The Marine Makes His Match Page 8

  “Seems like you’ve been fitting in pretty well tonight...” he said, sounding as if he was leading to something.

  “With your help,” she responded.

  He’d kept his part of their deal, including her as if she were his date. He’d brought her into every conversation he’d had, specifically targeting her possible half siblings, doing his best to find common ground between her and Dylan, Derek, Dane and Lang. He’d given her an opportunity to have some time alone with GiGi by asking GiGi to show Kinsey her collection of Hummel figurines. He’d also done a considerable amount of tending to his mother in order to free Kinsey to just socialize.

  He’d definitely succeeded in giving her a different experience than when she’d gone to the Camden Sunday dinner as Maeve Teller’s nurse. Tonight it had seemed far more as if she were one of the guests. And that had allowed her to mingle, to seek out her half siblings, to engage them a little on her own—something she hadn’t felt she could do before.

  “Have you thought of maybe just trying for what we need for the colonel—friendship?” he suggested then.

  Ah, that’s what he was getting at.

  “Seems like you already might have an open door for that,” he added. “Especially with Livi and Lindie. Maybe it would be better all the way around if you just keep your secret for now and find another way to connect with them.”

  Kinsey rejected that idea with a shake of her head. “It wouldn’t be the same. And even if I could get to be more than an acquaintance of Livi and Lindie’s, how much of a friendship would I be likely to have with Dylan, Dane, Lang or Derek—wouldn’t the women in their lives think it was weird if I was suddenly trying to start up some kind of relationship with them out of the blue? And what about GiGi—she and I couldn’t just be friends. If they never know I’m a blood relation then these Sunday dinners still wouldn’t be my Sunday dinners. GiGi and Livi and Lindie and Dane and Derek and Dylan and Lang still wouldn’t be my family.”

  But looking at that wall of pictures had made her feel very melancholy and less optimistic about penetrating the close-knit group.

  She waited for Sutter to point that out, to say that if she revealed who she was it might only accomplish her being spurned by them all.

  But he didn’t do that. Instead, as if he knew she was feeling a little down, his tone was soft and compassionate when he said, “Then I guess we’ll just stay the course and hope for the best.”

  She doubted that he knew how much it helped to hear even the slight note of encouragement in his voice. It was the only bit of support she’d met with since she’d started this quest to connect with her family. Whether or not he agreed with what she wanted to do.

  And while she didn’t want—or need—a reason to like him even more, she suddenly had one. Kind of a big one to her because his support made her feel like she wasn’t completely on her own. It was as if she’d called in the troops, but it wasn’t her brothers who had come, it was Sutter.

  “But for tonight we’d better get off the course and get the colonel home,” Kinsey said, reiterating his words.

  Then Sutter did one more thing that bolstered her flagging spirits—he reached over and squeezed her arm.

  Molten honey went from that point of contact all the way through her and it made her forget for a minute everything except the feel of that big, capable hand on her.

  Until he released her arm and said, “Let’s go.”

  Kinsey took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and left that wall of Camdens and the past.

  All the while aware of Sutter by her side, reminding her that she wasn’t about to leave alone.

  And that helped, too.

  * * *

  “Are you sure you’re up to that?” Kinsey asked Sutter.

  The colonel’s fatigue had made her all the more cantankerous when she, Kinsey and Sutter had arrived home from the Camdens’ Sunday dinner. As a result, it had taken Kinsey longer to get the older woman settled for the night, so it was after eleven o’clock before she was ready to leave.

  That was when Sutter said he needed some exercise and proposed that he get it by riding with her to her apartment and walking back home.

  “Am I up to walking a little over three miles?” he responded. “I’m a marine—I’ve done three—sometimes four—times that in boots, carrying a full rucksack. This’ll be nothing but a little stroll.”

  “With Jack,” Kinsey said because he’d also decided to take the dog.

  “Look at him—he’s been locked up most of the day and for hours tonight. He needs to be worn out.”

  The wirehaired fox spaniel was trying hard to pull the cast iron grate out of the fireplace. Only his tail end was visible through the opening of the fire screen but he was growling and yanking back and clearly determined to conquer it.

  “But he’s only a puppy. Three miles is too far for him, don’t you think?”

  “So I’ll carry him when he gets tired—he’s all of five pounds—that’s nothing compared to a full pack.”

  Kinsey could see that there was no point in arguing.

  “All right, it’s up to you,” she finally said.

  Sutter pulled Jack’s halter and leash out of his sweatshirt pocket and called the puppy. Who ignored him.

  So while Kinsey gathered her things, Sutter went to the fireplace to pull Jack from his quest and put on the halter. Then, carrying the pup like a football under his good arm—while Jack held the leash in his mouth and shook his head back and forth—Sutter returned to the entryway and Kinsey.

  “I’ll be back before long, Colonel,” he called up the stairs to his mother, who he’d already told of his plans. “I have my phone and you have yours if you need anything.”

  “Don’t wake me when you come in,” his cranky mother responded.

  Kinsey led the way to her car, where Sutter got into the passenger seat with Jack while she got behind the wheel.

  “Think you’re going to get the colonel to stick with that oxygen at night?” Sutter asked as Kinsey backed out of his driveway.

  “I’ll keep trying. I think she was just tired tonight so everything was a bigger deal to her than it really is. Eventually she should get used to the tubing and not even notice it. I just have to try to make her use it long enough for that to happen.”

  “You were a busy little bee tonight at the Camdens’,” he mused then. “I heard you arranged for the colonel to play bridge with GiGi’s bridge club? And GiGi is putting in a call to some woman who’s part of a group of women vets to get the colonel and this other woman together?”

  “Since the colonel was so much older than her sister—seventeen years, right?—I pointed out that GiGi and the colonel were more contemporaries than either of them were with your late Aunt Tina. I think GiGi had just gotten in the habit of thinking of the colonel as her daughter-in-law’s sister rather than as someone in her own age group. It sort of went from there. They both love bridge, and talking about it reminded GiGi that someone in her bridge club just died so there was an opening. She asked the colonel if she might be interested in joining to fill the vacancy—”

  “And the colonel agreed?” he said with some surprise.

  “It took a little coaxing, but she said she’d give it a try. As for the other, it isn’t actually GiGi who knows the retired woman vet—”

  “Who is it?”

  “Margaret—who I guess is not only GiGi’s housekeeper but has been around so long they’re best friends?”

  “Margaret and Louie Haliburton—they helped GiGi raise the ten Camden grandchildren when GiGi took them on.”

  “They do seem like family.” And if the Camdens could incorporate two people who had begun as mere employees into their inner circle, was it really overreaching to think they would accept her and her brothers?

  Kinsey hoped it wa
s an indicator that they might.

  “Anyway,” she said, “Margaret has the retired military friend. And the colonel was pretty eager to connect with another woman vet and maybe the group of them. The colonel was so enthusiastic about that that Margaret promised to call her friend tomorrow to get something going. So that should give the colonel two outlets and two chances to connect with other women her own age,” Kinsey finished the lengthy explanation, emphasizing the women part of that so as not to get him riled up about any more chances of his mother finding male companionship.

  “Well you did some good work tonight,” Sutter concluded. “The colonel and GiGi have always known each other, but there hasn’t ever been any kind of camaraderie before this.”

  “I know GiGi isn’t military but she’s so down-to-earth and pragmatic that she and the colonel actually seem like-minded in some ways.”

  “Apparently it took you to point that out.”

  “Just keeping up my end of the deal,” Kinsey said. Then she changed the subject to something that looking at the Camden family photos had made her curious about. “So did you grow up in Denver, near the Camdens, even though your mom was in the military?”

  “Nah,” he said. “We’ve always had the house that the colonel is in now—I think I told you it’s been in the family forever. But we used it more like a vacation home. We lived on whatever base the colonel was assigned to. I grew up a marine brat, in more places than I can count, going to more schools than I can remember. We even lived for two years in Australia and a year and a half in Japan.”

  “But you’ve always been close to Beau Camden?”

  “Like brothers. I came back here for weeks at a time during summer breaks, and he came to stay with us on base, too—he actually did a full year of school with me in Australia on an exchange program. Spending time on base is what gave him the bug to join the marines himself.”

  “But he wasn’t career.”

  “He was until just recently when he decided it was time to take his place in the family business.”

  “And you don’t approve,” Kinsey guessed by his tone.

  “I don’t approve or disapprove,” he claimed.

  “But you think he should have stayed in the military,” she persisted.

  “It’s my calling. I thought it was his, too. And no, I don’t like to see the kind of training we’ve had the privilege of go to waste.”

  “Wow, you are marine through and through, aren’t you?” Kinsey observed, thinking that it was a good reminder for her.

  “I am,” he said without equivocation. “So is Beau, so I’m not sure how he’s going to do outside of the marines, sitting behind a desk. But now that he’s getting married and taking on that baby his fiancée adopted, it’s what he should do.”

  “Because your dad hated being essentially a single parent while your mother served the military and you hated being dragged around from base to base as a marine brat?”

  “Who said either one of us hated anything?”

  “Neither of you did?”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw him shrug. “Duty to my country was bred in the bone and the moving around was just part of it. Starting over in new schools wasn’t my favorite thing as a kid, but I got used to it. After my dad got out of the marines he willingly followed the colonel wherever she was assigned—which changed as she moved up the ranks. He always said that by supporting her, we were serving in our own way.”

  “So both of your parents did the nontraditional thing—a woman is in the minority in the marines, especially back then. And your dad kept the home fires burning on base—there couldn’t have been a lot of husbands doing that.”

  “No, there weren’t. We were always surrounded by waiting wives. But my dad was dedicated to my mom’s being able to stay in the marines as long as she wanted. He went back to school and got an accounting degree that gave him a job skill he could use wherever we went—usually on base, hired as a civilian employee.”

  “So if you all lived on whatever base she was assigned to while she practiced law, then there weren’t long separations?”

  Sutter chuckled at that notion. “The colonel’s specialty was operational and international law. In wartime, operational lawyers are deployed with operational units—that happened twice. And even when she wasn’t deployed, she went wherever she was needed, for however long a trial or a court martial took—all over the country and out of it since she’s also an expert in international law. She had plenty of time away until she became a judge. But that wasn’t until after I was long gone.”

  “So you were mainly raised by your dad.”

  “I was,” he said.

  His voice got a little gravelly as he added, “For the most part it was just me and my dad.”

  Kinsey could tell that he was feeling the passing of his father. “It must have been particularly hard on you to lose him,” she said.

  “No question about it,” he confirmed gruffly, sounding like his mother. “Thanks in no small part to the colonel,” he added under his breath.

  Kinsey was stopped at a light and glanced at him. He was frowning out the side window.

  “The colonel made it harder to lose your dad?” she asked in confusion.

  “She didn’t tell me what was going on here. She doesn’t believe that anyone on deployment should be burdened with what’s happening at home. So I didn’t even know my dad had been in a car accident or was lying in a hospital bed for a month. If I had known, I’d have done whatever it took to get home, to see him before he died. As it was...”

  She saw his jaw clench and she could tell that there was some anger at the colonel for this. It was her turn to just be sympathetic and supportive of Sutter, so Kinsey said simply, “I’m sorry, Sutter. You should have had the chance—any chance there was—to be with your dad at the end.”

  The light changed and they went the last two blocks to her apartment building in silence.

  Even Jack must have sensed the tension in Sutter because when Kinsey parked her car, the puppy slinked from Sutter’s lap to Kinsey’s as if to escape some of it.

  Kinsey gave Jack a comforting pet, waiting for the storm to pass.

  Finally Sutter sighed and said, “Nothing to be done about it now.”

  “And no one can take away the time you did have with your dad all those years growing up,” she reminded him.

  “I do have good memories,” he confirmed.

  “He was a good dad?”

  “He was. He wasn’t as...military...as the colonel. He was more easygoing. A genuinely good man. Kind. Tough on me when I needed it, but a buddy when I didn’t. Everybody loved him. He was such an upstanding guy that when we were living on bases, husbands would come to him and ask him to look after their wives while they were deployed. And he would. He’d be the shoulder they needed to cry on, the helping hand with stuff around the house or teenage kids who got into trouble—he even rushed one woman to the hospital in the middle of the night to have her baby. They named the baby after him. I can’t think of anyone who ever didn’t like my dad.”

  Remembering that seemed to make him feel better because he persuaded Jack to return to his lap with a few pats of his hand on his thigh. When Jack went, Sutter made peace by stroking him with that big hand that had reached out to her earlier.

  Lucky Jack...

  Kinsey was in no hurry to go up to her apartment. Refusing to consider why that might be, she merely angled in her seat, resting her back against the inside of the door so she could look squarely at him.

  “So...” she said then, “if you were okay being a marine brat and your parents were happily married despite your mother being in the military and gone most of the time, why do you think your cousin should have ended his career as a marine now that he has a family?”

  He raised his eyebrows in
a response to her question. “The military is hard on marriages and families.”

  “Sure,” she said because that was a given.

  “Growing up on military bases I saw how hard it is on them. I saw a lot...”

  “Of?”

  “Of people struggling on their own when their partner was away. A lot of unhappiness. Sometimes all-out depression. And loneliness—a lot of loneliness and missing the service member off doing their duty. Don’t get me wrong, there are a whole lot of strong, stoic people like my dad who do it well. But it can take a pretty big toll.”

  “A toll you witnessed,” Kinsey prompted.

  “And lost my innocence to.”

  She hesitated to comment on that, surprised by his candor. If he meant what that sounded like he meant.

  Then she decided the only way she was going to know for sure was to ask, so she said, “Innocence as in virginity?”

  “No, not as in virginity,” he answered with a laugh. “That went to a girl in high school—Zoey Dubois—who was also a marine brat. Her dad was a JAG officer like the colonel.”

  “If not your virginity, then innocence as in...”

  “Innocence as in overhearing too many wives telling my dad how sick and tired they were of the separations and sacrifices. I saw too many marriages crumble under the pressures and loneliness, plus the funeral of the mother of one of my friends when she committed suicide because she couldn’t stand the life of a military wife anymore. Another wife reached a low point and... Well, she would have taken my virginity if I’d been willing.”

  He shook his head, then added, “And it wasn’t only that side of it. I also saw how hard it was for the marines—I saw my mother feeling like the odd woman out when she got back and life had gone on without her. I saw marines depressed from missing so many things with their families—birthdays, holidays, graduations, problems they should have been there for. That baby named for my dad was eighteen months old before his dad met him. Like I said, it takes its toll.”