e one you’re keeping from me.”
Her chin went up. “You’re paranoid.”
“You’re defensive. You’re holding something against me, but I can’t fix it if I don’t know what it is.”
“Maybe I don’t appreciate how you glide back into town after a decade and expect me to be waiting—ready and willing to pick up where we left off?”
Not fair. He hadn’t expected a thing, and she knew it, but he also recognized someone trying to pick a fight to avoid a conversation. He refused to return the verbal body shot and instead focused on the real question buried in hers. “Where did we leave off, Sinclair? I remember standing right there”—he pointed out the window—“telling you I loved you and listening to you tell me the same. And then you never responded to my letters or answered my calls—”
“What letters? What calls? You mean the ones that didn’t start until months after you left?” She leaned in now, too, her icy reserve burned away by a wave of genuine outrage. “You blew me off for the entire summer—longer. By the time you finally decided to give me the time of day, I—”
“You moved on.” He lowered his voice. “It’s fine, Sinclair. I get it. You could have dropped me a line to let me know as much, but you were only sixteen, and maybe you didn’t know how to say it. You don’t have any reason to feel guilty or defensive.”
She jerked upright as if he’d slapped her. “Fuck you, Shane Maguire. I don’t feel guilty, or defensive. I’m angry. Because—because—” She literally clamped her mouth shut, turned away, and inhaled a deep breath through her nose.
There was the wall again. This time frustration got the better of him. “Because it took me longer to get in touch than you expected? I was in boot camp, for God’s sake, not on a vacation. We talked about this before I left. The Marines owned me during that time. Thirteen weeks of no cell phone, no texting, no computers. Limited opportunity to write, but I couldn’t do that anyway, because you were in Europe all summer. I would maybe…maybe…earn a phone call—”
“I had my phone the entire time. It never rang. Not once. There was a point when I would have sold my soul just to hear your voice. I marked off every day of thirteen weeks on my calendar, waiting like some pathetic idiot. But after four months of silence? No. Just…no.” Still stubbornly looking away, she brought her coffee to her lips.
The sharp note of betrayal in her voice stirred his guilty conscience. Turns out he had defensive reflexes as well. “Jesus Christ, Sinclair, that was ten fucking years ago. Something I didn’t plan happened my first week of boot camp, okay, and it screwed up my timeline. So maybe you could cut me a little slack?”
Coffee exploded from her mouth on a choking cough. She coughed again, into a napkin this time, and then drew in a careful breath. When she lowered the napkin, she looked at him as if she wanted to slug him. “Something unplanned happened to you?”
Fuck it. The incident was not his proudest moment, but apparently even after all this time, he needed to justify being out of touch longer than expected. He waited until she stopped mopping coffee from the table and looked at him again. “I got sent to the brig for decking the drill instructor. One of the recruits in my unit fell out during a training run. The guy—Salcido—was down, clutching his knee and insisting he couldn’t move, but the DI wouldn’t back off. He kept yelling, ‘On your feet, recruit.’ Salcido kept saying he couldn’t. Then the DI kicked him, and I lost it. Next thing I knew I was standing over my DI, with my knuckles on fire, watching his eye swell shut.”
“You came to his defense,” she said, sounding strangely distant. Her face went blank.
“I came this close to getting bounced”—he held up his hand, finger and thumb a half inch apart—“but the other recruits in the unit spoke up. Even so, it took three weeks for the Corps to investigate the incident and clear me. They funneled me into the next group of new recruits, and I spent the following twelve weeks on my best fucking behavior, because there is zero margin for error during a second chance.”
“I-I can only imagine.” Color slashed across her cheekbones, like crimson flags against her otherwise pale skin.
“Now you know the whole story. So, here’s the thing, Sinclair—the U.S. Marines saw fit to give me a second chance. Maybe you could do the same?”
…
Her heart stuttered in her chest. So stupid, because explanations hardly mattered after all this time. Ultimately, his didn’t change a thing. But even so, her world tilted off-center, leaving her scrambling to rebalance her internal compass and get it pointed in a safe direction. That turned out to be the door, and after mumbling a weak-assed, “I’m not doing this,” through numb lips, she managed to propel herself toward it, dodging a wave of passengers flooding into the depot from a Greyhound she hadn’t even noticed arriving.
Over the din, she heard Shane call her name, but she kept moving, shoving through the double doors and gulping in breaths of burning-cold air as she broke into a run. A car screeched to a halt to avoid plowing into her. Shane called her name again—alarmed this time—but also farther away. She dug her key out of her pocket while she rushed to her car. Thank God for keyless entry and a start-button ignition, because shaking hands would have prevented her from sliding a key into a lock. The battery juiced life into the dashboard displays, but the engine thwarted her for one panicked second. She gunned the gas and got no response, until she finally realized she still had it in park. She shoved the stick to drive, and the Tahoe lurched forward.
A hand slammed down on her hood. She jumped, and looked over in time to watch Shane shout her name once more. Anger dominated his voice now. She jerked the wheel left and shot toward the parking lot exit, bouncing hard as her tire hit the curb on her way out.
Urban off-roading, she thought hysterically and gripped the wheel a little harder. All she could think of was getting away. Getting herself under control before she said something she couldn’t unsay about old mistakes she couldn’t undo.
Her cell buzzed from the depths of the purse she’d left on her passenger seat. After a moment it stopped, then started again. She ignored the noise but steered at a more cautious speed through downtown. With every mile she put between her and the bus depot, she breathed a little easier—until she got stuck behind a cement truck just outside the Whitehall Plantation and noticed a black Range Rover coming up fast in her rearview mirror.
Adrenaline kicked in again. The kind that took control of her nervous system without any oversight from her brain. She hit the accelerator and pulled into the oncoming lane. A flatbed hauling a backhoe lumbered toward her, chugging up the hill with all its unwieldy momentum. She floored it, zipping past the cement truck and swinging back into her lane before the flatbed driver finished blowing his horn at her.
The sharp turn into her driveway forced her to slow down, but apparently, Shane possessed advanced driving skills, because he took it much faster. The Rover skidded into the turn, took a hard, fishtailing drift to account for physics, and then the big back tires spat gravel as he accelerated out of the maneuver.
Physics might not be her strong suit, but she knew math well enough. How long would it take one mad-as-hell man driving forty miles per hour to overtake one chickenshit woman driving half that speed? More than the twenty feet she had left in her driveway. Running wouldn’t work. The situation called for a new strategy. Control the confrontation. Shane was about to meet the stone wall of her resolve.
She pulled the Tahoe to a halt, jumped down from the driver’s seat, and slammed the door while the Rover screeched to a halt. The driver’s door opened before the vehicle completely stopped moving. That should have given her pause, but she gritted her teeth and set off toward him at a righteous pace…until he got out of the car and she saw his face.
Holy shit. Crashing headfirst into a Peterbilt would have been the easy way out. She barely registered drawing to a stop, possibly taking a step back, as he closed in on her like a dark angel—a dark angel looking deceptively mortal with his disheveled hair, black crewneck sweater, and dark jeans, but the fury coming off him like unearthly energy belied anything casual in his intentions. It electrified the air around him, turning the atmosphere volatile and dangerous.
A stone wall, she reminded herself and lifted her chin. “Get out.”
He just kept coming, forcing her to cede ground until the back end of the Tahoe brought her up short. “If you ever do anything that reckless again, I swear to God you won’t sit for a week.”