Military Grade Mistletoe. Julie Miller

coveting his meal or sensing Harry’s increasingly testy mood, Gideon squealed and stabbed at the plate, scattering the pile of chips across the table top. Harry shoved the plate aside and pulled the boy back, scooting the chair across the tile floor. His boot knocked against Hans, sending the dog to his feet with a startled woof.

      All at once, the dark place inside his mind erupted with a fiery explosion. He felt the pain tearing through his flesh. He heard the shouts for help, the whimpers of pain.

      Harry staggered to his feet. “Platz, Tango,” he ordered, mixing the past and the present inside his head. “Hans, I mean. Platz.” Pike’s well-trained dog instantly obeyed the German command to lie down. Slamming the door on the flashback, Harry thrust Gideon into his frightened sister’s arms and grabbed his coat. “I’m sorry. I need to walk around the block a couple of times. Clear my head.”

      “Harry?”

      “Let him go, honey.”

      An hour later, Harry had come in from the cold, apologized to his sister, finished off the meal she’d saved for him and shut himself inside the bedroom he shared with Gideon.

      The flashback had receded to the wasteland of buried images inside his head, although he was still having a hard time settling his thoughts enough to sleep. With Gideon snoring softly from his crib across the darkened room, Harry lay back on the double bed, using the flashlight from his duffel bag to read through the stack of cards and letters that normally soothed him on nights like this.

      He grinned through Daisy’s account of catching one of her students licking a potted plant in her classroom because the girl had been curious to find out what the sap oozing from the stalk tasted like. The girl had been perfectly fine, but the spate of dumb jokes that had followed would have given a stand-up comic plenty of material. The story had made his unit laugh to the extent that when any one of them made a boneheaded move, they’d teased the Marine by calling him or her a plant-licker.

      Gideon gurgled in his sleep, reminding Harry that he was the interloper here. In another couple of months, Hope and Pike would need this space for Gideon’s new little brother or sister. Although he had every intention of returning to his duties with the Corps by that time, Harry acknowledged another stab of guilt. Maybe Hope wanted to redecorate this room. She had talked about expanding their loft into the shop’s second-floor storage area, but a renovation of that scale wouldn’t happen until after the baby’s birth. Maybe he was in the way here, and Hope was too kind-hearted to say anything. Maybe he could camp out in their condo for just a few days longer, then find himself a quiet place to rent until his penance was over and he could report back to Lt. Col. Biro.