“You were fifteen when you met him.”
“Yeah.”
“Not usually an age when a girl knows just what she needs for the rest of her life.”
“I wasn’t your average girl.”
Of course she wasn’t. She was an angel come to earth.
But that wasn’t what she meant. “That’s right. You were starved for love.” Guilt seized Scott as soon as the words left his mouth. “I know you loved Paul, but you also loved being loved. Admit it.”
He didn’t know why he was doing this. Why pushing her was so important. But after all these years of loving her, of silently swallowing the frustration, the hurt, the things that he’d needed out of love and concern to say, he could no longer keep silent. He’d never be able to love her as he needed to. His own conscience wasn’t going to allow that, even if by some miracle she suddenly woke up and found herself in love with him.
But...
“I loved being loved.” She was looking out her window and the words were muffled.
“You never looked at another guy after you met Paul. And you were only fifteen,” he repeated. “How do you know there wasn’t someone out there who was even more perfect for you than Paul was? Someone who wasn’t going to curtail every spontaneous impulse you had?”
“I wasn’t spontaneous! I’ve never been spontaneous. When it comes to my personal life I’m the most cautious person I’ve ever known.”
“And when you finally had a family to love you, when you started to trust us to be there for you, that person who’d been locked defensively inside you during all those years of being shuffled from one foster family to the next started to emerge.”
She made a sound. Scott waited, thinking she’d said something. But maybe not.
“That girl had an infectious spontaneity Laurel. Not that it had much chance to take root. Paul squelched it fairly rapidly.”
“I needed Paul,” she said, her voice taking on an edge it hadn’t had before. A certainty. “I needed his conservativeness, his unwavering ability to stick to the road he was on.”
“Because his road led to you?”
He could understand that. He just didn’t like it. That was no reason to tie herself to someone—and now to his memory—for the rest of her life.
“No,” she said, slowly turning to face him. “Because I needed someone who would teach me to trust. Someone who was going to be predictable, who I could count on to do exactly what he said he was going to do, someone who wasn’t going to change his mind about me. Someone I could believe.”
As a child she’d been told so many times that she was home—only to be taken away again when the family decided they no longer wanted to do foster care, or the money wasn’t enough to make the job worthwhile anymore. Or when they got pregnant with a child of their own and needed Laurel’s room.
Scott knew all of those things had happened to her.
“What about now?” He had to ask—to twist his own knife a little deeper, give those demons inside him more reason to keep tormenting him. “Do you still think you need someone conservative like Paul?”
“I still love Paul.”
It didn’t quite answer the question he’d asked.
Or maybe it did.
* * *
CECILIA HAMILTON’S HOME was a beautiful ranch-style building with a huge expanse of lawn broken only by the occasional flower bed filled with colorful, late-blooming perennials.
Those flower beds were well tended. Someone had to be in residence, or a service had been hired to care for the place.
“And this is a summer home?” Laurel said, accompanying Scott up the massive walk.
He grinned. “Kind of makes you wonder what her real home looks like, doesn’t it?”
There was no answer to Scott’s knock on the front door.