Her second letter to him had almost made him tell the truth. Almost made him reveal that he was the one writing to her, not a fictional man he named after a wounded dog his unit had adopted and nursed back to health.

One way or another he was going to convince her to spend Christmas with him. He tucked the letter away and smiled. There was no need to read it. He knew the words by heart. Hell, he knew every word of every letter she’d written and the ones he’d written, too.

Sage and Gage.

He rolled his eyes. That should have been her first clue. It sounded like a couple on one of those soaps his abuela faithfully watched on Univision.

Dear Sage,

Please call me Gage. Mr. Huntstone makes me sound old and you’re not one of my ‘men’, so no 1st Lt. anything in our letters.

It’s not too bad here. When the sun sets just right, the country looks peaceful and for a little while, a man can forget what he’s been sent here to do. Sometimes, when I’m going to sleep, I pretend I’m at the ocean, drinking a Corona while listening to Sublime on my iPod. It’s easier than you’d think. My ‘bed’ is a hole dug in the ground since the only structures we have around here are a chow hall and command center.

I know it would probably be easier for us to chat on Skype or Facebook, but our internet connection is sketchy at best, and non-existent at worst. Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t have a Facebook page, and I don’t use my army email for personal correspondence.

Please keep writing me. I won’t be able to respond right away the next few weeks or so, because I’ll be heading up more missions into certain regions. Can’t say when I’ll be back, or even where I’m going exactly—mostly because I’ll get in trouble (just kidding…sorta).

Keep me in your prayers; you’re in mine.

Your friend,

Gage

Dear Gage,

I guess it’s official—we’re pen-pals! Dare we identify our relationship to the world? It has been two months since we first ‘found’ each other.

Although I appreciate your police description of yourself, I wish you would send me a real picture (your hand on the unit’s adopted dog doesn’t count and neither did the one with the gas mask covering your entire head). I’d like a face to picture when I’m writing to you…or thinking about you.

However, it’s easy to imagine your brown eyes when I close mine. They’re my favorite color eyes.

I’m so sorry your dad and mom haven’t written back, but at least you tried. If you’d like I could write to them, or even drive to their house to talk to them in person. North Carolina isn’t that big of a state, and you said you were from Alleghany County. I’m sure I could find their house.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking more and more about your missions and how dangerous they are. It led me to do some research on the Army and I found out it has a patron saint. So, in the care package I sent you, I included a Saint Christopher’s medal. You don’t have to wear it, of course.

Missing and thinking of you,

Sage

Sweet Sage. That was one of the things he loved the most about her—her soft heart. There would be no Sunday announcement. He would have to do things the old fashioned way, with some old-fashioned courting. By Christmas Day, he would have her in his life again. Permanently this time.

But first he had to deal with his parents.

***

“What the hell?” Joaquin slowed his truck down, raising his brows at all the fanfare.

Balloons, cotton candy machine, jugglers—jugglers?—a stainless steel pig cooker where his dad stood serving up hotdogs and hamburgers, but overshadowing it all was a giant banner with the words, Welcome Home Our Hero, Joaquin!, strung from one end of the car lot to the other.

Now he was a hero?

After four years and not one damn letter or phone call, they were proud of him? Exhaling, he focused on what he’d come here for. Besides, things could have changed. His parents really could be proud of him. Hell, knowing he was coming home today let him know they’d gotten his voice mail. Maybe they had read all the letters he’d sent, too.

He loved his parents—despite what they had done to him, or maybe because of it. Kicking him out had forced him to grow up, to quit playing at being a man and skating through life with his family’s money. Although if he had to be honest, there had been many times he wished he’d had that security.

Scanning the parking lot as he parked his truck in an out of the way spot, he smiled faintly at all the balloons secured to antennas and the tops of open hoods, showcasing polished chrome head gaskets. On every vehicle parked on the strip of grass by the highway, windshields were covered with bright red and green lettering that proclaimed: ‘Great on Gas!!’, ‘Great Family Car!!’ or ‘Great Deal!!’.

The trifecta of sales, according to Juan Morales: Exclamation points, car swag and the overuse of the word ‘great’.

He allowed his grin to widen. Some things never changed.

Then he noticed all the discount car tie-ins to his homecoming and his grin faded. Some things really never changed and his dad’s focus on the almighty dollar was one of those. This wasn’t a homecoming; it was a sales gimmick. One that had probably driven Charles Caswell to price matching and cursing the day the Morales family moved to Holland Springs.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted his dad and turned.

Juan cooked hotdogs and hamburgers on a huge stainless steel grill, complete with twenty foot flagpole and gas burners on each side. Old Glory waved in the constant breeze as families stood near fake Christmas trees eating and talking. Families that were in no way related to him, confirming what he knew to be true.

What a fucking joke.

Joaquin backed the truck up, then found the nearest exit and sped away. He hadn’t talked to his mom and dad in four years. What would another day hurt?

All that mattered was getting Sage back in his life—permanently.

***

Sage sat on the steps of her front porch, her head in her hands when he pulled in the drive.

Joaquin cut off the engine and got out, slowly making his way to her. He shivered. In the last few minutes the weather had turned bitterly cold, so cold that he could see his breath.

Sitting down beside her, he left just enough distance between them so she didn’t feel crowded and he didn’t fall off the step.

“I’m sorry,” he said and she looked up at him, red rimming her eyes.

After wiping at her nose, she balled up the tissue and shoved it into her pocket, then gave a little sniff that shredded his heart. “What for—lying to me? Threatening to embarrass me? Leaving me four years ago, or for getting caught?”

“Everything, but the getting caught part only because I’d come to tell you in person what I’d done, but you’d already found out,” he admitted and rocked his neck from side to side, trying to relieve the tension that had been building up since is plane had landed. “What gave me away?”

“Your cousin.”

That certainly narrowed things down. He had tons of cousins living around Holland Springs. “Which one?”

“Roberto let it slip about the dog while he was cutting my hair last week.”

He should have seen that coming a mile away. Roberto was Joaquin’s mother’s favorite nephew and hairdresser. Roberto loved to gossip with his clients. Hell, Roberto loved to gossip with anyone who’d listen. Joaquin didn’t know how Roberto’s wife, Carmen, put up with him. The man never shut up about anything. “I swear to God, the next time I see him—”

“It’s not his fault or your mom’s. It’s yours,” Sage pointed out. “Besides, I’d begun to suspect it a couple of weeks earlier. Still…” She tucked and untucked a strand of auburn hair behind her ear, something she’d always done when she was nervous. “I’d always wondered why things seemed to flow so easily with us. It was like we were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while. It felt like…”—She paused, her eyes the color of rain on a dreary winter day—“we were meant to be.”

They were!, he wanted to shout. Instead he cleared his throat, struggling for the right words. “It was supposed to be my apology. A way to start over. Show you the man I’d become.”

“Right now, you don’t seem much different from the boy I knew.”

A low shot from her, considering what he’d given up for her. “I’d like the chance to prove to you that I am; that those letters were me, and I wrote what was in my heart. Consider spending Christmas with me.” He held up his hands. “No strings attached. No expectations—just you and me as…friends.”

“On one condition,” she replied, so softly that he couldn’t be sure she’d actually said the words.

“Anything.” And he meant it. He’d salsa butt naked down Broad Street if she wanted him to.

She held out her hand, the tiny diamond ring glimmering, making it hard to breath. “Get this off of me.”

Chapter Four

Coffee colored eyes blackened and his jaw hardened. Sage thought for sure Joaquin would say no. That he would stomp off and go brood.

But he didn’t. Instead, he gently caught her hand and her breath hitched. She had missed his touch, but now she knew she’d also craved it.

“Stuck?”

She could only nod.

Holding it closer to his face, she could feel his hot breath on her skin, and she shivered. “You already tried getting it off?”

“I’ve tried everything, but it won’t budge.”

He turned her hand sidewise, his brows coming together. “There’s a raw spot on your knuckle.”

“Yes, I—”

“Poor thing.” He kissed that little red spot and her eyes went wide. She tried to snatch back her hand, but his grip tightened. “No, it’s my turn to get this ring unstuck.” Then he did the unthinkable. He put her finger, ring and all, in his mouth and began to suck.

Good Lord, she didn’t want to pull her hand away. Not only did she not want to pull it away, she let it stay there. She might had even let it slide deeper into the recess of his mouth. He swirled his talented tongue around the ring and her finger, making everything slippery and hot.

Oh, so very, very hot.

She placed one hand on her chest as it rose and fell. As if that could calm her wild heart.

He stared into her eyes as he licked and sucked on her finger, and to her mortification her nipples tightened. Unable to take his knowing gaze, she closed her eyes and simply felt. remembering their last night together:

His tongue licking the backs of her knees and between her thighs. His hands cupping her breasts and his fingers pinching her nipples. He’d whispered how sexy she was, how beautiful she was, how much he loved her, before he thrust inside of her and the world went up in flames.

A moan slipped past her lips as his teeth grazed her skin, then cold air hit her finger.

Her eyes snapped open to find Joaquin holding her ring, longing and desire etched on his face. Her gaze dipped down to his lap. She drew in a sharp breath, then jerked her gaze back to his.

“I told you I want you. Only you,” he rasped, then a hard smile covered his face. “I’ll come by tomorrow and take you to breakfast, in public.”

Her mouth dropped open as he tucked her ring in his pocket and walked away. She started to argue, but he stopped in his tracks. “You made the condition and it was met.”

“You said consider.”

He gave her a look and she let out a thick sigh. He was right. She had only made that condition because she’d thought he wouldn’t be able to get the ring off. She had gambled and lost.

“I’m done playing games, Sage.”

So was she. She thought she was finally done with him. Finally able to move on with a man the opposite of her should-have-been ex. For a long while she studied him. There were dark circles under his eyes, his mouth was drawn tight and weariness worn in the lines of his face. The boy she knew and had married wasn’t there.

“You look exhausted.”

“This is nothing.” His lips curled at the corner a little. “Remember that letter I wrote about my mission to take wheat and water to the locals?” She nodded and he continued, “We’d been on the road sixty hours straight, taking turns driving and keeping watch. At one point, I fell asleep in the middle of a sentence I was writing to you.”

“I had wondered where those lines came from,” she said on a smile.

He shifted from side to side. “Do me a favor?”

She licked her dry lips. “Um, depends.”

“Can I shower, then crash here for a couple of hours?” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I promise to leave afterwards. You can even call the nearest hotel and get me a room.” A grin kicked up the corners of his mouth. “I assumed you cancelled the one at Haven’s”

“Yeah and she’s already rented it out.”

“What about Fairway?”

Shaking her head, she said, “Closed two years ago. Mr. and Mrs. Bell are travelling around the country in an RV.”

“I’ll think of something.” He frowned, then looked at her house. “Why haven’t you decorated for Christmas?”

Actually she had, but once she confirmed his deception, she’d taken everything down and shoved it in her guest bedroom. The tree she’d bought had been placed on the back porch. Only a love of all things living had kept her from chucking it in the forest, so she kept it watered. “Why bother,” she said with a shrug. “It’s just me and I planned on spending it at my parents’ house.”