The next thing she knew, he was opening the car door and sitting in the passenger seat. He mumbled a curse when his long legs wouldn’t fit in the compact car, causing Colleen to grin despite her tears. He moved the seat back and slammed the door shut.
“Where are the kids?” she asked.
“Don’t worry. Your mom is with them in the garage. They’re working on the boat. Brendan dropped by my office last week after a P.T. session and asked if he could help with Lucy, and of course Jenny had to come once she heard.”
She stared at him in amazement. “Was anyone going to bother to tell me?”
“We did. This evening is the first time they’ve come. Why are you crying?” he changed subjects abruptly, leaning toward her.
Colleen stared through the front window.
“I always seem to be crying around you,” she mumbled. “I hope you’ll take my word for it that I don’t normally go to tears at the drop of a hat.”
“Does that mean the tears have something to do with me?”
She inhaled slowly and sighed. “Inadvertently, maybe,” she admitted. She avoided his laserlike stare, but she felt it like a touch on her cheek. “To be honest, I was sitting out here in the driveway trying to figure out why I’m so defensive about going into your house.”
“My house?” he asked flatly, clearly not understanding.
Colleen sniffed and nodded.
He made a frustrated sound and turned. He grabbed a box of tissues from the backseat. “Here,” he said, offering her the box.
“Thanks,” Colleen murmured, taking one
“So, what’s my house got to do with anything?” he asked after she’d dried her cheeks.
“The house is really just a symbol of it all, I guess. The truth is…” She paused while she withdrew another tissue and dabbed at another falling tear. She felt so ashamed of her idiocy. She could be stubborn at times, but once she’d taken ownership of her failings, her contrition was absolute. Still, this wasn’t easy.
“I…I owe you a huge apology,” she began falteringly. “I’ve held so much anger toward you in the past. I’ve been so unfair. You never did anything to deserve my attitude.”
“I may have been stubborn a time or two myself,” he admitted sheepishly.
She turned to him and smiled. She really liked him in that moment.
“No. You’ve been nothing but kind and generous ever since Brendan’s surgery. I wish you’d accept my apology for being so…prickly around you,” she finished in a quavering whisper.
His expression hardened and his eyes widened slightly, as if he wasn’t really sure how to take her shift in demeanor.
“Colleen,” he muttered. He touched her jaw. His fingers felt pleasantly cool and dry next to her skin. His hand shifted and he palmed her neck, his fingers rubbing just below her scalp. Her entire body stilled in awareness, as if every cell had just gone on high alert at his touch. “If it makes you feel any better, I always understood why you felt the need to go on the defensive around me.”
“You did?” Part of her was surprised by his admission, but most of her was completely focused on his massaging fingertips on her nape.
“The cards were stacked against us. Our history saw to that. It was inevitable things were going to be prickly between us, as you put it.”
She lowered her gaze, staring at his nose. “Then Sunset Beach happened, and things got even more complicated.”
He made a sound of agreement and bent his head toward her. He continued to stroke her muscles with talented fingertips. “I probably should admit that I was attracted to you before what happened there…before the accident, even.”
Her gaze bounced up to his. “You were?”
“One time when I was a teenager, I saw you in front of the library. You smiled at me and said hi.”
“You remember that?” she blurted out, amazed.
His arched his eyebrows incredulously. “Are you kidding? I was an outsider looking into your world. In the summers, I worked fifty…sixty hours a week. In the hockey off-season, I was a geek who spent whatever spare time he had with his nose buried in a book—”
“You were not a geek. You were brilliant,” Colleen insisted, but he continued as if she hadn’t interrupted him.