Nerd and the Marine Read Free Page B

grown yet.
Which was good, and my friend who he tried to tackle is on the
left, in the back, third in. Yeah, the biggest guy in our company.
Al saw him coming and braced and has a great sense of humor, so
there were no problems. But then I opened a can a few days later,
and wasn't expecting Bentley-the-demon-root-beer-dog and ended up
on my backside. Which Bentley thought was funny.
    After a few experiments,
which my buddies helped conduct, we discovered brand doesn't
matter, Bentley just likes root beer. And he'll take anyone,
including Al, or me, down to steal the stuff. I'm glad you found a
practical use for this tendency of his.
    I received your family
picture but can't get you back, since the oldest, meanest looking
person in the picture looks like a great grandparent and I know
you're not there yet. And, I don't have Bentley to help me.
I think I'll persevere, though. I'm a Marine,
after all. I also circled the person I think you
are in the family picture.
    We're expecting yet
another sand storm, so I need to make this fast. This computer is
dying on me. Too much sand in the hard drive now, so I have to be
careful with it. The base computers aren’t in much better shape and
are always occupied and used hard, even with all the sand in
them.
    All for now, it's time to
secure everything again.
    Yours,
    Mitch
     
    Lainy opened the attachment and saw
her family picture download. Mitch had circled her sister Laurie,
who was quite pregnant. Lainy laughed. She figured he was getting
her back for choosing the oldest guy in his company. She hoped he'd
gotten a laugh, and expected he had, since he'd offered her one.
She'd put in a caption when she sent her family picture, which had
included Bentley, that he had the advantage since he could safely
discount half the people in the picture, as they were
male.
    She looked closer at the photo and
finding herself, found a little squiggle mark next to her face in
the picture. Scrolling down to the bottom of the picture, he'd left
a caption.
    You weren't hard to find.
You told me in an earlier e-mail how your brothers threw you into
the lake glasses, purse and all, so I just had to find the young
woman with glasses to know who you were. Easy!
    Lainy sighed. Of course she was easy
to find. Just look for the nerd and there she was. The quiet one.
The brainy one. The socially inept one. The geek. She left the
computer and stared in the mirror, almost tripping over Bentley in
her haste.
    Bentley’s dad was one of the biggest
men in his company, and in her opinion, the handsomest. With his
square jaw and dark, liquid brown eyes, and those lips that begged
to be kissed, she'd had no trouble picking him out. He radiated a
humanness that appealed to her. A Marine who loved his dog so much
was an incredible man, indeed. She'd simply looked for the sweetest
eyes. When it had been a tossup between him or his friend, Al, a
huge African American man in the back row, intuition had led her to
the smaller man.
    And there went her fantasies about him
coming home and thinking her the most amazing creature ever.
Because when she looked in the mirror, she saw a nerd. A Marine
attracted to a nerd? Not going to happen. Her stomach tightened.
She’d have to talk to him, and that wasn’t going to happen,
either.
    What had she overheard at a high
school dance all those years ago? “Lainy Morrison is too
intelligent to date. Talking with her is fine, sometimes, but
dating, no way.”
    A cheerleader had added her own
comments. “Well, she’s so tall and has so much hair.” Another
cheerleader had chimed in then, of course. “And she wears glasses,
I mean, come on.”
    The star football player in the group
had another comment. “Yeah, that means she’s intelligent, remember?
Men don't date smart women.”
    Lainy had slunk home that evening in
despair, knowing her sisters were the beauties in the family and
her, the ugly duckling. The clever ugly duckling.
    Her two relationship