nodded, understanding the same desperation that had driven him away from their father’s brand of torture as soon as he’d been able. Like Zach, he’d left their mother here to face it, since she’d refused to admit to what her husband was, much less abandon the material comforts and social status she’d enjoyed as a Rayford. As sorry as he felt for the suffering she’d endured when he’d been believed dead, Ian still hadn’t entirely forgiven her for refusing to protect him and his brother back when it might have mattered.
But there was nothing to be gained by treading that old minefield, and he quickly changed the subject. “I’ll apologize for scaring Mama. I’ll remember my phone next time. But I won’t be coming back with you now, not unless you tell me who’s there waiting.”
“I’ll tell you this much. It’s a woman. A woman from your past.”
Ian frowned, wondering which past his brother meant: the one he couldn’t bear to think of, or the dark, erotic glimmers that invaded his dreams every night.
* * *
Andrea had known Ian grew up on a working cattle ranch in North Texas, but she’d had no idea that he’d come from money. Maybe she’d been projecting the hand-me-downs and frequent moves that had defined her own hardscrabble upbringing or maybe she’d judged Ian by his rare comments about living hand to mouth after going out on his own right out of high school, but the ranch itself, especially the opulent white mansion at its center, convinced her she’d had it wrong. As did the fact that a heavyset woman with her pinned-back gray hair and a starched uniform wheeled out a real, honest-to-goodness tea cart with a silver pot and baskets of delicate confections to the fussy formal living room where she waited while Ian’s mother, Nancy Rayford, did her best to pick Andrea’s brain.
“So, dear,” said the neatly dressed, silver-haired woman over the gold rim of her teacup, “you were saying, you met my son in California?”
Andrea didn’t answer, too distracted by the heat rising to her face as the maid offered her some cookies. “Th-thank you very much. These are lovely.” Andrea chose a chocolate-centered square to be polite, nearly choking on the thought of how her mother, who had waited on more than a few pampered rich ladies in her day, might have looked a lot like “Miss Althea” had she lived.
The maid nodded and excused herself, leaving Mrs. Rayford to repeat her question.
Andrea nodded. “Sorry. Yes, we met on a country road not far outside of San Diego. I was out riding when the chain came off my bike and sent me flying.” She shivered in the air-conditioning, remembering the moment she’d gone over the handlebars. “Fast as I was moving, it’s a wonder I didn’t split my skull along with my helmet.” As it was, she’d been a bloody mess, with the frame of a bike she’d scrimped and saved for for two years bent so badly it was never again race-worthy.
Mrs. Rayford frowned. “You don’t mean to tell me you were riding one of those noisy motorcycles, do you?”
Andrea nearly laughed aloud at the horror souring the woman’s prim face, as if a female on a motorcycle would have been the scandal of the century. “Not a motorcycle, no. A racing bike, for the triathlons I used to compete in before that crash. I tore up my knee pretty badly in the fall. If it hadn’t been for Ian pulling off the road to help me, I could’ve lain there for a long time before anyone else came along.”
She remembered the moment she’d first seen the tall, dark-haired man jumping out of his SUV and racing toward her, gorgeous as any guy she’d ever met in real life, but in a masculine, clean-cut way that left actors and male models in the dust. Hurting as she’d been, she’d still felt sucker punched by his blue eyes, the intensity and concern in them as real as anything she’d ever seen.
“He was always a bighearted boy,” his mother reminisced. “Always dragging home strays.”
Jolted by her words, Andrea wondered if she’d just joined their ranks in his mother’s eyes, if the woman somehow saw through the tan slacks and coral shell she wore with a light jacket, through the fake gold earrings and the thrift-store beige pumps and all the way back to the scabby-kneed, motherless girl she had once been. Telling herself that couldn’t be, that Nancy Rayford only knew her as Zach’s former fiancée, a psychologist who happened to work an hour away in Marston, Andrea said, “He didn’t exactly drag me home, but he did drive me to the ER.”
Behind her, the floor creaked, and she turned to face the man she’d met that long-ago day. Though his face was leaner and his tan deeper, she recognized those deep blue eyes and came to her feet at once. But his eyes were different, too, she realized, haunted by events he could not consciously remember.
“Ian,” she managed, pulse revving as she fought an instinct to run to the man she’d once loved and throw her arms around him. “I’m so glad to see you, so relieved that you’re...”
He stared into her face, his gaze as unreadable as it was disconcerting. Her stomach fluttered in response, and she felt an outbreak of tiny beads of perspiration.
“He won’t remember you, of course,” his mother announced. “He didn’t know any of us here at all, not for days and days—”
“Andrea?” he asked, taking two steps closer. Close enough that she saw his color deepen and recognized what looked like pure relief wash over him. “Andie, is it really you?”
Andie, he had called her, using the nickname no one else did...
Before she could react, his mother scolded, “You’ll need a shower before you come in on the good furniture. I can smell the horse on you from here.”
Paying her no mind, Ian took two more steps and claimed Andrea, pulling her into his arms and kissing her for all he was worth.
The connection arced through every nerve ending, raising each fine hair and jolting her with memories of how incredibly well their bodies worked together. The searing contact made her ache for more, forgetting all the ways they’d wounded one another.
Forgetting, at least for a few moments, the other woman who stood gaping at them and the man Andrea herself had so recently promised to marry, a man whose face she struggled to recall.
Finally, she pulled away, a red-hot tide of embarrassment scorching her face. Shaking her head, she stammered, “I—I’m sorry. S-sorry, Ian, but what you’re remembering—that was two years ago. It’s been a long time since we—”
“I remember the trip we took together to Key West in Florida,” he said, the words coming in a rush as she took two steps back. “There was a little bed-and-breakfast, and you wore—there was this blue bikini. I’ve been dreaming of that trip, of all that color, of you for so long now.”
The professional in her noticed the way his eyes had dilated and the light that had come into them, extinguishing the pain she’d first glimpsed. As much as she hated dimming that excitement, she told herself that letting him go on believing would be crueler.
“You’re right,” she said. “What you remember really happened. But afterward, so did a lot of other things. We’re not—we’re not together anymore, not in that way. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about what’s happened to you. It doesn’t mean that I can’t be your friend.”
“We’re not...we’re not together anymore?”
Confusion shifted through his handsome features, followed by a sorrow so profound it
