Christmas With The Marine. Candace Havens

waved goodbye and then left.

      Ainsley crooked her arm through his. “Come on, Marine. I’ll buy you lunch and we can check out the booths. I have a few homemade gifts on my list. I might find them here.”

      He’d walk across hot coals to spend a little time with her, so he could easily handle the loud noise of the craft fair a little longer. “Only if you let me buy,” he said.

      “Sure. If you really want to.”

      “Hey, you’ve donated a lot of time and like I said, I owe you a meal at the very least.”

      “Whatever. Come on.”

      He thought they’d head back to the parking lot. He planned on taking her somewhere nice. Instead, she pulled him through a maze of booths to reach the other end of the cafeteria.

      “Hold up, you want to eat here?”

      “Yes,” she said. “This booth has the best chili pies.”

      She walked up to the window. “Who made the chili today?” she asked the elderly woman manning the cash box.

      “Frank,” the woman replied. “He doesn’t let anyone else touch it. Doesn’t want to ruin his reputation. What can I get for you?”

      “You are in for a treat,” Ainsley said to Ben. “Frank is an award-winning chili star. His daughter, Amber, is on the drill team. He’s pretty much the best thing about coming to the craft fair.”

      She turned to the woman. “We need two chili pies and a Coke. And what do you want to drink?” she said to him.

      “Water is good.” He didn’t drink a lot of soda. He tried to avoid sugar and he was careful about what he ate, too. Not that he had a lot of choice when he was deployed. You ate what the mess hall gave you or what was in your pack. But when he was stateside he ate fresh food whenever he could. He’d learned to cook when he was kid. It’d helped out his mom because she had to work so much of the time.

      “You okay?” Ainsley was handing him a bottle of water.

      “What? Yeah. Sorry. I’ve never had a chili pie.”

      “No way. Fritos and chili and cheese. Best things ever. Are you some kind of health nut? Is that how you have that hot bod?” Her eyes flashed as if she’d realized what she’d just said.

      “You think I’m hot?”

      “Marine, everyone here thinks you’re hot.”

      A grin spread across his face. “Uh, thanks. But I don’t think everyone’s looking at me, I have a feeling all eyes are on you. How could they not be? You’re gorgeous.”

      She snorted. “You’re so polite.”

      “You don’t know how beautiful you are, do you?”

      She shrugged. “Don’t really think about it. Let’s go sit. Can’t believe I’m hanging out with a chili pie virgin. This is going to be fun.”

      He nearly tripped when she said the word virgin. He picked up their drinks, so she could grab the cardboard containers with their food. The chili didn’t smell too bad, and he was hungry. She led him to an orange table with matching plastic chairs. Been a long time since he’d eaten in a high school cafeteria.

      “Make sure you get some Fritos in that first bite. It’s the salty mixed with the chili spices that makes it worthy of worship.”

      He did what she’d told him and it was...good. Really good. “I had no idea corn chips could taste like this.”

      “I know, right? So amazing.” She took a swig of her drink. “How long have you been in the Marines?”

      “Joined up the week I graduated from high school. Best way I could think of to take care of my mom and little sister. It was decent pay, and I didn’t have to worry about living expenses so I could send them just about everything I made.”

      She blinked and he wasn’t sure if those were tears in her eyes.

      “Did I say something to upset you?”

      “No. Not at all. You risked your life when you were nothing but a kid to take care of your family?”

      “Yeah. And I’ll admit, it seemed cool at the time. Fighting for my country. But I had no idea what I was getting into. Still, I wouldn’t trade being a Marine for anything.”

      She blinked again.

      “Are you okay?” he asked.

      “Yep. I’ve just never met a selfless man before. You’re an anomaly.”

      Her compliment made him laugh.

      “I don’t know about that. Maybe you just haven’t met the right guys.”

      “True that.” She wiped some chili from the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin. “I’m so impressed that even that young you were looking after your people. Wow, when I was eighteen, I was an idiot. Partying in college and making bad choices.” She rolled her eyes. “Really bad choices.”

      He chuckled. “Well, if I’d had the opportunity, I probably would have made worse choices, another reason why my mom didn’t fuss too much when I went off to boot camp. She knew I needed the discipline. I was never a bad kid, but I didn’t always make the smart choices, especially in high school. My grades were low.” Of course, a lot of that had to do with being tired from working sometimes as many as two jobs after school. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do to help his family.

      It had taken his mom challenging the principal in front of the school board before they finally gave him some grace. His mom was a lot of great things, and fierce was one of them. Never in his life had he won an argument with her, and the principal had learned that the hard way.

      “Still,” she said, “it took me another four years before I figured out what I wanted to do. And another year after that before I finally had the guts to do it. What you do is heroic and dangerous. It takes a special type of person to do that job. To run toward the scary when everyone else is running away.”

      “We don’t really think about it that way.” He wanted to find out more about her, and he’d never been comfortable talking about himself. “I’m curious how you make money shopping for people.”

      She blanched.

      Shoot. He’d done it again. “No, no. I mean, I think it’s a cool job. And I’m curious about how it works. Oh, and that reminds me.” He pulled out a wad of cash. “How much do I owe you?”

      “You can pay me later. I have receipts for you in my car. I was able to get some of the stuff donated when I told them what it was for, so I bought twice as much. I hope that’s okay. Maybe these elderly people might enjoy getting more than one gift. It’s small stuff, mostly, to make their lives more comfortable. Only spent a little over half your budget and that’s with the wrapping. I’ll have to look at the receipts but it was right around six hundred.”

      “You are good at this. We can donate the rest to the charity. Are you sure I can’t compensate you in some way?”

      She shook her head. “Nope. And to answer your question, I usually get a commission. A negotiated percentage of the whole budget. A lot of what I do is for corporate clients. Finding the perfect gifts for their staff or for guests they have coming in, or finding giveaways for trade shows. We have a whole division for that last thing, and by division, I mean that’s mostly what my partner, Bebe, handles, where she finds promotional swag for different companies.”

      He swallowed the last bit of chili. “That’s interesting. I didn’t even know a business like that existed.”

      She put down her fork. “Yeah, my grandmother actually helped me figure it out.”

      “Did she have the same kind of business?”

      “Oh, no. She’s a retired professor who lives in