and if you don’t mind, I’d rather not hear it again.”

She flushed. Karen felt the warm rush of it fill her cheeks. Blast it. “Fine. Sorry.”

He nodded briefly, then said, “I’ll go get the rest of our stuff.”

“You want some help?”

“No, thanks,” he said tightly, already turning for the door. “I can manage.” Glancing back over his shoulder, he added, “Why don’t you call your folks before the power lines go down? Save your batteries.”

She watched him step out into the windswept rain and disappear into the darkness. When she was alone, she walked to the closet, peeled off her jacket and hung it up. But as soon as she set the wire hanger onto the rod, the wooden bar collapsed, hitting the carpet with a thump. She stared at her jacket, crumpled beneath the rod, for a long moment, then sighed and left it there. If this was a sign of things to come, she really didn’t want to think about it.

Figuring things couldn’t get much worse, she resolutely walked to the phone, picked up the receiver and started to dial. Now all she had to do was keep her mother from doing handsprings over some imagined reunion between her and Sam.

Martha Beckett desperately wanted grandchildren and wasn’t above using the age-old weapon of guilt in an attempt to convince her only daughter to provide said babies before she was too old to enjoy them.

Karen half turned on the bed to watch as Sam came back into the room, and at the same time her mother picked up the phone on her end.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Mom,” Karen said, swinging her gaze back to something safe. Like the wall. “It’s me.”

“Honey,” her mother crooned, “I’m so glad you called back. You’re out of the storm, I take it? Safe?”

“Yeah,” she said. Safe from the hurricane, anyway.

“Good. Now, I want to hear all about you and Sam. You didn’t tell me you were back together!”

“We’re not, Mom,” Karen said, knowing it was useless but giving it the old college try, anyway.

“I was just telling your dad the other day that I just knew you two would work things out eventually!”

Karen groaned, and lifted one hand to rub the sudden throb that had leaped up dead center of her forehead.

“Now, the way I see it,” Sam said, stalking around the tiny room like a caged tiger, “we’ll each have our own areas.”

“We will?”

“Yeah.” He glanced at her, sitting on the bed with her back up against the headboard and her long legs crossed at the ankle. Even in the dim light of the pitifully low-wattage bulbs in the bedside lamps, Karen’s blond hair shone like sunlight. Her blue eyes watched him, and one corner of her mouth lifted in a half smile that teased him with memories of other times. Happier times.

Instantly, he remembered lazy Sunday mornings in her bed. Waking up with her cuddled up beside him. The soft hush of her breath on his chest, the lemony scent of her hair, the tantalizing magic of her touch.

“Sam?” she said, loudly enough to tell him it wasn’t the first time she’d called his name.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah.” He shoved one hand across the top of his head and reminded himself that those days were over. Karen had called a halt to what they’d had, and if he had an ounce of sense, he’d remember that and forget all the rest.

Or at least try to.

“Anyway,” he said firmly, “I figure you can have the bed. I’ll take the floor.”

“Deal.”

One eyebrow lifted. “That was fast.”

“Well, the feminist in me wants to argue that we should at least take turns sleeping on the floor. But…”

“Yeah?”

“The girl in me thinks the bed is pretty comfortable and really hates sleeping bags.”

He laughed shortly. “I remember. You really weren’t much of a camper.”

“It rained.”

“We had a tent.”

“Yeah, and every bug in the county came inside to get out of the rain.” She smiled, and just for a moment the problems between them dissolved in the memory of their last good weekend together.

They stared at each other for a long, tension-filled moment, then Karen abruptly ended the spell by leaping off the bed to grab up one of her bags. “Might as well settle in, huh?”

“Right,” he muttered, and mentally pushed his desire for her into a tight, hard knot deep into a corner of his soul.

A half an hour later, their respective “camps” were set up. At the foot of the bed, Sam studied his area, making sure all was as it should be. Against the wall, he’d stacked his MREs—meals ready to eat—bottled water, a battery-operated radio and a lantern. His sleeping bag lay open on the floor in front of his supplies, and he kneeled on it while he unrolled his poncho.

“What are you doing now?” Karen asked.

He glanced at her over his shoulder. Both of his eyebrows lifted as he said pointedly, “I’m getting ready for a hurricane. Unlike some people…”

“I’m ready,” she argued, not looking at him.

“Yeah,” he said wryly. “I can see that.”

Once she’d finished painting the last of her toe-nails, Karen looked up to meet his gaze. “Hey, I finished unpacking twenty minutes ago.”

“You unpacked your cooler.”

“I was thirsty.”

“Karen…”

“Lighten up, Sarge,” she said. “It’s not like there’s anything we can do beyond sitting in this room and waiting for the darn storm to hit.”