“Oh.” Tiffany gave a knowing, smug nod. “I see.”
Her secret literary persona was
not
going to get outed by Tiffany of all people. Time for damage control. “You see what? You have a cool name. I’ve been stuck with a boring old name my entire life. So when I signed up and had to choose an ID, I thought I would get creative. Can I help it if the guys call me Summer?”
“Guys, plural? Exactly how many men are you writing to,
Summer
?” Tiffany crossed her arms.
“I send stuff to a lot of the deployed troops, both male
and
female. Sometimes they write back and say thanks. It’s all perfectly innocent.”
“And what about this guy from the email? Jazzy. Do you have something going on with him?”
Jeez. How the hell long had this nosy bitch stood reading over Maureen’s shoulder? How rude. At least Tiffany had gotten off the name thing, but this subject wasn’t much better.
“Jazzy is married…” Maureen realized that really didn’t mean much these days. She was fairly certain Tiffany was currently dating a few married men, so she added, “Very happily married and totally in love with his wife.”
“Yeah, sure.” Tiffany looked positively, gleefully evil. “I think he’s looking for a little cyber affair if you ask me.”
Maureen frowned.
Cyber affair
. Ugh. Only Tiffany would think of that. Maureen would have to stop checking her personal emails at work if this was the result.
“There’s nothing going on. Can’t an adult male and female have an innocent platonic relationship?”
Tiffany shook her head. “No.”
Maureen let out a breath of frustration. “This is ridiculous. I’m supporting our military. That’s all.”
“Sure. You’re just a one-woman USO. So why don’t you fix me up with one of these guys? Or are you hogging them all for yourself?”
“It isn’t a dating website, Tiffany. It’s a troop-support site.”
“Hey. I just want to do my part to
support
the troops too. So get me a few email addresses, and I’ll send some letters of
support
myself.” Tiffany smirked and actually made air quotes with her fingers each time she said the word she so easily mocked with her double entendre.
Maureen pictured her own tiny, cluttered apartment. The stacks of old paperbacks she had purchased at the library’s used book sale waiting to be sent to the deployed troops. The empty cardboard boxes and padded mailing envelopes waiting to be filled that cascaded out of the closet whenever she opened the door. The fact a roll of packing tape and a stack of shipping forms resided permanently on her kitchen counter, and her postal clerk dreaded seeing her coming through the door with an armload of packages to be sent overseas. The sad reality that her bank account was much emptier since she’d begun spending a small fortune on postage as well as books, snacks, rubber shower shoes, phone cards and toiletries that the troops needed but couldn’t get where they were deployed.
And Tiffany expected to simply be handed a list of addresses so she could meet some soldiers and flirt with them? Gorgeous Tiffany with her blonde hair, long legs and perfect everything else in between. Tiffany, who sometimes juggled two dates in one day when Maureen more often than not had none…or had one that was better off forgotten.
Maureen bit her lip to control what she really wanted to say and instead blurted, “Fine.”
Tiffany smiled. “Great. I can’t wait. Make sure they’re cute though. Can I see pictures? Do they post those?”
“Sometimes they post pictures. I’ll see what I can do.” Maureen gritted her teeth. She could only take Tiffany in small doses, and this was about her fill. “We better get back to work before Pam sees us goofing off.”
Tiffany inspected her perfectly manicured nails as a sly grin spread across her face. “Pam’s gone. She took off early for the day. She left while you were at lunch.”
“Really?” That was good news. Finally Tiffany came through with some useful information for a change. It didn’t happen often enough to balance out the annoyance factor, but at least for today, she’d made Maureen one happy girl.
“Thanks for the info. Talk to you later.” Turning her back to her annoying coworker, Maureen dismissed the thorn in her side.
Once Tiffany took the hint with a huff and went back to her desk, Maureen reopened Jazzy’s email and hit
Reply
. She never knew when he’d be able to check his inbox again, so she always tried to get back to him quickly.
Hey Jazzy.
Glad to see you’re still alive and in one piece. I have a really funny thing to tell you… My coworker thinks we are having a cyber affair. Isn’t that ridiculous? I guess two people can’t be friends anymore. It’s a pretty sad comment on today’s society if you ask me.
I’m glad you got the coffee. Let me know when you need more. I’m also glad you got my book. I know it’s a “girl” book, so I will totally understand if you don’t read it, but you did say you had a few females there at the camp so I figured I would send it for the bookshelves in the MWR.
Anyway, better let you go. Talk to you soon. Keep your head down and your hatch closed.
Your secret cyber lover (hehehe),
Summer
She smiled at her own little closing joke and hit
Send
, but then she felt a frown form on her brow. Tiffany’s request went from annoying Maureen to enraging her.
Maureen couldn’t help but feel protective of her guys. She’d paid her dues for every pen pal and friend she’d made. Tiffany had done nothing at all. Not one damn thing, not even fill out the form to become an official volunteer on the support site. She didn’t deserve a soldier of her own. Maureen would just make sure she dragged her feet or maybe even totally forgot about Tiffany’s request for the addresses of cute, single military men. Maybe it was bitchy, but you know what? No one is perfect.
With that resolve firmly in place, she picked up the phone and dialed Peter’s number again. And this time she had no intention of whispering. She had plans to make. The weekend was nearly upon them, and she’d be damned if she didn’t do something fun.
Chapter Two
The command-post runner pounded on John’s door, startling him awake. “Good morning, Staff Sergeant Blake!”
Even when muffled by the door, the runner sounded more energetic than anyone should at zero-four-thirty. John groaned. He was awake, but it didn’t mean he liked it.
From years of military life, he could go instantly from sleeping like the dead to being alert and ready—mostly anyway. He still needed some coffee in a bad way.
He grunted some sort of audible response to the extremely spry man who had delivered his wake up call. Just because John was awake did not mean he was ready to be civil. Flipping on the light near his bunk, he glanced at the watch that rarely left his wrist and then corrected himself—no one should be that lively at zero-four-thirty-
five
—he had been left to sleep five minutes past his requested wakeup time.
Last night he’d had a whole three hours—and five minutes—of sleep. Not bad. He’d been running on less than that all week. Maybe he and the men would actually not be called out again for a few hours. It would give them much-needed rest and time to refit. He himself had woken up early to get some mundane things done, like paperwork. Those things needed doing even when the insurgents kept them up all night. The Army didn’t accept excuses for tardy paperwork, not even good ones.
He swung still-weary legs from the thin pad masquerading as his mattress and planted them firmly on the icy floor. His bones ached and his joints popped as he rose and stretched his six-foot frame to full height—though he was probably closer to five foot eleven and a half inches at the moment. Wearing seventy plus pounds of body armor in addition to weapons for more hours a day than not tended to compress a body. Nothing a chiropractor couldn’t fix when he got back home.
Home… Just thinking the word could make him homesick for all the niceties he’d lived without for so long now. Hot showers. Good food. No snipers. A remote chance of having sex.
Shaking those pointless thoughts from his mind, he set about getting ready for another day. Now that he was out of the shelter of his sleeping bag, John shivered in the teeth-rattling chill of his small room. The plastic, stretched over holes that had once upon a time been filled by glass panes, rustled slightly with what had to be a pretty brisk wind.
It wouldn’t have surprised him one bit to be able to see his breath in the cold morning air. The sandbags now piled over the window opening stopped snipers’ bullets, rocket-propelled grenades and other assorted dangers pretty well. They just didn’t do much against the cold.
There were a few space heaters around, but no one dared plug them in. The generator-driven electricity coming through the decrepit Iraqi wiring in the building barely limped along enough to power a light bulb and a coffee pot simultaneously as it was.
John supposed it could be worse. It could be summer. Being from Pennsylvania, John was a Yankee by birth, according to Morales anyway, so given a choice between sweltering or freezing, he’d choose freezing.
No use worrying about things he couldn’t change. Besides, John had a list a mile long of things he needed to do, but first, before tackling the paperwork piled insanely high on his desk, he needed coffee. The closest place it was most likely to be already made and still fairly fresh would be what they jokingly referred to as the Internet café in the MWR.
Soldiers lined up day and night for their thirty-minute allotment of Internet access. Five old, temperamental computers hooked to the World Wide Web by a satellite dish that had been hit with more shrapnel than all of Uncle Sam’s troops combined were shared by over one hundred enlisted men. That meant the MWR consistently had both a line of people and lots of coffee.
John walked in and found exactly that—about half a dozen soldiers including his loader and, across the room on another computer, his gunner, who would both be still deep in dreamland if they had any brains.
“Jesus, Jazzy. Why the hell aren’t you still sound asleep in your rack?” John stepped up behind the man seated at a computer terminal.
Jazzy grinned up at him. “I had a ton of emails to write including one to Summer to tell her I’m reading her book. And it’s the wife’s birthday today. I couldn’t risk us being called out again and not getting a chance to see her quick.”
He couldn’t blame Jazzy. If he had someone at home to email, he supposed he might be there on a computer at zero-four-fifty also. John glanced down at the window open on the monitor and saw the image of Jazzy’s wife on the video camera. She was a looker. Nope, he couldn’t blame Jazzy one bit for choosing her over sleep.
Slapping Jazzy on the back, John decided to make a graceful exit. “I gotta grab some coffee. I’ll give you two some privacy.” At least as private as you could get in a big, open room full of soldiers.
“That’s okay. I was just saying goodbye. I’ve been on for my thirty already, and the crowd is about to get hostile if I go over time again. Just let me sign off and I’ll grab a cup of joe with ya.” Jazzy typed a few more brief sentences into the Instant Messenger window to his wife, signed out and grinned big again as he wandered over to John at the coffee pot.
He was always happy. It would be really annoying if John didn’t like the guy so much. Instead, it was simply perplexing.
Jazzy whistled as he poured them both a cup of steaming coffee. Taking the cup from him, John finally couldn’t resist asking about the man’s constant good mood. “How can you be so damn chipper all the time?”
The response to his question was a deep, rumbling chuckle that grew into an all-out laugh. “Have you seen my wife?”
That made John smile. “Yeah. But she’s back on the base in Germany and you’re in frigging Hell, Iraq.”
“There are ways.” Jazzy smirked.
“Really?” John raised a brow and glanced around the bustling MWR. “I would guess cyber sex but that would definitely be impossible here, or at the very least really, really difficult.” Not to mention public and embarrassing.
His reaction was met with another chuckle. “Funny, I was just discussing cyber sex with Summer in our emails. Her friends think we’re cyber lovers since we write to each other. Too funny.”
Ugh
. John inwardly cringed. He didn’t want to discuss this Summer woman’s cyber sex life.
“Anyway, as I said, there are ways. You just have to get creative like the wife and I do.” Jazzy continued talking, so thankfully John didn’t have to comment about Summer.
He was afraid to ask, but for some inexplicable reason he did anyway. “Such as…”
“Such as I’ll write her the beginnings of a sexy fantasy and send it to her, then she continues the story and mails it back to me. Believe me, I have a very vivid imagination.”
“I bet you do.” John laughed. Having known him for a while now, he had no doubt about the imaginative capabilities of Jazzy’s mind. “I’m not so into fantasies myself though.”
That statement was met with a cocky grin. “You should try it sometime. Don’t know what you’re missing ’til you do.”
“Ha. Who do you suggest I fantasize about?” John scowled. He certainly would not be fantasizing about his ex. Definitely not about one of the few females he ran across at camp. Fraternization was a big no-no, and his career was not worth losing to briefly satisfy his dick.