One Week with the Marine (Love on Location)

“And Tom?” The eldest of the Morris boys was the benchmark by which the others were to live their lives. Perfect wife. Honorable Discharge. The works.

“Tom is doing well. Jennifer is pregnant again.”

“What’s that make it now?”

“This will be their sixth.” He took a pull on his beer.

“Jeez, it feels like we only went to their wedding four years ago.”

“We did…” Holden trailed off.

A waitress dropped by with their tower of hot wings and set the steaming plate in the middle of the table. Avery’s mouth watered. She could already taste the spicy, vinegary succulence. And the best part of all? They wouldn’t have to talk about his horrendous family anymore.

Or the stranglehol

d they had on Holden’s future.

Win, win.

She stacked a few wings onto her plate and began demolishing them systematically, picking through them like a finely tuned machine.

“Don’t you want some bleu cheese or something to cool that down?”

He only had one partially picked wing in front of him.

Amateur.

“Dressing is for the weak. You have to taste the wing in all its glory.” She crunched down onto another piece, initiating an unspoken competition. He set the dressing in the far corner of the table. Game on.

“If you can do it, so can I,” he said.

His mouth curved around the wing as he bit down, his tongue peeking out occasionally to lick the sauce from his mouth. It was so damn distracting that she stared a second too long before she remembered that she intended to win this contest.

They glowered at each other mockingly as they ate, locked in a silent battle for supremacy. She shucked the chicken between her teeth, half tempted to see if she could toss the bones in her mouth and tie them with her tongue like a cherry stem.

“You eat like a man,” he said, his mouth stuffed with food.

“You’re crying like a girl,” she argued. It wasn’t true, but she needed something to goad him with. She’d expected the volcanic spice of the wing to elicit a trail of tears, streaming down his cheeks, but he kept going, sucking down wing after wing without pausing to sip his beer.

“Just give up.” She laughed.

“Never,” he grunted and chugged his beer before slamming it back down like Thor in a banquet hall.

No matter how fast he went, her plate was filled with twice as many bones as his. He stood no chance at victory, and she wasn’t one to throw a game.

They continued for a while before a pile of twenty-six chicken bones sat on Avery’s plate. She leaned back and licked her fingers with a satisfied smile.

“Count ’em and weep.”

“You cheated,” he said, running a wet nap over his hands and pushing his uneaten wings aside.

She chuckled and ripped open another wet nap, reaching across the table to wipe away the sauce that still lined his chin.

He looked down at her hand as she rubbed away the residue, and when she saw the astonishment in his eyes, she threw the towel on the table between them before resting back against the padded booth.

What the hell was wrong with her? What had come over her that she just did something like that automatically? She wouldn’t have done that to Myla. Or would she? Maybe she would. Maybe…

She glanced at him from the corner of her eye as she wiped the corners of her mouth.