The ear-splitting shriek of the smoke detector ripped through the house. Tara jumped so badly she nearly lost her footing, and Chance’s eyes widened in comprehension.
“Oh, shit, the salmon’s burning.”
He bolted across the room and out the door, and in a second she heard his heavy footsteps thundering down the stairs.
She knew she should follow him, dart around the ground floor opening windows while he turned off the oven and fanned the smoke in the kitchen. She’d do it—she’d go down and help him. First she just needed one minute to breathe.
Three
“Is that everything you need?”
The soldier behind the desk gave the spousal ID application a final onceover and nodded. “Looks fine. She can come in any time on Monday to get her photo taken and we’ll issue the card then.”
“Thanks, I’ll tell her.”
Chance breathed a sigh of relief as he left the administrative building, squinting as he stepped into the crisp but sunny autumn morning. He was so worried he’d have to answer invasive personal questions about why he was only now registering a spouse after nearly a year of marriage that he’d turned up at the ID office as soon as it opened, hoping it would be empty and limiting the risk of running into someone he knew. But the woman who accepted his paperwork hadn’t so much as blinked at the date on the marriage certificate, and now that it was over he realized how paranoid he’d been. This was the army. They’d seen it all.
He stretched and yawned, wondering what to do with the hour remaining before the start of his duty shift. Tara won the fight over who got to spend the night on the couch, but the queen-size mattress might as well have been the floor for all the sleep he got.
He’d thrown together a vegetable stir fry while Tara scraped scorched bits of salmon off the baking sheet, and the atmosphere over dinner was companionable if somewhat stilted, like they were two feral cats sizing each other up, deciding whether they’d need to fight to protect their respective territories. What strange accord they’d seemed to find had been banished so thoroughly by the smoke alarm that Chance thought he must have imagined it. Tara was back to being one wrong word away from ornery, and he kept the conversation light and superficial until it was time to say goodnight.
As soon as he switched off his bedside lamp his mind started to race, except his thoughts weren’t circling the question he expected, namely what the hell Tara Lambert was doing in his house. Instead he fixated on her lips, her breasts, the faintly discernible outline of her nipples in the thin T-shirt she’d worn to sleep in. His breathing quickened with memories of how she’d tasted, how her sweet scent had cut through the stuffy air in the hotel room, blackberries and vanilla, long-sought delicacies yielding to his hands and melting against his tongue.
He tossed and turned for what felt like hours, trying to think about anything else, until with an exasperated sigh he admitted defeat and slid his hand beneath the waistband of his boxers. He’d no sooner closed his fist than a door slammed downstairs—Tara was in the bathroom directly below the far corner of his bedroom. He snatched his hand up to his stomach and flopped onto his back, readying himself for a long, painful night.
“Hey, McKinley, I was wondering what happened to you.”
Chance turned to see Sergeant Carl Watkins, one of Echo Company’s team leaders, heading toward him. He raised a hand in greeting.
“You know if you hadn’t texted to say you were all right that I would’ve been beating down your front door,” Carl chided. “And I spent the hour up until then kicking myself for not following her car. Since when are you in the habit of accepting rides from random women who leap out at you in parking lots claiming to be your wife?”
“She is my wife.”
Carl rolled his eyes. “Come on, man, what’s really going on?”
“I’m serious, we’re married. I was just in there turning in a DD-1172.”
“Oh yeah? Prove it.”
Chance handed him the copy of the marriage certificate he’d brought for the application. The amusement drained from Carl’s face as he read it, and by the time he handed it back his expression was grim.
“I figured you’d hit the card tables during R&R but I didn’t realize you walked away with a wife.”
“It was roulette, actually.”
“Unbelievable.” He shook his head. “The whole company is thrilled to pull R&R during Christmas and you spend it in a casino, managing to get the Missouri version of a Vegas wedding? Why didn’t you go home like normal people?”
“My mom’s been a cocktail waitress my whole life. I grew up in casinos. In a way, I was home.”
“I guess that makes it okay, then,” Carl drawled sarcastically. “Now explain to me how you drove into Kansas City expecting to leave with a hangover and an empty wallet and wound up married instead?”
Chance shrugged. “Tara was working the bar, and we kept things going after her shift ended at midnight. We had a few drinks, then a few more, and somehow we made a bet that if the spin landed on green, we’d get married. Next thing you know it’s eight o’clock in the morning and we’re waiting for the courthouse to open. We paid the fifty dollars for the license and went back to the casino, where her coworker was ordained to perform marriages thanks to one of those Internet churches. Two rings from the gift shop, a few words from this guy and boom, ’til death do us part.”
His colleague stared at him for several seconds. Then he replied flatly, “That’s the most ridiculous story I’ve ever heard.”
“More ridiculous than that time at Camp Victory when we stole the balls from the bowling alley? And then when we heard the First Sergeant running down the hall I hid mine in the—”
“You’re legally bound to this woman now,” Carl interrupted, ignoring Chance’s attempt to change the subject. “That has serious consequences.”
“It was just a bet. A two-in-thirty-six chance.”
“Sounds like exactly the kind of odds you’d go for, McKinley.” He exhaled hotly, seeming to pull his temper into check. “Why are you getting her an ID? Aren’t you going to have it annulled?”
“I don’t know.” He stuck his hands in the deep cargo pockets on either side of his camouflage trousers, scuffing the toe of his boot against the pavement. “I might wait and see how things go.”
Carl slapped his hand against his forehead. “See how things go? You barely know this woman, not to mention you’re shipping out to the sandbox in four weeks. What are you planning to do, leave her alone in your off-post house for six months and hope she doesn’t rob you and sell your car?”
“She’s not like that,” Chance insisted, his shoulders stiffening with offense. “I don’t need to date her for years to know she’s a good woman. Anyway, she won’t stick around once the novelty wears off—in the meantime, this might be my only opportunity to experience marriage.”
He’d meant it as a joke, but as soon as the words left his mouth he realized it was true. It had taken nearly thirty years to find a woman crazy enough to marry his sorry ass—what was the likelihood he’d find another one like her? He’d always liked the idea of marriage, even if he’d never really seen one firsthand. It appealed to him in a remote, fantastical way, like when he saw TV evangelists asking for money, all shiny white teeth and dewy skin and first kisses saved for wedding days, and thought it must be nice to have your choices made for you, to live in wholesome contentment and absolute certainty that God had your back.
For as long as he could remember, life was chaos. He was never quite sure who’d be sleeping in his sisters’ bedrooms from one day to the next, or whether there was any food in the refrigerator, or if his mother would get home from the casino in time to take him to school, not to mention whether she’d be sober enough to drive. He hadn’t consciously joined the army in search of structure, but eventually he understood that had been a bigger draw than the free flight to basic training at Fort Benning.
Ultimately he owed his success in the military to the mastermind recruiter he’d met at a rally car festival in Bay St. Louis. They talked for forty minutes about his family, his recent high-school graduation, his job bussing tables in a casino restaurant. When he aced his ASVAB and had his pick of enlistment contracts, the recruiter asked whether he fainted at the sight of blood, then wisely guided him toward sixty-eight whiskey. Combat medic.
It turned out that gray-haired sergeant in the stuffy office knew him better than his own sisters. Just when the repetition of boot camp really began to wear on him, it was time to ship off for advanced individual training at Fort Sam Houston. He was up at four o’clock every morning for a revolving series of fast-paced classes and intensive physical conditioning. He’d never taken a particular interest in the lackluster science classes at his overcrowded high school, but adrenaline-fueled line medicine was the perfect combination of pace and detail to hold his attention. Add weekend nights off and the bars lining the River Walk in San Antonio and he thought life couldn’t get better.
Then he went to Iraq. The violence and heartbreak and sheer disorder was beyond anything he imagined. And the instant he set foot on American soil at the end of his deployment, he knew he had to find a way to get back.
