Perfect Trilogy 1 : Almost Perfect

Chapter 2

Never let your past limit your future.
-How to Have a Perfect Life

Maddy wondered about Jane's advice as she tossed the book into her suitcase and headed for Santa Fe. Was it possible to leave the past behind? With every mile that flew by, she felt more and more as if she were seventeen again and racing off to meet the boy her overbearing, police officer father had forbidden her to see. Her body tingled every time she remembered how Joe used to sweep her into his arms and kiss her as if his life depended on getting her naked as quickly as possible.

They'd been crazy-mad in love in that way teenagers often were, without a practical thought in their heads about the future.

Until Joe had been arrested along with some friends for stealing a car. Then the future had crashed down on both of them.

Colonel Fraser had used every contact he had to get the charges against Joe dismissed-since he'd been an unwitting participant-and have Joe accepted into the Army. To everyone's surprise, and the Frasers' immense relief, Joe really took to the Army and informed Maddy he didn't want a short stint. The day he proposed, he proudly announced he'd been accepted into Ranger School and planned to make the Army his career. He thought she would share his enthusiasm, but her dreams of becoming an independent woman and a world-famous artist did not include getting married right out of high school the way her mother had, then putting aside all sense of self to be the perfect little homemaker. Of course, at the time, she hadn't known that the words "wife" and "slave" were not synonymous.

Memories of how it all had ended made her grimace many times during the drive from Austin to Santa Fe. The scene had been bitter and ugly, and Joe had looked at her with such shock, it was clear he'd felt completely betrayed.

But that had been a lifetime ago. Surely he was over it by now. As a mature adult, he had to see in retrospect that she'd made the right choice. For both of them. She'd been entirely too immature and would have made a terrible wife for anyone. Especially a soldier who would have to deploy at a moment's notice for covert operations that could last for months.

Yes, she'd made the right choice.

And Joe would be long over the rejection by now.

Maddy repeated that reassurance like a mantra as she passed a sign that told her Camp Enchantment was just ahead. She glanced through the trees on her left. The road had been following a river through several miles of untamed countryside, as she climbed from the desert into the mountains, but now there was a collection of buildings on the opposite bank.

Her stomach fluttered with the realization that she'd be seeing Joe face-to-face in just a few minutes. As camp director, he'd be on hand to greet her and the other coordinators who were arriving as an advance guard to get the camp ready for the counselors and campers. Weeks had passed since she'd built up the courage to call Mama Fraser and accept the job. If Joe had any objection to seeing her again, he'd had plenty of time to tell her not to come.

She tried for the thousandth time to imagine how their first meeting would go...

He would greet her with a smile and ask how she'd been as each of them surreptitiously took stock of how the other had changed. He'd been a tall, wiry teenager when she'd seen him last, with dark good looks that spoke of some portion of Native American blood. What portion was anyone's guess, since he barely remembered his birth mother and hadn't known his father at all.

She tried to picture him slightly heavier, with the muscles he'd no doubt acquired in the Rangers going soft now that he was out and his jet-black hair beginning to recede. They would laugh a little awkwardly perhaps as they remembered how greedy they'd once been for each other. He would politely tell her she looked good, even though she'd gained a few pounds and collected her first faint wrinkles around the eyes. Personally, she didn't mind the weight or the wrinkles. Aging was just part of living, and it beat the heck out of the alternative: dying young, as Nigel had.