The Tortured Marine's Coastal Sunshine

Chapter 1

Noah Kendrick knew exactly who the blonde woman was the minute she walked into the Salty Dog Diner that afternoon. He recognized her from the funeral. It had been a few years, but she’d left a lasting impression.

Or maybe what had left the most lasting impression was his own guilt, and so the faces of every single one of Corporal William Miller’s family members were burned forever into his brain.

His sister most of all.

Noah was behind the counter in the weathered old diner he’d been running since he’d gotten his honorable discharge from the Marines, eight years shy of his full retirement.

Before that, it had been his grandfather’s for as long as Noah could remember.

The old man had lived here in Wild Rose Point, a foggy, cold, perfect Oregon beach town where Noah had spent his summers when he’d been a kid growing up in Seattle.

When Grandad had died, he’d left the diner and his house out back to Noah, because Noah was the only grandchild.

And maybe because he’d seen where his grandson was heading, Noah liked to think, and wanted to give him an out.

God knew, Noah had needed it.

He’d known it was time to leave the Marines, despite not making it all the way to retirement.

Ghosts like William’s had started to outweigh any good he’d wanted to do and he knew that didn’t end well.

He knew too many veterans to think otherwise.

And after all the summers he’d spent there, he figured Wild Rose Point was the perfect place to nurse a few of his most pressing war wounds and see about exorcising a demon or two while he was at it.

Demons were easier to handle. They could be wrangled with discipline, more or less. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

Noah knew better than to think he could get rid of the ghosts. They liked to stick around. They liked to wake a man up in the middle of the night to remind him of his failures, and they weren’t much for boundaries, either.

It was easier to just accept them, and the guilt that came with them.

He accepted that. It wasn’t like he didn’t deserve to feel that guilt, after all.

There was an itemized list inscribed deep into his bones, of every single thing he’d done that he wished he could take back, every order he’d given that had led to shit he couldn’t change, and every life he should have saved, but hadn’t.

The weight of it was staggering, but he carried it. He was alive to carry it, and he didn’t take that lightly. Other men had died, so he wasn’t about to complain about the things that kept him up at night.

Literally, it was the least he owed them.

As soon as he’d gotten the diner up and running under his management, he’d issued an open invitation to other combat vets.

If they couldn’t get right with integrating into civilian life, but weren’t still hoping to run missions like some badass individuals everyone knew about up in Alaska, they could come and find a place in Wild Rose Point.

By now, Noah not only housed vets in Grandad’s rambling old house, he’d renovated the old sheds on the property too, and he wasn’t averse to tents, either.

If a veteran needed a place to crash, Noah made it happen.

Take mean, scraggly old Tank, former Army Ranger, who could scare children with his face—and often did. And yet the man baked like a dream. His specialty was something called a salted honey pie that was so good it had people lining up to get a piece of it every time he made them.

Sometimes the line went out the door and down the street, which would have confounded Noah’s grandfather. And maybe delighted him, too.

All that, and Tank—who sometimes didn’t sleep for a few days at a time and sometimes disappeared for a few more—got to feel like a human again. Like he was like everyone else, or at least adjacent to them.

Sometimes that was all a man had.

All of this to say that Noah had started thinking that he’d been doing a pretty good penance these last years.

But the woman who walked in? She was his reckoning. He knew that.

He rang up the customer before him and muttered something to one of the vets standing near him, indicating he’d be taking five.

“Understood,” Crusoe replied. “Though with a face like that, I might take more than five.”

Noah gave the man a glare that could have ripped a man who hadn’t been a Navy SEAL into shreds, but Crusoe only smirked.

“It’s not like that,” Noah growled.

“If you say so, Staff Sergeant,” Crusoe replied, because they all slipped back into their old military personas that easily. It was always right there, ready to come out.

Especially if a rank could be used as a dig, which was only to be expected from a Navy guy, Noah thought. And hoped his face showed.

But a little good, old-fashioned interservice rivalry couldn’t change what Noah had to do now, given their new visitor.

She was still standing there in the entry to the diner, looking completely unaware that she’d set Noah to taking stock of his entire life to date.

He didn’t allow himself to shirk his duty, even if it came by surprise, so he stepped out from around the counter and wound his way through the mostly-filled tables toward the door.

When he’d taken over the diner, it hadn’t been full very often.

His grandfather had mostly kept it open out of spite.

The only customers were his grandfather’s cronies, and Noah maintained a table for the few of them who were still alive, over in the corner, out of respect.

He’d started cooking meals here because he liked it, and because short order cooking required that he think about the cooking and not a lot else.

Hard not to like it, especially when he was freshly out.

He still cooked now and then, because customers liked to claim that they could taste the difference in his bacon.

And because that claim pissed off their current chef, the generally irascible Jeremiah, who had been a fighter pilot and now considered himself a culinary artist. Not that he wasn’t an artist, but nothing was more entertaining than ribbing him about it.

Usually he had a temper tantrum and then cooked whole special meals about it. Win/win.

These days, the diner was pretty crowded during the morning rush and again at lunch.

So it was pretty lively as Noah made his way over to the door, and part of him was proud of that.

Like he could point to the fact that he’d built something, something that had nothing to do with death and war, and that might mean something to this woman whose brother’s death was on his hands.

That’s wishful thinking, asshole, he told himself curtly.

He scanned her almost absently as he drew near, because that was proper operating procedure. Particularly in the case of unfriendly approaches.

Not that Raemy Miller looked like an enemy combatant.

Noah took a moment to think about the fact that he was far more worried about interacting with this woman—all wild blonde hair and all those colors, as if she was trying to brighten up the Oregon coast with a spectacularly pink raincoat and matching boots over a very turquoise dress—than he would have been if she’d been a big, jacked dude who looked like trouble.

Noah knew how to handle trouble. Raemy, on the other hand, was an explosion of color instead of testosterone and if the situation wasn’t so serious, he might have laughed about that.

Internally, that was. Noah Kendrick wasn’t exactly known for his good humor. Most people in this tiny little town would have said he had none.

That wasn’t true, but he didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about entertaining his neighbors. He also didn’t care if they talked shit about him behind his back, because that was none of his business.

Raemy was bringing it face-to-face. He cared about that.

When he reached her side, she was looking around the diner, so he did the same.

The usual motley crew of veterans were doing their thing: waiting tables, running orders, and talking their usual shit behind the counter.

They’d been written up in the local news as a special interest story, which made Noah want to throw himself off the nearest monolithic rock standing tall out there in the Pacific, because he didn’t want attention. Ever.

But if attention brought more veterans to his door, wild-eyed, feral, and looking for a kind of halfway house between the shit they’d seen and the life they needed to figure out how to live, it was worth it.

So he suffered the attention and he framed the articles and put them on the wall.

Besides the articles, there were pictures of lost friends in between the old Vietnam, Korea, and World War Two paraphernalia that his grandfather had collected.

There were also a lot of fishermen’s keepsakes—old tide clocks and pieces of old boats—which shouldn’t have worked.

Yet, somehow, it was all the same thing in the end.

Grumpy men who’d seen too much crap they didn’t want to talk about, Noah thought. That was the theme. That, and astonishingly delicate baked goods plus hearty, delicious food.

Not a bad life, to Noah’s mind, but he was all too aware that Raemy Miller wasn’t here to commend Noah on his life. She was probably more interested in the lives he’d had a hand in losing, her brother’s chief among them.

“Hi,” said Raemy at last, turning and looking up at him. “I’m—”

“I know who you are, Raemy.” Noah sounded rough, and he hated that. He reminded himself to keep it steady. “Why don’t we take a walk?”

She blinked, then pointed at the closest empty table.

“Do we have to take a walk?” she asked, and as she spoke, he found himself...

not staring, obviously. That would be completely inappropriate, particularly in these circumstances, and he had enough on his conscience these days without adding being a complete dick to the tally.

But he was alive, so he definitely noticed how ridiculously blue her eyes were, and how they sparkled when she talked.

And that wasn’t even getting into the way her hair was a big mess of blonde waves that she just shoved this way and that as she spoke, or that almost-smile on her mouth that seemed to be breaking containment.

“It’s just that I’ve been driving forever, literally, and I’m so hungry, and everything in here looks delicious and smells even better. Can we sit down?”

Then she flashed that smile at him at full strength. A megawatt disaster.

Because for a moment, Noah forgot himself. He forgot who he was. He forgot what he’d done—not just in general, but to this woman and her family.

For just one moment, Noah Kendrick was nothing more than a man looking at a pretty woman, and that smile hit him like mortar fire.

He was hard. He was horrified. He cleared his throat and scowled.

This did absolutely nothing to change the way she was smiling at him, he noted.

“Of course,” he said gruffly, hoping she had no idea how he was reacting to her. “Please. Sit.”

And she did, in a rush of headache-inducing pink and turquoise and all of that blonde, flinging herself into the nearest chair at that empty table and then smiling at him some more while he sat down in front of her like a man facing a firing squad.

“It’s good to see you, Noah,” Raemy said when the silence stretched out across the table that he thought could probably use a condiment refresh, tilting her head a little as she looked at him. “It’s been a long time.”

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make small talk. “I know why you’re here,” he said roughly, and he didn’t try to smooth it over. “You don’t have to pretend.”

“What?”

She looked like she couldn’t decide whether she should laugh or not, but he needed to say this, so he kept going.

“You just tell me what you need, and it’s yours.

I don’t expect you to offer me forgiveness.

I wouldn’t even ask for it. But I want you to know that not a day goes by that I don’t think about your brother and wish that I’d made better decisions so that I might have kept him safe. ”

Her smile... changed. “Thank you.” Her eyes were impossibly blue and the longer she looked at him, the bluer they seemed. “But I forgive you. Of course I do. How was any of that your fault?”

Noah stared back at her and thought for a moment that the scowl he was wearing might become permanently attached to his face. Maybe it was his face at this point. “What are you talking about? You can’t forgive me. It was entirely my fault. That’s not debatable.”

And instead of sitting back, nodding soberly, and waiting for Noah to account for every shitty decision he’d made that had led directly to William’s death under his command, his sister only looked at him for a moment. Just a moment.

With those wide blue eyes that he swore could see straight through him, deep into all his three am dark nights of regret and his memories like fire and his worst regrets that he, certainly, had no intention of forgiving himself for.

She looked at him like she could see his soul, and Noah knew that was a twisted piece of fuckery best left alone at the best of times, but she didn’t seem to get that memo.

Because what Raemy Miller did then was not the reasonable reaction. She didn’t run. She didn’t throw something at him or pull out a weapon to even the score. She didn’t launch into a tirade or demand he account for himself. She didn’t cry.

What she did instead was laugh.