LITMIR.BIZ

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reached the door. “Hey!”

      Keith caught it in one Calhoun-sized hand. If Bruce had anything to say about it, his brother would play college ball.

      Heather walked in carrying Keith’s letterman jacket.

      She waved to Bruce. “Hiya.”

      Bruce offered a halfhearted wave.

      To Keith she said, “You left your jacket at Kelly’s again.” Not so sweetly.

      “I told you, I gave it to her. Hers got stolen at band practice. She doesn’t have the money to buy a new one. And it’s starting to get cold.”

      Heather rolled her pretty brown eyes. “I’ll find her a hoodie or something of mine to wear.” She parted with Keith’s jacket grudgingly. She might not want the other girl to have it, but that didn’t mean she didn’t want it for herself. “Kelly can’t meet up with you on Saturday. She volunteered to pass out books at the VA hospital again. I don’t see how being a candy stripper is supposed to make her a better doctor.”

      Had Heather just said candy stripper?

      Not the brightest bulb in the box. Not the dimmest, either. Her comment seemed calculated.

      “Actually,” Bruce couldn’t help but point out, “volunteering is a good way to see if you’re cut out for something.” To Keith he said, “I’m going to start putting my DEPers through their paces next week.” Did he even have any DEPers?

      Keith accepted the challenge. “I’ll be there.”

      CHAPTER FOUR

      “BE WHERE?” Mitzi asked, coming in on the tail end of their conversation. Keith and Heather were already on their way out the door.

      “Do I have any DEPers?” Bruce asked.

      “Don’t think so.” She twisted the cap off her water bottle. “All your kids were absorbed into other stations when the last recruiter left several months ago.”

      He sized up the kids lined up at the minifridge. “Mind if I borrow a couple of yours?”

      “Knock yourself out.” Sipping water, Mitzi looked fresh as a flower. Her kids looked a lot more wilted.

      “How far did you run them?” He started unbuttoning his uniform shirt. His hands stalled in the process. Was she checking him out?

      More likely inventorying his body parts.

      “’Bout a mile.”

      He looked over at the kids in question.

      “A twelve-minute mile,” she said defensively. “I’m not trying to kill them before they get to boot camp.”

      Slow. Even for a Navy mile.

      The average recruit didn’t have to run much faster than that. And he’d never met anyone who could outrun a bullet.

      “How many Navy SEAL recruits?” he asked the kids directly. Two of the boys raised their hands. Both looked reasonably fit. “A ten-or twelve-minute mile isn’t going to cut it. SEALs have a sixty percent attrition rate. Think you could run another couple miles for me today?”

      Both boys nodded eagerly.

      “Any hospital corpsmen?” he asked, looking to the third guy in the group. These were just a couple Navy rates he knew that were the most likely to see some action with their Marine brethren. The kid avoided eye contact.

      The girl raised her hand. Chances were she wasn’t going to be assigned to a Marine Corps combat unit. Then again, she might. The days of G.I. Jane were here.

      Both the Army and the Marine Corps were finding ways around the “noncombatant” rules for women.

      Case in point, Mitzi. A five-foot-nothing Navy rescue swimmer who could haul his six-foot-plus ass out of the water.

      He nodded the girl toward the SEAL twins. She beamed at him as she followed the boys outside.

      “What’s your rate? Navy job,” he clarified for the kid, who looked as if he’d sat on the sidelines most of his life.

      A gamer? A little chunky. A little nerdy.

      The glasses didn’t help. And he’d probably gotten in under a weight waiver—which meant he would have to lose a few pounds before he shipped out anyway. But Bruce wasn’t going to embarrass the kid by saying so. He’d just work it off him.

      “Aviation electronics,” the boy answered.

      “Get out there with the rest of ’em, brainiac. If you’d said nuclear field I might have given you a pass.”

      Not. Every geek and gearhead had to get through boot camp before operating those nuclear-powered ships and subs.

      “You coming?” Bruce asked Mitzi as he stripped down to his olive-green T-shirt, hanging his shirt on the back of his chair. Now she wouldn’t even look at him.

      “I’ll pass.” She picked up the invitation Keith had left on her desk. “Career Day? Are you going?”

      “I’m not invited.”

      “I take it the conversation with your brother didn’t end well.”

      “I think he’s sneaking around with the brunette behind Heather’s back.” He just didn’t know why. If, as his brother had said, Keith and Heather hadn’t dated since eighth grade, why all the secrecy?

      “Kelly,” Mitzi said, remembering the girl’s name when he didn’t. “The one who hides behind her books? She’s one of my Officer Candidate School referrals. The Navy’s going to pay her way through college and med school.”

      “The candy striper who wants to be a Navy doctor,” he said, cementing Kelly in his brain as something other than the brunette with the rockin’ seventeen-year-old body.

      “She’s a nice girl.”

      “It’s the nice ones a guy has to watch out for.”

      Mitzi crossed her arms and stepped across the DMZ, their own little no-man’s-land that separated the Navy from the Marines. “I was a nice girl. Are you accusing me of something, Calhoun? Like ruining your nonexistent basketball career?”

      Harsh even for a reality check. “Not a chance, Chief.”

      “Don’t confuse what you think you wanted at Keith’s age with what you really wanted. I was there when you turned down those basketball scholarships to join the Marine Corps, remember?”

      “Fair enough.” In high school he’d been a big fish in a small pond with little chance of reaching his Final Four dreams. He knew it. Even back then. Especially when only the smallest junior colleges had even bothered to look him over. Basketball was never the be-all and end-all for him. For him the Corps was his calling. He didn’t see that in Keith. “I’d just hate for him to give up his dreams so young.”

      “You have to let him make his own mistakes.”

      “You seen him play?” he asked. He had on rare occasions, in years past when his brother first made the varsity team as a freshman. Mostly he’d heard secondhand accounts from his family.

      “A couple times,” she admitted without further comment. Which he assumed meant those couple of times had been since she’d started dating the boy’s basketball coach. “Bruce.” She hesitated. He watched a range of emotions cross her face. “Lock up when you leave, please. I have a…date tonight.”

      Ouch.

      Your fiancée is dating my coach.

      Ex-fiancée.

      Bruce felt a surge of jealousy unlike anything he’d experienced since high school. And he’d been jealous plenty since then. One problem.

      He no longer had the right to be jealous.

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