Second Chance for the Damaged Alpha Ex-Navy Corpsman Mountain Man

Prologue

Marco

I don’t tell Maya much about my job, but she is intuitive and seems to understand the seriousness of it, and the challenges I face.

Every chance I get I am over at Maya’s restaurant.

She kind of teaches me how to make Adobo.

I don’t ever fully understand quite how she does it.

It is amazing. It tastes like something that matters, and I tell her that, even though I don’t think either of us knows what that means exactly. But we both agree, it matters.

Then the day comes. I am being deployed into an unsafe environment.

I tell her that I have to go, and I leave.

When I come back, I go home to Silver Pine, a small town in Colorado.

She sells her restaurant and comes to find me there.

But then I leave her again after I show her a side of myself no one should see, this time for five years.

Embarrassed and ashamed, I retreat to the mountains, and I make a life for myself there.

It is a quiet life as I try to recover from the deployment.

I have a satellite installed because I know I can’t deal with the trauma I faced overseas, I can’t deal with the eyes of Davis, a Marine I tried to save, but could not.

My therapist helps me to understand how to manage.

It works, as long as I am here alone, in my isolated cabin.

I tell myself again that this is what I wanted, that this is what I chose, that being up here means I don’t have to deal with anything I can’t control. But that’s not entirely true, and I know it.

Because even up here, even with all the distance I’ve put between myself and everything else, there are things that find their way in any way, things I haven’t been able to shut out no matter how much I try, and one of them has a name I don’t say out loud.

Maya.

The thought of her comes without warning, sliding into place before I can stop it, and with it comes everything else I’ve spent years trying to keep contained, the memory of her kitchen in San Diego, the heat and the noise and the way she moved through it like she belonged there in a way I never quite did, the late nights after closing when it was just the two of us, the quiet moments that felt like something I didn’t know how to hold onto even when I had it.

I remember the way she used to laugh when I got something wrong, the way she would step in close to show me how to fix it, her voice steady and patient as she explained things that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with who she was, with where she came from, with the kind of life she expected to build.

I remember the way she held back, the way she drew lines I didn’t cross, not because I didn’t want to, but because I respected her too much to push, because what we had felt like something that needed to be built the right way or not at all.

But in the quiet of my cabin, I think about us together if we did not get stopped by the deployment and aftermath. I think of us going further than we ever let ourselves go. Her body was amazing, smooth, curvy, and every move she made as she managed her restaurant was sexy.

In my fantasy, I imagine her taste. It’s after hours at her restaurant, and she looks at me like I am the only man who could ever satisfy her.

I approach her and remove her apron, as I kiss the back of her neck.

She turns her head, looking up and into my eyes.

We kiss, and she moves to allow me to fully embrace her, our bodies fitting tightly together.

A second later, we put two tables in the dining area together in the form of a bed.

I lay her back and remove her soft pants, her underwear.

I place my mouth on her woman hood. This is where I stay for what seems like hours.

She is moaning quietly, and I feel myself getting harder.

She moans over and over again, more loudly now.

She calls my name ‘Marco,’ saying ‘Here, baby, kiss me,’ and I move to her lips, sharing her taste with her, as our tongues dance.

Now suddenly we are both naked, and she tells me she wants me inside her, she wants to feel me inside her. In my fantasy, I enter with a single thrust, all the way, and she gasps.

She starts to move her body, smoothly, almost like she is dancing, like she does in the kitchen, and I feel my cock fully absorbed into her.

I can feel her squeezing me, welcoming me, as she moves up off the hard table up into my body. I kiss her with frenzy, and she responds, her tongue moving deep into my mouth. I hear her, I feel her, I taste her. She has somehow taken over my soul, my whole self.

In my fantasy, I start to feel pulses, from her, and maybe from me. She screams my name again and again, as I feel her get wetter as she vibrates around my cock. I can tell that she is coming, and I start to join her. I feel my own release as I fill her, as I fully join her in this moment.

We lay together on the hard table, joking about what her customers would say if they knew they were eating on our improvised bed. I revel in her cuteness, in her sense of humor, dry, but always appropriate.

As my fantasy slowly comes to an end, I see her standing in front of me, again fully clothed, including her apron. “Do you want to taste it,” I hear her say, holding a tablespoon of dark steaming adobo sauce, a taste that it is said gets better the second day, in her hand. I say “yes, I would.”

For me, for now, she lives only in my dreams, but I still hope that one day I will have the courage and the faith to see her again.

How that could happen, I have no idea. For now, I only have memories of someone I used to know.

But some days, in the silence of my cabin, I can almost see her sitting on the couch. I can almost feel her.