Once a Warrior by Fran Baker Read Free Book Online

accepted to OCS and would be leaving soon. But with her firm breasts pressed against his chest and her eager hands undoing his belt buckle, no power on earth could have kept him from taking her.
    They’d kissed until her lips were swollen and his own felt raw. Her cotton dress had risen about her hips, and he’d caressed her through the thin rayon of her panties. Then he’d slipped his hand under the band and she’d opened her thighs so he could stroke the soft, damp velvet of her.
    When he’d entered her, they’d lain in the swaying hammock, locked in the ecstasy of an embrace as old as time, until their yearning young bodies had begun to move and they’d come together like an electric shock.
    Mike stared down at the envelope for a long, reflective moment. He knew he should probably write her back, but after “thanks for the memories,” what more could he say?  Without opening it, he tore it into tiny pieces and dropped them in the wastebasket beside the table.
     
    * * * *
     
    “For richer or for poorer,” Father Campbell intoned solemnly.
    The priest’s parlor smelled of oil soap instead of orchids or roses. A hissing radiator provided the music, and three straight-backed chairs served as pews for the guests. Though there were none of the tears that were normally shed at weddings, there was an aura of sadness about the couple who now faced each other and their impending separation.
    Still, the groom cut a handsome figure in his “pinks and greens” uniform. And the bride looked as a pretty and fragile as a hothouse flower in her floppy hat and a blue jersey dress that didn’t quite hide the slight swell of her expanding tummy. But it was the maid of honor, a leggy redhead standing across the semi-circle that the wedding party had formed in front of the priest, who held the best man’s attention.
    Mike took a chance and smiled at her. If he thought she would blush or dip her head or demurely avert her eyes, he had another think coming. She looked straight at him and smiled back.
    “In sickness and in health,” Kitty repeated softly.
    Mike knew he should be paying closer attention to the ceremony so that he’d know when to produce the ring that was nesting in the pocket of his dress uniform pants. But he was leaving tomorrow morning, he’d dumped that blonde last night, and the maid of honor might be the last American female he had any contact with for a while. A very long while.
    Pressing his luck, he winked at her.
    She winked back.
    “’Til death do us part,” John vowed gravely.
    Father Campbell cleared his throat then, and Mike realized that it was time for the blessing of the rings. He laid the bride’s slender gold band on the paten the priest extended toward him. When the redhead placed the groom’s wider one beside it, a ray of the chilly gray light washing the eastern window glinted off the matched set of diamonds on her left hand.
    Matron of honor , Mike thought resignedly. He didn’t have many rules where women were concerned, but he lived by one. Never with another man’s wife.
    “You may kiss the bride,” the priest said in conclusion.
    From the corner of his eye, Mike watched the matron of honor watch the newlyweds exchange a chaste peck. Then he did what he’d just sworn he wouldn’t do. He looked directly at her.
    As if she sensed him staring at her, she turned her head and met his gaze head-on. Her eyes were green, large and slightly upturned at the corners, her nose a little too short and pert to balance them against her full, scarlet mouth. Almost daring him to break their visual connection, she moistened her lips in a way that had him mentally placing them and that saucy pink tongue where they’d do him the most good.
    “Time to cut the cake.”  Agnes Dill, the priest’s spinster housekeeper, had slipped out of the room the instant the ceremony ended. Now she wheeled a serving cart into the parlor. On it was a pot of freshly perked coffee and a one-layer cake she had