Cathie Linz - Stranded With The Sergeant

Did he have something to prove? You bet. Was he still worthy? Joe didn’t know…and that was one of the many things eating away at him.

“In the Marines, do you have tests like we have in school?” Rosa continued.

Focus on the facts and figures, he ordered himself. “Boot camp has five graduation requirements—rifle qualification, swim qualification, a physical fitness test, battalion-commander’s inspection and scoring eighty percent on academic tests.”

“Eighty percent isn’t that good,” Keishon pointed out. “That would only be a B in our class.”

“Depending on the scores of the rest of the class,” Rosa said. “Girls can be Marines, right?”

“Affirmative,” Joe replied. “I pointed out their training area and barracks area during the base tour.”

“Girls can be whatever they want to be,” Prudence added.

“Were you ever a Marine?” Rosa asked her.

“No,” Prudence replied. “I always wanted to be a teacher.”

“There aren’t any teachers in the Marines?” Rosa said.

Prudence shook her head. “Only drill instructors, and they aren’t the same thing.”

“I don’t know,” Joe drawled, giving her a wry look. “I can easily imagine you barking out orders in BWT, ma’am.”

“What’s BWT?” Pete asked, always eager to learn something new.

“Basic Warrior Training,” Joe replied.

“You think Ms. Martin is a warrior?” Pete said.

Joe nodded. “She was raised by a warrior.”

“That would be my mom,” Prudence told her students. “Not that my dad is any slouch, either,” she noted with a grin. “After all, he is a Marine.”

“I was referring to your father,” Joe said.

She gave him a mocking look. “No kidding.”

“Is kidding allowed in the Marines?” Pete asked.

Joe thought back to the numerous practical jokes he’d played on his brothers or his buddies over the years. “In very special circumstances and under certain conditions, then the answer is that sometimes kidding is allowed, yes.”

Pete frowned. “I didn’t think warriors were supposed to be kidding around.”

“Sometimes laughter is the only thing that keeps you going when it seems impossible to continue,” Joe quietly said, his smile disappearing. And sometimes even that didn’t work.

The Fates had to be laughing their heads off at him, crammed in a tin can van with five kids and his C.O.’s daughter. Yeah, someone up there was no doubt having hysterics right about now.

Too bad Joe wasn’t laughing with them. A year ago, none of this would have bothered him. But then Joe was a very different Marine than he’d been a year ago.

So far he seemed to be the only one aware of it. But that awareness was slowly eating away at him, along with the guilt and the secret shame that he was no longer good enough, strong enough, courageous enough to be called a United States Marine.

He bolted down those dark emotions and focused his attention on the passing scenery. They’d left the coastal plain and the short palmetto palms behind. They’d also passed the urban areas of Raleigh-Durham and Winston-Salem, traveling clear across the state until they were now surrounded by pine forests. The green foothills had given way to bigger mountains, their rounded curves flowing from one ridge to the next in layers of smoky-blue.

The kids…er…the very short recruits continued peppering him with questions for the remainder of the drive. Every so often, Joe would turn to look at Prudence to see if he could read her thoughts. She didn’t talk much, letting him do the bulk of the work in responding to the questions being tossed his way by her ubercurious students. The small smile on her lips made him think that she was enjoying putting him in the hot seat.

Looking at her mouth made him hot, hot in a different way. Hot to kiss her, hot to taste her mouth, part her lips with his tongue and…

Joe blinked. What was he doing? He had no business fantasizing about his commanding officer’s daughter. No business at all.

Ordering his gaze away from her, he reminded himself that she was off-limits to him in every way.

“Is it true Marines have nicknames like Jughead?” Keishon said.

Joe tried not to wince. “Jarhead, not Jughead.”

“What other nicknames do Marines have?”

“Devil Dogs,” Joe replied.

“Sounds like a kind of hot dog they have at Dog ’n’ Suds. I think it has hot peppers in it,” Pete said.

Joe tried not to grit his teeth. “Sinatra, do you know why Marines are called Devil Dogs?”

“It better not be because they’re mean to dogs,” Keishon, the animal activist, said.

“Marines aren’t mean to dogs. The name came from the Germans during the first World War,” Sinatra proudly replied.

“Teufelhunden,” Joe said. “So named because of the Marines’ tenacity in combat during the Battle of Belleau Wood. Nice going, Sinatra.”

“Teacher’s pet,” Pete muttered.

“What was that?” Joe demanded, using his drill instructor voice.

“Nothing,” Pete quickly replied. “I was just…uh…coughing, sir.”

Just when Joe was sure he couldn’t stand being cooped up with this bunch a second later, Prudence cheerfully announced, “We’re here!”

The Sunshine Trailhead wasn’t nearly as impressive as it sounded. In reality it was merely a graveled parking lot. But it represented the end of the line as far as being stuck in this van with Pete, Keishon, Gem, Rosa and Sinatra—not to mention their impossibly sexy teacher Prudence.

Joe was the first one out of the van. As he watched the really short recruits climbing out of the van, he was reminded of circus routine he’d seen as a kid with clowns tumbling out of a VW Bug.

This wasn’t the most graceful bunch of really short recruits he’d ever seen. Not that being graceful was something a Marine aimed for, but this group seemed to fall over their own feet an awful lot.

Meanwhile Prudence stood watch with a clipboard, ticking off items as they were unpacked from the van.

“Six sleeping bags…” She paused to count them off as each student donned their backpack. “Check. Two tents. Check. Six backpacks. Check. I’m assuming you’re responsible for your own items, Sergeant Wilder?”

“Affirmative,” he replied, while efficiently adding the larger of the tents to his pack.

Prudence watched him work, the muscles in his arms rippling as he easily hefted the pack and put it on. He didn’t have the bulky frame of a football player or wrestler, but he was powerfully built in a lean-and-mean kind of way.

The sun had seared crinkles around his eyes, or maybe those were laugh lines? She was only now noticing that his nose and jaw weren’t perfectly symmetrical, saving him from a merely pretty-boy handsomeness. His was the face of a man who’d seen and done more than his fair share of living.

He’d been fairly good-natured about the kids’ incessant questions during the drive. She was surprised. She shouldn’t have been. Marines were infamous for following orders and as Joe had told her more than once, he’d been ordered to accompany her and her students on this field trip.

But that didn’t mean he’d grown any more comfortable with the situation. She still didn’t know what it was about the kids that made him uneasy. Maybe he was an only child or something and didn’t have much experience with kids.

She could ask him, she supposed. But she was hesitant to form a friendship with him. She didn’t want to know if he was an only child, didn’t want to know why his nose was a little off-kilter. The man himself made her feel off-kilter all the time. Keeping her distance, emotionally even if she couldn’t do that physically, was clearly the wise thing to do in this situation.