One More Kiss Read Free

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.
    But his mind hadn’t let Alysse go as easily as Jay had hoped. Every night she sneaked into his dreams—and the sexy ones weren’t the problem. It was the normal-life ones that really disturbed Jay. The ones where he pictured Alysse in an apron with a few kids at her feet were the worst because he didn’t believe he was ever going to be the man who gave her those things.
    “You’re on leave, Lance Corporal, I didn’t think you had anywhere to be,” Lucien said.
    “I do tonight.”
    There was a lot of laughing at the table as the men all made some comment about women and hot dates. He smiled and let them think it was just a casual hook-up. He waved goodbye and walked out of the bar in San Diego’s Gaslamp district.
    He got on his Ducati 1100s motorcycle and drove to the Hotel Del Coronado. He didn’t make a lot of money as a sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps but Jay didn’t spend a lot of money either. He didn’t have an apartment or house of his own, preferring to stay in hotels when he was on leave. Since he had always planned to be a career military man, he used base housing and stored his Ducati when he was deployed.
    But something had changed in him on this last deployment. He had no idea if it was the fact that he’d turned thirty or the fact that he was at a crossroads. He could get out of the Corps now, find a civilian job and maybe have a shot at normality. Though he wasn’t convinced he was cut out for normal.
    Tricking Alysse wasn’t the answer, but the last time he’d had a shot at a real life had been with her. His commanding officer would say he was being a, well...a coward, for lack of a better word, and Jay knew the CO would be right. But he wanted Alysse back.
    His plan—and he always had a plan—was to spend his leave here with Alysse Dresden and figure out if he was meant for this life or if he should stay being a warrior.
    Still, he needed to make up for how he’d left her. He