more than he does for you. Six months really isn’t that long to wait for the rest of your life.”
“I hate it when you’re right,” I whisper into her hair. She squeezes my ass in both of her hands.
“I’m always right, bitch. Go snuggle with that puppy. He’s like a mood enhancing drug. I swear it. He went outside to pee just before you got here, but that doesn’t mean much because I think his brain is the size of a pea.”
I walk to my room and set little Goose on my huge bed and just gawk at him. He’s staring right back at me. The responsibility of owning a dog scares me. I pull the letter from Maverick out of my purse and trace my fingers over my name.
Win,
Stop reading unless you’ve seen Gretchen first…
You have him now? Okay, good. Surprise!
Courage is a strange thing. The more you use it, the more it consumes you. You didn’t want to pull the trigger on a puppy, so I did it for you. Fear not, you will be the greatest dog mom ever. How am I so sure? Because you’re good at everything (and I do mean everything). Usually things that involve your mouth and hands…but everything else too. You’re so good that I popped wood just writing/thinking about the last sentence. See? So good. I wanted to get you a larger mutt, something that would latch on and then kill an intruder, but Gretchen stepped in and said something smaller and “cute” would be preferable for condo life. Look at that furry thing. He’s adorable. That isn’t a word I’ve ever used.
I pause reading and look at Goose. He huffs and stretches his back legs out like a frog. Freaking adorable as sin. Mav’s right.
He’ll keep you company and kiss you senseless until I come home and kiss you senseless in a better way. I miss you already.
Mav
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Maverick
“GODDAMMIT! TOSS ME the bottle of Febreeze, man. It smells like a fuckin’ whore house on a Saturday night,” Stone yells.
Our room in this camp, if you can even call it that, is small and full of sand. At least it’s not a tent. At least it has walls. Plywood forms the dividers and the floor. The door creaks because it doesn’t shut properly. That fact doesn’t matter much. Even if someone made it as far as inside our camp, which isn’t possible, the second they step into this room they’d be dead. Not like, “hey man, you’re dead meat,” either. Like a bullet in between your fucking eyes dead. I pull in a deep breath and wince. It’s hot here.
I throw the bottle at his head. “Like you even know what a whore house smells like, you pussy.” Most of the guys do know the exact eau de skank scent of such a place. Stone doesn’t. Believe it or not, I don’t either. Standards, people. He catches it before it hits his head…the quick asshole.
The second I landed in this fucking dust bowl, something inside of me switched. It’s time to work. Of course I miss Windsor and all the comforts of home, but I’m just as comfortable in this cramped shack as I am in my four thousand square foot house. Part of the glory package is dealing with such conditions. I gladly accept all the shit aspects to be able to do what I love. I was made for this life. Not many can say that.
I tell Stone to stop spraying the plywood with Febreeze because the linen breeze is giving me a damn headache. He tells me the stink is coming from the wood. Morganna’s habits are so ingrained in him that he doesn’t even realize when he’s acting like her clone. Minus the tits, of course. When we’ve cleaned the room as much as possible, I hang a huge American flag. It takes up the entire plywood wall of our room—reminding me why I do what I do. It’s my good luck charm, too. I never deploy without it.
With all the menial tasks done for the day, I let myself think of her. I hike myself up into the top bunk, because Stone won the arm wrestling match for the bottom bunk, and open my laptop. The Internet connection is always splotchy and doesn’t work most of the time. I don’t have enough bars to call Windsor on Skype so I type her an e-mail, which will be our main form of communication while I’m gone.
_______________
Winnie Bear,
I