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hurried, he still had time to stop into the commissary, buy some flowers and stash them in his car before his shift started. He shoved the phone in his pocket and headed off in that direction, hope quickening his steps.
    Tara frowned at her phone, rereading the brief text for the fourth time.
    McK? What was this, Top Gun ? She supposed Love, Your Doting Husband or Kisses was too much to expect at this stage, but surely she merited the use of his first name at least. Even if it was a stupid one.
    She peered over his shoulder as he filled out the marriage application. “I can’t wait to see what your mama came up with for your middle name.”
    He wrote the word Harrison in tidy block capitals. “For a long time I figured it was my father’s name. That was pretty much all I knew about him. Then my mom told me I was named after the county where I was conceived. Turns out my dad’s name was Derek.”
    She touched the small of his back. “Do you know why she picked your first name?”
    Chance shrugged. “Fifth kid, first boy. Maybe she was hoping this time she’d get it right.”
    â€œDid she?”
    â€œNot even close.”
    With the memory of his rueful smile hovering behind her eyes, Tara deposited the phone on the counter and planted her hands on her hips, surveying the kitchen around her. If she wanted Chance to treat her like a wife, it was time she started acting like one. She had four hours before he’d be home for lunch—more than long enough to clean up the kitchen, cook him something to eat and make herself presentable.
    She imagined his delighted grin as she set a heaping plate of food in front of him, the subsequent failure of that homemade meal to hold his attention as his gaze followed her across the room, her secretive smile as she bent over the sink at an unnecessarily deep angle and he licked his lips without even glancing at his lunch.
    Yes. She was totally going to make this happen. Just as soon as she’d had a cup of coffee.
    Three-and-a-half hours later Tara was darting between the upstairs bathroom, bedroom and spare room, leaving wet footprints on the floorboards as she cursed herself for forgetting to pack her hairdryer.
    Her morning hadn’t been quite as productive as she’d hoped. After staring blankly into the refrigerator and failing to puzzle the contents into a viable recipe, she decided to drive to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for the one meal her grandmother taught her to make way back when she was young—meatloaf. Only by the time she drove the twenty minutes into Meridian, spent another twenty finding what she needed and made the journey back did she realized it was already too late to peel, boil and mash the potatoes she’d bought as a side dish. Deciding to steam some of the vegetables in the fridge instead, she searched for 30-minute meatloaf on the Internet and started chopping an onion.
    When she finally slid the misshapen, lumpy loaf into the oven it was noon, the kitchen looked like a bombsite, she had egg in her hair and she’d vowed never to cook anything ever again. She stepped out of the shower just in time to see Chance’s text that he was on his way, and she scrambled into her clothes and wrapped a towel around her head while she searched his house for a hairdryer.
    â€œNot that a soldier with a crew cut is likely to need one,” she muttered, yanking open drawer after drawer in his bedroom dresser, rifling through the socks and T-shirts she found inside and then slamming them shut.
    She sprinted back to the spare room, belatedly thinking to check the small drawer in what looked like a discarded bedside table. She pulled it out to find a pile of envelopes and folded pieces of paper, and exhaled in frustration. The force with which she shoved the drawer back into place disturbed the pile, and in the second before it closed she caught sight of what looked like a photograph of a woman.