Looking For Love (Semper Fi, The Forever Faithful Series Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Thank you, Gracias, Dank u wel… and a peek behind the curtain

  Also by Stella Starling

  About the Author

  If you enjoyed this book…

  Looking For Love

  Stella Starling

  Looking For Love

  Looking For Love © Stella Starling 2017

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  Edited by Elizabeth Peters

  Cover design by Resplendent Media

  All rights reserved. No part of this story may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied within critical reviews and articles.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  The author has asserted his/her rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book.

  This book contains sexually explicit content which is suitable only for mature readers.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Thank you, Gracias, Dank u wel… and a peek behind the curtain

  Also by Stella Starling

  About the Author

  If you enjoyed this book…

  1

  Zach

  Zach Hunter slung his backpack over his shoulder as he got out of his truck, happy for a chance to finally stretch his legs after the two-hour drive back from Angeles National Forest. The long drive was worth it for the rush of spending all day jumping off the Bridge to Nowhere, though. He’d been out of cell phone range all day, and as he walked toward his apartment building, he pulled out his phone, figuring he should make sure his morning plans were still a go before he crashed.

  We still on for 0600 at Mission Bay?

  Zach shot the text off to his friend Gabe, pausing in front of Ana García’s apartment when he noticed her morning newspaper buried deep in the spiny gooseberry bush by her door. He grinned. He had no doubt that she’d had a few choice words to say when she’d seen it there, and since she got just as prickly as the gooseberry whenever she thought he was trying to look out for her, retrieving it gave him the perfect excuse to check in.

  He reached for the newspaper, ignoring the sting as the thorny berries did their best to remove a fair amount of his skin. It was late, but Ana’s light was still on and Zach could hear the faint sound of rapid-fire Spanish from one of the telenovelas she was addicted to coming from inside.

  His phone buzzed before he had a chance to knock on her door. It was Gabe.

  Dude, yes already to 0600. Jet packs!!! But quit texting, I’m trying to sleep, yo.

  Zach laughed, not buying it for a second.

  Sleeping? Really? Because I thought Jake was flying home tonight…

  Given that Gabe’s husband—a flight attendant—had been gone for four days, Zach was actually surprised Gabe had bothered to answer his message at all.

  Yeah, Jakey’s here, so leave me alone and let me get some already. ;-)

  Then, hot on the heels of the first:

  Wasn’t gonna rub it in, Z, since I know you’re batting oh-for-all-of-them lately…

  And a final text:

  *cough* dry spell *cough*

  Zach snorted, sending back a one-fingered emoji that expressed his thoughts better than any words could.

  Gabe liked to tease Zach that he’d become a serial dater, and it was a bit ironic that while Zach was the one who’d spent the last year actively looking for love, Gabe—a former commitment-phobe—was the one who’d actually found it. Gabe’s dry-spell dig wasn’t far off the mark, either… especially given that lately, Zach had decided to pass on hookups and hold out for the real thing.

  The real thing that he had yet to find.

  And yes, missing out on regular sex kind of sucked, but there were plenty of ways to deal with sexual frustration. Zach grinned. The adrenaline rush of jumping off a 120-foot bridge earlier that day had been a pretty good one. And in the morning? Flying over Mission Bay with an Iron Man-style jet pack strapped to his back would be another.

  Zach tucked away his phone, already anticipating the rush. And, sure, there was no denying that a part of him—a certain, very insistent part that was getting damn tired of its close, intimate relationship with his right hand—wasn’t fully satisfied with adrenaline as a substitute for getting laid. Zach’s dick would have been more than happy to give up on the idea of holding out for love and go back to getting casual sex on a regular basis, or at least back to the kind of long-term relationships he’d had a few times in the past. The ones that had been based almost entirely on sex, convenience, and a dash of superficial compatibility with someone he liked.

  Zach’s heart, on the other hand, was stubborn. It had been there, done that, and now it wanted more.

  He knocked on Ana’s door, tapping the newspaper against his thigh as he waited for her to answer. After a moment, the sound of her television muted.

  “¿Quién es?”

  “It’s Zach, Ana,” he answered, raising his voice to be sure she could hear him.

  He knew it would be a few minutes before she got to the door. It took a little time for her to cross the room on her creaky knees… and then, of course, she’d have to stash her walker in the coat closet so that they could both pretend she hadn’t needed it. He grinned, familiar with the routine, and brushed off a few small drops of blood that had beaded up on his wrist from the gooseberry thorns while he waited.

  Gabe always accused him of having the patience of a saint, but in Zach’s experience, the best things in life couldn’t be rushed. It was why he wasn’t discouraged by his recent dating record, despite a year-long string of taking out people who’d all failed to—as Ana referred to it—light the spark that was impossible to put out.

  During Zach’s last deployment, he’d had a come-to-Jesus moment of clarity out in the
field after losing some good men to an IED, and the wake-up call had reminded him that no one really ever knew how much time they had. He’d decided then and there that before his time was up—whenever that turned out to be—he wanted something he’d never had before. He wanted the kind of love that hadn’t existed in his world growing up. The kind that would fill him with the same kind of rush that jumping off a bridge or out of an airplane did; the kind that would fill him up with all the things he saw in Gabe’s eyes whenever Gabe looked at Jake.

  And, dry spell or not, he was both patient and stubborn enough to keep looking until he found it.

  “Un momento, Zachary,” Ana said from behind the closed door, her words not quite masking a familiar scraping sound that told him she was hiding her walker. A moment later, the door swung open, her eyes lighting up at the sight of him.

  “Hola, Ana,” Zach said, pulling her frail body in for a gentle, one-armed hug. “Glad I caught you still awake.”

  “Pfft,” she said, squeezing him back for a minute. “You know old women never waste time sleeping. There is too much to do and too little time left to do it in.”

  He sent a pointed look in the direction of the muted television screen behind her. “You mean like finding out if El Centauro’s son will help him escape before he dies in police custody?”

  “Quiet, mijo,” she said, smacking him on the shoulder. Her lips twitched, then she added a gleeful, “But did I not tell you? Season two has been started. El Centauro did not die!”

  “I’m shocked,” Zach said dryly, biting back a smile. “However will Yolanda and Gerardo find their happily-ever-after if he’s still around to mess with their lives?”

  “I am sure they will manage,” Ana said, patting his arm. “Love always wins in the end. It is the way of things, Zachary.”

  He laughed, but couldn’t disagree, at least not when it came to the plots of the shows she loved. And in the real world? Sometimes it proved true there, too. At least, he was hoping so.

  Ana looked him up and down with an expression of dismay.

  “You are a mess, mijo,” she said, clucking her tongue as her eyes found the scratches on his arm. Her gaze moved from there to his chest, and he belatedly remembered that he’d ripped his shirt climbing back onto the bridge after his last jump. A small price to pay for the rush.

  “What have you gotten up to today? Please tell me it was not risking your neck again for no good reason. Is there not enough danger when you are in uniform?”

  “Bungee jumping,” he answered with a grin, not bothering to answer the second question.

  Unless he was deployed with the Marines, his day job as a hospital corpsman for the Navy didn’t exactly provide the kind of adrenaline-inducing danger she seemed to picture, but still, there was no denying that it was nice to have someone worry about him.

  When he’d first been transferred to San Diego, he’d moved into his little one-bedroom at the Cielo del Mar apartments because it was both cheap and close to his duty station at Camp Pendleton… but if he was honest, Ana was a large part of why he was still there, five years later. They may not always see eye to eye on things, but Zach kind of loved her. He’d never had a grandmother of his own, and even though he’d never said as much to Ana, that was how he always thought of her.

  “Bungee jumping?” she repeated, shaking her head as she smoothed a hand over the tear in his shirt. “You are lucky that I ask Him to watch over you. It is amazing that you have not yet broken your neck, the way you carry on, mijo.”

  Zach grinned. Ana’s belief in the power of prayer—of her prayers, in particular—was unshakeable. And who was he to argue? Like she’d said, he hadn’t broken his neck yet, so maybe there really was something to it.

  “Thank you,” he said, and even if he wasn’t entirely convinced that there was really someone listening to those prayers, his gratitude was sincere.

  He couldn’t help comparing her loving concern with the kind of attention he’d grown up with… or, more accurately, with the complete and total inattention he’d grown up with, no matter what kind of extreme, self-destructive stunts he’d pulled in a bid to get his father to notice that he existed or his mother to acknowledge that he mattered. Basically, to see if either one of his parents had really given a shit about him at all.

  Answer: a resounding no.

  Karen Hunter and John Pearce were two people who were more interested in doing what was easy than what was right, and if there was a blessing to be had in their choice to always put their own wants ahead of their child’s needs, it was that growing up as their son had shown him exactly the kind of person he never wanted to be. When push came to shove, Zach would always choose to do the right thing.

  And helping out a neighbor who felt more like family than his own had ever been? He grinned. That was definitely the right thing to do, sharp thorns or not.

  “La Prensa was in the gooseberry again,” Zach said, handing it over.

  She took the paper from him, turning to glare at the decorative plant and mumble some seriously dirty words under her breath. Zach swallowed back a laugh, but when she gave him a sharp look, he immediately replaced his grin with an innocent expression. He had no problem letting them both pretend that his Spanish wasn’t good enough to have followed along as she’d condemned the gooseberry to the hottest corner of hell, questioned the ancestry of her newspaper delivery boy, and invoked the wrath of a few saints for good measure.

  “That delivery boy,” Ana said, tsking as she tucked the paper under her arm and reached for Zach’s wrist. She ran a gnarled finger over the fresh abrasions from the gooseberry bush, shaking her head. “I know that he aims for this devil-bush on purpose. Then he comes to collect my money at the end of the month—looking up at me like un querubín inocente, all big eyes and sweetness in his smile—and I cannot find it in my heart to chastise him for his determination to keep me from finding out the news of the world.”

  Zach laughed. “My offer still stands, Ana. Anytime you’d like me to show you how to read the paper online, just let me know.”

  Ana waved him off, shaking her head just like he’d known she would. “I cannot read it if I cannot feel it in my hands,” she said, applying a logic Zach had never quite understood. “Words on the computer screen, they are not the same, Zachary.”

  “Okay,” Zach said, grinning down at her. He knew she preferred a rousing argument to his easy surrender, but 0600 wasn’t all that far away, and he was tired. He’d make it up to her another time.

  “No trying to convince me to go online this time, mijo?” she asked, doing a poor job of hiding her disappointment. Then her face brightened. “Well, that is okay, because I can see you are tired, but you are also in a good mood. And a good mood despite looking like you have fallen over a cliff today? I think this must mean that things are going well with that nice woman you met on the mountain bicycles last month, no? ¿Como se llama? Shayna? Shannon?”

  “It was ‘Shantelle,’” Zach said, holding back a laugh at the predictable turn in the conversation.

  “And Shantelle, you were bungee jumping with her today?”

  “No. Things didn’t work out with her.”

  Zach wasn’t at all surprised when Ana’s face fell at his answer. Before her late husband, Fernando, had passed, she’d been blessed with five decades of the kind of love that Zach was hoping to find for himself someday. Ana was in love with the idea of love.

  “Such a shame,” she said, giving a heavy and overly-dramatic sigh. “I liked that one, Zachary. Do you think there might still be a chance…?”

  Zach shook his head. He’d liked Shantelle, too, but as far as he was concerned, life was both too short to settle for someone he only liked, and too long to consider spending with someone who didn’t inspire the same kind of unquenchable devotion he heard in Ana’s voice whenever she spoke of Fernando.

  “No,” he told Ana. “I’ve actually got a date with someone else tomorrow night.”

  He fully expected to s
ee her face light up at the news—her eternal optimism about his love life a given—but instead, she looked up at him warily.

  “Please tell me it is not with Janis.”

  “Janis?” He repeated, sputtering a laugh. “That ship has sailed, Ana. Of course it’s not Janis.”

  He and Janis had dated casually but exclusively for a couple of years, a third of which he’d been out of the country for. At least, he’d thought the relationship was exclusive... until she’d messaged him during his last deployment to let him know that she’d been getting more than just lessons from her tennis instructor. When Zach had gotten back in-country a few months later, she’d said she wanted to try again, but it had taken him all of five minutes in her company to realize that he couldn’t get over her unfaithfulness.

  Well, that, and there just wasn’t the kind of spark between them that he was looking for. If he was being honest, there never had been.

  “That is good,” Ana said, nodding decisively. “She came by today looking for you, and I was hoping you had not decided to be so foolish as to take her back.”

  Zach blinked, surprised into silence. He hadn’t seen or heard from Janis in months, and he didn’t particularly want to. Even though she’d been the one to cheat on him, she hadn’t taken it well when he’d told her they were really done.

  She’d had a fun-loving, adventurous side that had meshed well with his, and there had been times when she’d been genuinely sweet and caring, but the finality of his “no” when she’d wanted to try again had brought out an ugly, selfish, entitled side of her that Zach hadn’t realized was there before. It had reminded him of his mother, and he’d wanted no part of it.