One More Kiss

It had been too long …

Alysse might want to pretend that she had some control over her emotions, but she really didn’t where Jay was concerned.

He tipped her chin up, looking down at her with those big dark-chocolate-brown eyes of his and he kissed her. His hands framed her face as his mouth moved over hers with the confidence and surety she remembered.

But then he intensified the kiss and she stopped thinking. She just let her feelings take over. Shivers spread down her spine.

She was alive and nothing else mattered to her at this moment.

He swept her off her feet and took a few steps before sitting down on a nearby chair. She straddled him and peered down at him.

“I want you,” he said. He took the tip of his finger and drew it down the center of her neck and then caressed the spot above her breasts.

She didn’t want to talk. If she did, she’d start thinking and worrying and she’d have to leave.

And right now she was remembering that it had been a very long time since any man had touched her like this …

About the Author

KATHERINE GARBERA is a USA TODAY bestselling author of more than forty books who has always believed in happy endings. She lives in England with her husband, children and their pampered pet, Godiva. Visit Katherine on the web at www.katherinegarbera.com, or catch up with her on Facebook and Twitter.

One More Kiss

Katherine Garbera

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This book is dedicated to my sister Linda and her family, James, Katie and Ryan, who made us so happy to call Southern California home and who shared their friends with us and they became our friends, as well. So a shout-out to Brit, Amy and Jason, who made us feel welcome.

I have to thank Julie Leto who was very helpful when I asked for her advice on writing for Blaze. She gave me her insights, which as always were spot-on. Also thanks to Brenda Chin and Kathryn Lye for liking my idea when I sent it to them!

1

“MARRY ME,” Gunnery Sergeant Mac said as he took the small box filled with four of her signature chocolate “sin” cupcakes. They were her number-one seller in the bakeshop, Sweet Dreams.

“I can’t, Mac, you only love me for my cupcakes,” Alysse Dresden replied. The uniformed Marine came in here once a week and every time asked her the same mock question.

“We can work around that, I can come to love you for your other assets,” he said as he headed toward the door.

Alysse laughed as the soldier left and she turned to her next customer. Sweet Dreams was the culmination of four years of hard work. She got at least two marriage proposals a day at her bakery and usually a few professions of undying love. Her mother hadn’t been wrong when she said the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach.

If only her mother had told her how to keep a man once she got his attention with food. Alas, she hadn’t, and Alysse had one failed marriage behind her. But that disaster wasn’t one that should be dwelt on.

“You should take him up on his offer,” Staci Rowland said as she came in from the back with a tray of red velvet cupcakes.

“Mac?” Alysse asked. She wasn’t about to marry a man she barely knew. She’d been there, done that and had burned the T-shirt.

“Yes, or any of the other guys who come through here,” Staci said as she placed the tray in the display counter.

Staci was her business partner and the cocreator of Sweet Dreams. They’d met almost four years ago in a local baking competition. They’d competed with each other for a few years trying to outsell and out-create each other around town before they’d decided to work together and open the bakery. The rest, as they say, was history.

“They aren’t serious. They just like my cakes,” Alysse said, knowing what she said was true. Though she wished sometimes that some of the men were at least interested in a few casual dates, they never were.

“Of course they do, but unless you go out with one of them you’re never going to find the one guy who wants more than baked goods from you,” Staci said.

Staci was five foot four and had short black hair that she wore in a pixie cut. She was petite but had more curves than Alysse, who was tall with a more athletic build. Where Alysse overanalyzed every action before she took it, Staci tended to jump and then hope a net would appear. They were opposites in everything except their desire to make Sweet Dreams a success.

“That guy was pretty hot, you should have—”

“Ugh!” Alysse said to Staci. “Besides, hot doesn’t mean he’s the right guy for me.”

She was living proof of that. Damn. Why was she dwelling on her ex today? She wanted to pretend she didn’t really know, but this week … it was the four-year anniversary of her waking up alone in the honeymoon suite of the Golden Dream Hotel in Vegas.

“It doesn’t mean he’s the wrong guy for you, either,” Staci chastised. “You have a thing against men in uniform. Why?”

“They’re cocky and they really can’t commit to a woman. And for the record, it’s not like I don’t go on dates,” Alysse said. She’d never talked about her brief marriage.

“You’ve given the usual dating websites a try and I’ll admit they aren’t exactly gleaming with amazing guys, but I think you don’t want to find a man.”

“Do you?” Alysse asked. To be honest, there were times when she was lonely, but the risk of falling for the wrong guy was too high for her to take the chance. She didn’t ever again want to feel the way she had when Jay had walked away. Ever.

“No, but I at least enjoy being single,” Staci said. “Going out to clubs. And you don’t.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t go with you last night. I had already promised my brother that I’d hang out with him.”

“Well, I’m surprised you went since it was just your brother and about fifteen hot guys.”

Alysse shook her head. “Toby’s friends are my friends. We grew up surfing together and playing beach volleyball. Going out with them … it’s fun.”

“It’s safe,” Staci said. “There’s no risk for you. Why do you do that?”

Alysse shrugged. It was safe going out with them because Toby’s friends treated her like their little sister. And when she was out on the waves, surfing with them they treated her like an anonymous person—just another surfer.

“Most people don’t want to risk their hearts,” Alysse answered.

Staci came over and gave her a hug. From the beginning, Staci’s caring heart had surprised Alysse, because her friend looked tough. Her hair was cut in a trendy fashion but she presented herself to the world as if she were a badass.

“Honey, safe isn’t doing it for you. Something is missing in your life. I just want you to be happy,” Staci said.

“Me, too.” Alysse really craved happiness but had no idea how to get it. She’d thought that the bakery was the solution but the longer they worked at it and the more success and accolades she achieved at Sweet Dreams, the bigger that longing inside of her grew.

The phone rang before Staci could respond and Alysse reached around her to answer it. The phone was an old-fashioned wall-mounted unit that had come with the bakery when they’d bought the property.

“Sweet Dreams Bakery, home of the incredible red velvet dream cupcakes.”

“Hello,” the caller said. His voice was deep and raspy, vaguely familiar, but then she talked to men on the phone all the time.

Staci just mouthed over to her that the discussion wasn’t over and went to help a customer who had entered the shop. Alysse leaned back against the wall and twirled the phone cord around her finger.

“What can I do for you today?” she asked.

“I have a dessert emergency,” he said.

“An emergency? Well, we will be happy to help you out,” she said. She liked creating desserts that were unique to the person who would eat them. It wasn’t always easy to do, but she’d done it more than once with a lot of success. In fact, she’d been featured in a regional magazine after she’d made an anniversary cake for the deputy mayor of San Diego.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” he said.

His voice was perfect, she thought. She closed her eyes and just let the sound of it wash over her. This was what was wrong with her, she thought, snapping her eyes open and staring at the photo of cupcakes mounted on the wall behind the phone. She was afraid of a man who walked into her bakery but one she could flirt with on the phone, one who was safely isolated, she could handle.

“What can I get for you?” she asked. She pulled a prestamped notepad closer and got ready to jot down the details. She and Staci had made these forms up after they’d botched an order writing it down on napkins. That had been a long time ago, but they still wrote everything down on the notepad.

“I need something … different. I made some mistakes where my lady is concerned and I want to make it up to her,” he said, his voice low yet sincere.

Alysse knew she was a softy when it came to men making big romantic gestures. One time she’d stayed up all night making an anniversary cake for a man who’d forgotten to order it in advance and needed it first thing in the morning. She’d charged him double to justify staying overnight to bake it, but in her heart she liked that he’d realized he’d screwed up and tried to make up for it.

“Then this is going to have to be a really special cupcake or maybe a cookie. Tell me about her,” Alysse invited.

Sweet Dreams had cultivated a reputation in San Diego of being the place for one-of-a-kind desserts, mainly because she and Staci both believed that making something special was more than worth their time. People would pay for good food and that was what they delivered.

“Hmm … that’s not easy. She’s kind of elusive and hard to figure out.”

It was always interesting to her the way men described the women they loved. She and Staci had an annual Valentine’s Day contest where couples competed to come up with the perfect treat for each other by describing what the other person was like. The winners were chosen from those who described their mate and picked the perfect dessert.

“That’s probably why you like her,” Alysse said. “Men like a mystery.”

He sighed and she thought she heard a honking horn behind him. “That we do. But I’m used to solving them.”

She jotted down mysterious on the order form. Every guy thought women were hard to figure out, but if they just paid attention, she thought, it would be mystery solved. She’d never known a woman yet who didn’t in her own way tell a man exactly what she wanted.

“What else can you tell me about her?” Alysse asked.

“She’s feisty and spicy in bed,” he said. “She knows how to both satisfy a man and leave him wanting more.”

She made a few more notes and then put her pen down. Well, it sounded as though he had found him a woman who met all of Alysse’s own perceptions of what the male fantasy was.

“Is she sweet?” Alysse asked.

“Semisweet,” he said. “She’s got a kind of gentleness to her that is at odds with that fiery temper of hers.”

She turned to look at the stainless-steel counters of the kitchen area of the bakery.

“Okay, I think I’ve got it. Do you want a small cake or a cupcake?” she asked. She already had an idea in mind for the batter—a kind of a riff on her Redemption Cake. She made it often enough out of a basic chocolate cake recipe and added special ingredients to make it personal to the couple.

“Surprise me,” he said.

“I will. When do you need it?” she asked. She figured she’d work on the recipe overnight and try a couple of variations so that she got the perfect recipe for this guy. She was going to be charging him a high price for this unique cake and she wanted to ensure he got his money’s worth.

“This evening.”

“Uh … I’m not sure I can do that. We close at six,” she said. She could also spend the afternoon in the kitchen working on this special order instead of helping customers and listening to Staci tell her she didn’t date the right guys, which—she wasn’t going to lie—sounded ideal. But this guy was asking for the moon.

“Perfect. I’ll pay you to deliver it to the Hotel Del Coronado—the Beach Villas.”

“Um … we don’t usually do that.”

“Please,” he said, his sexy voice dropping a bit to become even deeper. “I won’t ask again.”

A shiver spread down her arms and across her chest. There was something familiar about that low tone but then she always associated sexy with Jay Michener, her ex-husband. And Jay was the last man who’d be pulling out all the stops to win back a woman. That wasn’t his style. No. Walking away without looking back was his style, and she needed to remember that.

“I think you might be my only chance,” he said.

Alysse shook her head at her own weakness for romance. What was her deal?

“Okay. I’ll do it,” she said. “Should I leave it at the desk?”

“No, I’m having a dinner catered for us on the beach. Can you bring it down there?”

She should say no, but this man who was going to such lengths to win back his lady intrigued her. “I’ll do it. What’s your name?”

“Just ask for the Marine,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll need your credit-card information,” she said. She wasn’t about to do all that work without being paid.

“I’ll pay when you get here.”

He hung up before she could get any more details. She turned around to see that the shop was empty again and Staci was watching her.

“Order?” she asked.

“A mystery order from a sexy-voiced guy,” Alysse said, trying to sound light. But this Marine and his order was affecting her and making her think of things that she usually kept tucked away. She decided to trust that he could pay her; he was staying at the Coronado and it wasn’t exactly cheap.

“Tell me more.”

She shrugged. How could she describe what he wanted her to do without letting Staci know that her hard heart was melting? “He wants something special to try to win back his girl.”

“What are you going to make?” Staci asked, focusing on the food like a good baker.

“I don’t know. I was going to go and pull ingredients that fit his description of her.” She liked this part of the process. Baking was as easy to her as breathing. She knew the recipes and then just changed up the ingredients until she had something unique.

“And that would be?” Staci asked. “Let me guess, sexy?”

Alysse laughed because so many guys said that when they were asked about their women. But once the probing went a little deeper the answers started to vary.

“More specifically, spicy, unpredictable and semi-sweet,” she said.

“Sounds like a challenge. When do you need it?” Staci asked, wiping down the counter.

“Tonight. I told him I’d deliver it to the Hotel Del Coronado.”

“Why are you delivering it?” Staci asked. “Girl, be serious here. We don’t do this kind of thing.”

“He had a really sexy voice and he said please,” Alysse said. It sounded lame as a reason even to her.

“He’s taken,” Staci said, shaking her head as she walked across the room. “He wants a dessert for his lady.”

“I know. I just … It’s romantic, isn’t it? That he’d go to that much trouble to get her back,” Alysse said.

“He must have really made a mess of their relationship,” Staci, ever the realist, said.

Big-time, Alysse agreed. But that didn’t change the fact that he was trying to make up for it. That earned him major points in her book.

“Probably. Would you take a guy back if he planned a dinner for you at the Coronado on the beach?” Alysse asked her friend.

“Not sure. I guess it would depend on the guy,” she said with a shrug. “I’m not much on forgiving.”

“Me, neither,” Alysse said.

Maybe that was why she had said yes to delivering the dessert. She wanted this couple to have a second chance at love. A second chance at making their relationship work—because her own lover had never even tried for a second chance.

Even if he had she would have said no, she thought. She left the store area and went back into the kitchen. It was time for her to do the one thing that she was genuinely good at—taking ingredients and mixing them into something edible, something mouthwatering and delicious. It wasn’t lost on her that she used her baking to escape from the real world. In here she was in charge and if anything went wrong she could toss it out and start over.

She weighed and measured the cocoa and the flour and sifted them together, taking a kind of comfort from the mixing. She tried to keep the image of Jay from her mind but she couldn’t. The memory of the tough-as-Pittsburgh-steel Marine Corps sniper was hard to ignore. She knew that was why she’d failed at blind dates and speed-dating. She measured every man she met by the yardstick that was Jay, or by what she’d thought Jay was when she’d married him, and no one, not even Jay, would ever measure up.

JAY MICHENER TOOK a swallow of his beer and leaned back against the wall behind him. The bar was more open than he felt comfortable in; since he’d gotten back from Afghanistan he couldn’t relax. There were three other guys at the table with him.

Lucien he knew well as they’d been in the same unit for two tours. They’d been to the Middle East and back several times. Lucien had gotten out of the Corps two years ago and had started his own security business with the other two men at the table.

Jay didn’t know either man well, but they felt like guys he’d known before. But then, Jay had spent all of his adult life in the military so there weren’t many enlisted men he couldn’t relate to. The two men got up to play pool and Lucien took a sip of his beer before turning to Jay.

“Why don’t you come by my office tomorrow and I’ll give you the tour? Show you what life is like on the outside,” Lucien said with a wry grin.

“The outside? It’s not like I’ve been in prison,” Jay said. The Corps was his life not because he had no other choices but because it was where he wanted to be.

“It sort of is. You’ve been in since you were eighteen and you’re pushing thirty now. Isn’t it time you tried something else?” Lucien asked.

“Maybe,” Jay said. “I’ll try to swing by tomorrow.”

“Don’t ‘try to,’ be there around ten, Lance Corporal,” Lucien said.

“Okay,” Jay told him, giving in. It couldn’t hurt to check out Lucien’s place.

“You free for dinner?” Lucien asked.

“Why?”

“I want you to meet my girlfriend,” Lucien said. “She’s always bugging me to bring home the guys I talk about.”

“I can’t tonight,” Jay said. Or ever, he thought. He couldn’t think of anything more torturous than spending the night with Lucien and his girlfriend talking about the old times.

“I’ve gotta go,” Jay said, glancing at his watch. He wasn’t a guy who normally took gambles, so this one with Alysse was odd. But she had always made him feel differently than other women did, which was probably why he’d married her four years ago. That was probably also the chief reason he’d left her after only one week.

He was dressed casually in a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt but he felt naked without his rifle in his hand. How was a man supposed to live when he was always on edge? With Alysse, he had hoped to find something more normal, but the week they’d spent together had made him realize that he felt even more vulnerable with her.

Now he was stationed at Pendleton in Oceanside, California, about a twenty-minute drive north of San Diego. Pendleton had an idyllic setting right across the 5 from the Pacific Ocean and it was easy sometimes to forget that there was anything else but the beach and an endless horizon.

But his mind hadn’t let Alysse go as easily as Jay had hoped. Every night she sneaked into his dreams—and the sexy ones weren’t the problem. It was the normal-life ones that really disturbed Jay. The ones where he pictured Alysse in an apron with a few kids at her feet were the worst because he didn’t believe he was ever going to be the man who gave her those things.

“You’re on leave, Lance Corporal, I didn’t think you had anywhere to be,” Lucien said.

“I do tonight.”

There was a lot of laughing at the table as the men all made some comment about women and hot dates. He smiled and let them think it was just a casual hookup. He waved goodbye and walked out of the bar in San Diego’s Gaslamp district.

He got on his Ducati 1100s motorcycle and drove to the Hotel Del Coronado. He didn’t make a lot of money as a sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps but Jay didn’t spend a lot of money either. He didn’t have an apartment or house of his own, preferring to stay in hotels when he was on leave. Since he had always planned to be a career military man, he used base housing and stored his Ducati when he was deployed.

But something had changed in him on this last deployment. He had no idea if it was the fact that he’d turned thirty or the fact that he was at a crossroads. He could get out of the Corps now, find a civilian job and maybe have a shot at normality. Though he wasn’t convinced he was cut out for normal.

Tricking Alysse wasn’t the answer, but the last time he’d had a shot at a real life had been with her. His commanding officer would say he was being a, well … a coward, for lack of a better word, and Jay knew the CO would be right. But he wanted Alysse back.

His plan—and he always had a plan—was to spend his leave here with Alysse Dresden and figure out if he was meant for this life or if he should stay being a warrior.

Still, he needed to make up for how he’d left her. He hoped the romantic setting and the surprise of the grand gesture would be enough of an olive branch to persuade her to give him a second chance.

He pulled his bike to a stop in front of the villa he was renting and went inside and showered and changed. He’d spent a lot of time thinking up this strategy. He knew better than just to call and ask Alysse out. He’d hurt her and he knew it. The fact that he’d thought of nothing but her for the last four years had sent a strong message to him that he needed some kind of closure with her.

He took his time setting up the area, just as he would to get ready for a target. Planning and execution were the keys to success and he never forgot that. The staff had laid out a bamboo rug and then set the table up on that. Twinkle lights hung from the ceiling of the cabana. There were curtains which had been drawn back to let the breeze flow through the structure.

Jay was a little wary of having so much open space around him, but he was on leave and he tried not to let it bother him. He hated how on edge he always was when he came in from the field. And tonight he was doubly edgy because of Alysse.

He scanned the beach and the area where he was standing looking for the best strategic advantage. He sat at the table but felt stupid just sitting there, so he got up. He checked the wine chilling in the freestanding ice bucket and then walked to the edge of the cabana to lean against a palm tree.

Just as he decided he looked like someone in an all-inclusive resort commercial, Alysse appeared. He realized all at once he wasn’t as prepared as he’d hoped to be, because he’d forgotten how beautiful she was.

She arrived just as the sun was starting to set. She wore a casual skirt, and a blousy shirt. But it wasn’t the clothes—more the body underneath it. She was tall—almost five-foot-seven—and had an athletic build. She moved with grace and confidence and he couldn’t tear his eyes from her.