Buch lesen: «A Marine For His Mum»

Chapter One

Gunnery Sergeant Matthew Cooper closed his eyes and clenched the armrests as his plane touched down onto the tarmac in Boise. No matter how many times he’d flown to obscure places around the world, he never got used to the steady decline and the rough bounce of the landing. But this time, he felt as if his entire future was skidding toward the edge of the runway.

A couple of months ago, when he’d stormed out of his commanding officer’s makeshift headquarters with Hunter Walker’s letter crumpled in his hand, he’d been mad as hell. He’d been even more pissed off at Dr. Gregson for suggesting he participate in the ridiculous pen pal program and pairing him up with some goofy kid in Nowheresville, Idaho.

As the seat belt light dinged off, Cooper remembered thinking that a Marine Corps base in Afghanistan wasn’t any place for him to be playing nanny-by-mail to some ten-year-old kid with an overprotective mom and no friends. It wasn’t as if Cooper had been some lonely nineteen-year-old infantry grunt who needed a morale boost. He’d been a provost sergeant who’d held some of the deadliest Taliban leaders in custody in the base brig. Before that, he’d been stationed as an MP at bases all over the world. He’d broken up bar fights, investigated assaults and murder, and even gone undercover with NCIS on a few occasions. He had no business being some kid’s babysitter or even worse, male role model.

But now that Cooper’s tour of duty, and possibly his entire military career, was at a sudden end thanks to a random suicide bomber, that same kid and the bond they’d established over emails and letters was the only glimpse of brightness in his dark, lonely future.

As the center aisle of the aircraft filled up with people trying to reclaim their belongings from the overhead bins, Cooper fiddled with his seat belt and longed to stand and stretch out his legs. But his knee was barely being held together with pins and screws, and he would have to wait for the rest of the passengers to disembark the plane before some airline personnel would load him up on a wheelchair and push his useless body out to the baggage claim area.

He hated being weak and was questioning his earlier decision to allow Hunter to see him like this the first time they met. He ached with stiffness, and he was completely exhausted. He’d been traveling on a commercial airline for well over thirty hours now, with layovers in both Tokyo and San Francisco. He’d taken a Vicodin in the Frisco airport an hour before he boarded the last leg of his flight, and now he wondered whether he was in any shape to meet his young pen pal face-to-face.

Or to allow the kid’s mom to drive him to the Shadowview Military Hospital outside of Boise.

Crap. How had he let Hunter talk him into that? Sure, he and the chatty fifth grader had built up quite the steady stream of correspondence when he’d been stationed in Afghanistan, and then later, as he’d been recuperating at the closest base hospital. And although he wasn’t what most people would consider a believer in divine intervention, Cooper had to question the alignment of fate when the doctors in Okinawa told him that the two best options he had to recover the use of his leg would be an intense orthopedic surgery at either Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland or the Shadowview Military Hospital outside of Boise.

Cooper’s distal femur fracture would need to be repaired and healed before they could even think about a total knee replacement. He was looking at a long recovery time and, while he normally didn’t mind his loner lifestyle or the fact that he didn’t have any family to speak of, he figured that if he went to Shadowview, he’d at least be close to Hunter.

How pathetic was that?

He tried to comfort himself with the belief that Hunter needed him. The kid didn’t have any positive male role models, and while the boy’s mom probably loved him, it sounded like Hunter really needed a strong hand to get him in check. What the hell was wrong with the kid’s mother? Putting him in yoga classes and forbidding sports? Who does that to a boy? Guessing by her baking job, she was probably just as out of shape as the kid—if not more so—and too busy working to bother with taking care of her son.

It had been a bone of contention between Cooper and his ex-wife, but one thing Cooper had learned early on in the foster care system was that people shouldn’t be having kids if they were too busy to raise them.

That old familiar pang cramped inside his left rib cage, and he grabbed his backpack from under the seat just to give himself something to do. He winced as the forward movement added pressure to his leg, but the physical pain was at least better than the emotional pain that he’d almost let get the better of him.

There seemed to be some sort of delay exiting the plane because nobody was moving forward. Cooper pulled the printout of one of his past emails from Hunter from his backpack and read it.

To: matthewcooper@usmc.mil

From: hunterlovestherockies@hotmail.net

Re: Surgery

Date: Jan 3

Wow! I can’t believe your actually coming Idaho to have your operation. How long do you have to stay in the hospital? I’ll have my mom and my Gram bring me down every week to visit you. Maybe I can hitchhike rides down the mountain too, when my mom is working. Jake Marconi said he hitchhiked once with his cousin and they went all the way to Winnemucca.

Are you real real worried about your knee? I’d be crazy worried if I were you. They should probably award your dog Helix a purple heart or a navy cross or something for going after that bomber and saving your life like that. Will they let you still be a marine if your knee don’t heal right?

You can still be my pen pal even if they kick you out and you’re not a marine no more. Where will you live when you get out of the hospital?

I went to Hawaii once with Gram. You could live there. Or even better, you could come live HERE. In Sugar Falls. It would be sooooooooo cool if we could hang out all the time. I’d be the only kid in my class to actually meet his real pen pal. I think I’m the only one now to still be getting letters and emails and stuff. Please please please think about living here after you get done at the hospital. I know I said Sugar Falls was dumb and boring, but it’s not really that way if we have each other we can hang out with. We could go fishing and everything.

You could stay with me and my mom. You’ll meet her when we pick you up at the airport to take you to the hospital. She’ll tell you that it’ll be so awesome. Please say yes!

Please.

Hunter

Cooper folded up the paper, and then looked at the standard issue class picture Hunter had sent in his original letter. He almost winced at the chubbiness of the kid’s face. The boy’s mom needed to get him off the cookies and onto a physical regimen, stat. Cooper may have had it rough growing up in a one-bedroom apartment in the slums of Detroit, but at least he’d been in shape and hadn’t taken any crap from the kids on the playground. Of course, taking crap from his stepdad was another thing.

Don’t think about the past. Think about the next step. The old adage he’d learned from his drill instructor had helped him to get past his crappy home life and rise up in the ranks. Even after his injury, he’d repeated the mantra dozens of times and knew that no matter how jacked up his leg was, he was a fighter and would get through this.

Once the surgeries were done, the physical therapy would be intense if Cooper wanted to regain full use of his leg. Maybe he could encourage Hunter to do some exercises with him. Heck, maybe Ms. Walker would be willing to get in shape with them.

The past few weeks, he’d found himself wondering about the boy’s mom more frequently. And no, it had nothing to do with the fact that he’d lost his own mom at the age of twelve and had fantasized about what it would be like to have a real home. And loving parents.

So he’d talked to Hunter to make sure that the mother was okay with their pen pal relationship. He’d never written to the woman directly, nor had Hunter ever sent a picture of her, but Cooper had her pegged all the same. As an MP, he could read between the lines.

He didn’t want to overstep his boundaries or cause problems for the Walkers. But the woman’s world most likely revolved around cookies and not much else. By the time she got around to noticing he was even in her son’s life, Cooper would be long gone.

* * *

“Mom, can’t you make this thing go any faster? Jake Marconi’s dad got a new Porsche, and Jake said it can go like a hundred and sixty miles an hour.”

Maxine Walker shot a glance across the seat at her impressionable son, yet her mind was focused on how quickly she and Hunter could greet his soldier friend at the airport and make it back up to Sugar Falls before dark. She could care less about Jake Marconi’s dad’s latest midlife cry for attention. Besides, they’d gotten another couple inches of snow last night, and she didn’t like this two-lane stretch of highway down the mountain, even in optimal weather.

“Hunter, explain to me why we have to pick this guy up, again? Doesn’t the military provide him transportation to the hospital?”

“I told you. I promised him I’d meet him in person. How would you like to be blown up in a war zone and then fly all the way around the world to some random hospital where you don’t know anybody? He’s a war hero, Mom. It’s our patriotic duty.”

Maxine blew a blond curl out of her eye as she finally turned her SUV off the highway and toward the interstate that would take them toward the Boise Airport. She didn’t need her ten-year-old son to preach to her about patriotic duties. Maxine had grown up on Uncle Sam’s rhetoric. Both of her parents were career Army and had bounced her and her six siblings around from base to base until she finally left for Boise State at eighteen.

“I think you’ve boosted enough troop morale for all of us these past few months, Hunter. Isn’t it enough that I let you keep writing letters to this guy, even though we don’t know anything about him?”

“What are you talking about? I know everything about Cooper. He’s my best friend.”

And that, in a nutshell, explained why Maxine had allowed this unorthodox pen pal relationship to continue. Her heart broke for her son. Back when Hunter was in preschool, and even in kindergarten, all the kids seemed to be on equal ground. But it didn’t take long for social awareness and parental attitudes to filter into the classroom. And, by third grade, Hunter suddenly didn’t mesh very well with the other kids anymore.

At first Maxine had thought it was because of her. The other moms had always seemed to be a little threatened because she’d once been a college cheerleader and still looked the part. Plus, since she was single, she had the feeling that the other women went out of their way to make sure that she never spoke to their husbands alone—or even when under their direct supervision. So she and Hunter were rarely invited to any evening or family activities.

Then, when Maxine launched her cookie shop, she became so busy that she had very little time for playdates or other after-school events that kept all the other kids socially relevant.

She only wished she could keep Hunter as productive as the Sugar Falls Cookie Company. But her once-happy little boy had become increasingly introverted. And, as a result, he’d turned his attention more toward his computer and less toward the natural, outdoorsy life that their small-town community had to offer.

Luckily, she had her best girlfriends and her mother-in-law to help keep her son busy. And recently, she’d hired more employees to help out in the shop, which gave her a little more time for Hunter, although he didn’t seem to want to do anything. But this pen pal business certainly had him perked up, so Maxine jumped on the chance to nurture his enthusiasm.

It was tough enough raising her son alone. Even if Bo hadn’t wrapped his car around a tree in an overinflated exhibition of masculine pride, he probably wouldn’t have stayed around long enough to help her raise Hunter anyway. But still, having to meet her son’s pen pal face-to-face and playing chauffeur to some soldier they’d never met was one of those things no single-mom handbook had ever addressed.

So now she was winging it.

Back in September, she’d glanced at some of their earlier correspondence, if only to make sure this Cooper guy wasn’t some predator or an otherwise bad influence on her sweet-but-naive son. The marine seemed on the up-and-up and she figured the relationship would run its course and fizzle out eventually. She wasn’t happy about this unexpected shift in proximity or the significance Gunnery Sergeant Cooper was now having on both their lives.

Had she really let her son leave school early today for this?

“Did you print out that email with his itinerary?” she asked, wishing she had given this whole airport to hospital run a little more consideration.

“Yeah, here it is.” Hunter’s growing fingers held it under her nose, and she remembered the way she used to kiss those little hands when he was a baby.

She almost missed the exit for the airport.

“Hunter, I’m driving. I can’t read it right this second.”

“Then why’d you ask me for it?”

“I wanted to know the exact flight details.”

“He gets in at one forty-seven.”

“Yeah, you told me that part already when you were practically shoving me out the door. But what airline is he coming in on, and are we supposed to take him straight to the hospital or what?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Maxine leaned her head against the leather headrest and slowly took three deep breaths. What she really wanted to ask was, How do I keep forgetting that you’re only ten and don’t understand the ways of the world? And how do I let you talk me into these kinds of things? But she saw the excitement on her son’s face as he looked at the prized email again. “Just read me what it says.”

To: hunterlovestherockies@hotmail.net

From: matthewcooper@usmc.mil

Re: Itinerary

Date: Jan 6

So my plane gets in on Thursday at 1:47pm. Don’t worry about picking me up or anything. Boise Airport is both a civilian and a military airfield. It has military facilities on-site, so I can arrange for someone from the reserves unit there to take me to Shadowview.

I don’t know what I plan to do after the surgeries are over, but I doubt I’ll get all the way up to Sugar Falls. We’ll just see how my physical therapy goes. I’ll look into getting a stateside cell phone when I arrive, so maybe hold off on calling the hospital for constant updates on my status.

Also, there’s really no need to get me a Boise State T-shirt. Contrary to what you told me, I’m sure I’ll manage to find appropriate Idaho clothes so that I won’t “stick out like boobs on a bowling ball.” You really need to stop repeating the dumb stuff you hear that Jake Marconi kid saying. You don’t want to get your butt kicked by offending someone’s girlfriend.

See you in a few days,

Cooper

“Hunter, that doesn’t tell us anything. We should have checked his flight info. Do we even know if he’s flying on a commercial airline? What if the plane is late? What if the hospital sent an ambulance to pick him up?”

“Then I’ll ride to the hospital in the ambulance with him and you can pick me up there.”

What world was her son living in that he thought she would ever approve of that harebrained idea?

But they had just pulled into the short-term parking area, so she was fully invested at this point and needed to keep her frustration in check.

“Here’s the deal, Hunter. You can meet him. We’ll say hi. But you’re not spending any time alone with him.”

“Mom, c’mon. Miss Gregson’s brother is the military psychologist and personally screened all the marines before they were allowed to write to kids. They’re fighting for our freedom. They’re not weirdos or anything.”

Her sweet son wouldn’t know a weirdo if it jumped out of the Star Wars cantina scene and landed directly in his bed—right next to the wiener dog stuffed animal he still slept with every night.

She turned off the engine and shot him one last look, but he was already climbing into the backseat to retrieve the Welcome Home sign he’d worked on all last night. Then he was out the door and heading toward the arrivals terminal before she thought to ask him to show her a picture of what his pen pal looked like.

* * *

Cooper had barely hoisted the olive-green canvas duffel off the baggage claim conveyor belt and onto the floor beside him when he heard his name being shouted from behind the security guard checking luggage tags. All sound drowned out as a chubby ten-year-old waving a hand-painted poster board sign that said “Welcome Home, Cooper” ran at him.

If he hadn’t set the wheel lock on the wheelchair when the airport personnel had parked him, he suspected the way Hunter launched his thick little body at him would’ve toppled them both over, chair and all. As it was, Cooper’s injured leg screamed in protest at the sudden impact, but his heart leaped in joy at the way the kid’s arms tightened around his neck.

He clung to the short boy dressed in a Colorado Rockies T-shirt, not sure why he was allowing himself to get so emotional in a random airport in the middle of America. Hunter was practically a stranger, yet at that second, he seemed closer to Cooper than anyone else in the world.

At every deployment homecoming he could remember, he’d stood to the side and watched the other marines reunite with their loved ones. He’d never begrudged his fellow soldiers their families or their loving receptions, but it had always made him feel a little... Well, it stirred up an ache somewhere deep inside to know that the only welcome he’d ever get—if he got one at all—was from a USO volunteer doling out a cup of coffee and a smile to anyone wearing a uniform looking the least bit lonely.

Something about squeezing Hunter back just as tightly as he was being embraced felt so right, and it made his eyes water a bit.

He needed to knock off all this sentimental crap. It must be the exhaustion and the jet lag. He ordered himself to man up and not become all weepy in public. Someone might think he was getting teary-eyed, and Cooper never cried. Not since... Well, not since he was practically too young to remember.

“I said you didn’t have to come meet me.” Cooper studied Hunter’s freckled face and huge crooked-toothed grin. No one had ever been this excited to see him before.

“Are you kidding? I couldn’t wait to meet you. I didn’t even sleep last night. I made my mom get me out of class early so we’d be here on time.”

At the mention of Hunter’s mom, Cooper looked to his left and saw a tan pair of cowboy boots. His gaze traveled up the most toned and sexy legs he’d ever seen. Her jeans fit her like a second skin and rode low on her hips, the waist ending just below the hem of her white knitted sweater. Her white down-filled vest didn’t cover up the fact that she had a knockout shape. Her beautiful face was surrounded by a mass of glorious blond curls. His fingers twitched at the thought of running through that silky hair, getting tangled in those...

Man, the image he’d conjured up of a dowdy overweight and overworked cookie baker didn’t fit Maxine Walker one iota. In fact, she was stunning.

For a couple of elevated heartbeats, he hoped she would launch herself into his lap, just as her son had. But even if he’d been wrong about her appearance, Cooper had the woman’s personality pegged right. She just stood to the side, distant and untouchable.

Her feminine hair and clothes gave off a warm impression, but the daintily sweater-clad arms crossed tightly around her midsection signaled she was anything but happy to be there.

Cooper had been in police work long enough to know when someone was trying to size him up for appraisal without actively making eye contact.

He ruffled Hunter’s curly hair as he lifted the boy off his lap, then held out his hand to the woman who’d so obviously decided to close herself off to him. “I’m Matthew Cooper, ma’am.”

Her palm was warm when it finally grasped his and he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about how it had been snuggled against her slim waist just a second ago. “It’s nice to meet you, Matt. I’m Maxine Walker.”

He hated it when people called him Matt. Nobody but his mom and his childhood social worker had ever called him by his first name. And hearing the intimacy of his name from her lush pink lips would surely be his undoing. “Please, call me Cooper.”

His leg was throbbing. He needed a shave and he had no doubt his eyes reflected his pain and his lack of sleep. Damn this stupid wheelchair and this stupid injury and everything else that suddenly made him feel like less of a man in her presence.

He hadn’t been with a woman in a long time, but he needed to get things in perspective. A single mom with ties to the community—any community—wasn’t for him. And the sooner he made that clear to himself, the better off he’d be.

Unfortunately, his voice came out a bit gruffer than he intended when he said, “You shouldn’t have met me at the airport.”

* * *

At that, Maxine stepped back and recrossed her arms, not sure what to do with her hands. “Well, it’s a little too late for that, now, isn’t it?” She’d driven all the way down the mountain to meet his flight and the man acted as if they were bothering him? What a tool.

A gorgeous, masculine tool with soft green eyes that made her heart bounce around like one of Hunter’s water balloons trapped inside her rib cage.

Even with him seated in the wheelchair, she could see the man was tall and well-built. But just because he was attractive didn’t mean she was any more at ease around him. In fact, that throbbing in her heart had her feeling all kinds of uncomfortable.

She’d already been on edge meeting this Gunny Cooper guy for the first time. And now, as he and Hunter were making a spectacle out of themselves in the middle of the baggage terminal, she didn’t know where to look or where to stand.

One traveler had pulled out a cell phone, probably thinking he was recording some soldier’s emotional homecoming, which meant there would be video footage of them on the internet within hours.

And what was with the “Call me Cooper” line? Could the guy be any more macho? Who went only by their last name? She understood military personnel and people who played team sports often went by their last names, but not in polite society.

Polite society? Geez, now she sounded like her former mother-in-law, Cessy. It was just that she wasn’t Cooper’s teammate or his squad leader.

Why was she already so damn frustrated, anyway? She wasn’t annoyed with him for being in town or even for not communicating with her about the whole transportation plan. She wasn’t even annoyed with him for having such broad shoulders or piercing eyes or hands that had made her own feel small and delicate.

Okay, so maybe that bugged her a little bit.

But hugging her son as if he were a loving father returned from the battle? Come on. Hunter was her child. She’d birthed him and raised him, and this testosterone-fueled stranger was acting as if he loved the boy more than she did.

“I just meant that I didn’t want to be a bother or inconvenience anyone,” he said as he reached up to ruffle Hunter’s curly head again.

How could she detest someone who looked at her son with such affection? Why couldn’t he have just said that in the first place instead of being so abrasive?

“Don’t be crazy,” Hunter said. “Of course I was going to be here to meet my best friend for the first time. I told my mom that I didn’t care if she grounded me or if I had to ride my bike all the way down the mountain, but I was going to be here when your plane landed. No matter what.”

“Sounds like your mom has her hands full with you, kiddo.” The man helped Hunter as the boy struggled to lift the weight of the Marine Corps–issued duffel bag.

Did he just imply that Maxine couldn’t handle her own child? Her eyes narrowed at the remark.

“Hunter, leave his bag alone. It’s way too heavy for you.” She didn’t want Hunter dropping the guy’s luggage and breaking something valuable. All she needed was a lawsuit.