I’m home to stay. I want a family—and that includes you and Jenny. If you’ll have me.” He took her hands in his, feeling like a drowning man holding on to a lifeline—and he finally said the words he’d been holding in since the girl he loved started dating his best friend fifteen years before. “Marry me, Lissa.”
Chapter 2
“Wh-what?”
It wasn’t exactly the answer Mitch hoped for. Nor was the look on her face. Surprised, yes. Stunned, maybe. Joyful, beyond his dreams. But the one look he hadn’t expected from her was that of a fawn he’d just shot.
Stricken. Bewildered. Betrayed.
So much for dreams and half-hidden hopes. He’d done it again. What a fool. What a heel. The world’s biggest jerk. Come home after twelve years, make conversation for five minutes and what did he do? Propose to her! He shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. He should have taken it slow, courted her with care; but no, he’d gone at her like a bull at a gate, let the dam break—and all he’d accomplished was to shock and confuse her.
He had no option but to go on with it now. He had to try to repair the damage he’d caused. “Think about it, Lissa. It’s the perfect solution for us all.”
She whitened and her eyes went dark like a lamp shattered by stones, bloodless and cold and broken. “No.” She tugged until he released her hands; she stumbled away from him, her breaths harsh and heaving, like she was trying not to throw up. “Don’t say it again,” she finally muttered. “Not ever!”
“Lissa—”
“I said no.” She flung up a hand between them. It was small and delicate, like Lissa herself—yet because it shook so hard, it was as effective a barrier as bricks and mortar, halting his advance. She turned her back on him, picking up her mug, sloshing coffee on the counter as she took unsteady swigs. “The kids will be home from school soon.” She spoke as if nothing had happened. “Matt and Luke will be so happy to see you—but expect hostility from Jenny. She loves her brothers. We’re a family.” The implication was clear: And we don’t need you.
Mitch dragged in a breath, seeing his life’s dream besides flying planes crumbling before his eyes. To him Lissa always had, always would, represent everything good and right and decent in the world. All that was beautiful and precious in his eyes lived and breathed here in Breckerville, on a sleepy verdant farm and in a pair of gentle gray eyes, a mouth made to love his body and a heart that had never known what boundaries were.
Except in this, obviously.
God, oh, God, he’d lost her. She didn’t love him. Didn’t want him. Not even to keep his kids—kids she obviously did love. “Won’t you even think about it?”
“I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want a ‘perfect solution’ to a problem I didn’t know I had!” Spitting the words out like epithets, she swiveled around to face him, her face filled with burning wrath. “You’ve been gone over twelve years, and in all that time, I never get a thing. No word, no call, no letter. I didn’t know if you were alive or dead until you needed my help with Matt and Luke. Now you waltz home after almost half a lifetime away and tell me you want to get married, just like that.” She snapped her fingers, her eyes flashing. “I’m not a dog you can call to heel, Mitch McCluskey.”
He bit the inside of his mouth. Somewhere along the line, his gentle Lissa had grown feisty. She’d squared up to him like Mike Tyson in a prematch slanging bout. What the hell had he said to make her quiver with fury like that? “I’m sorry.” He stumbled over the long-unused word, jerking a hand through his hair, and cursed when it caught in his tangled curls. “I hated leaving you. I’ve missed you like crazy the whole time I’ve been gone. Not a day’s passed when I didn’t think about you, want to see you, call or write—but Tim made his feelings pretty final.”
“But I didn’t,” she snarled, startling him with the vivid passion in her face. “You just left me—left us both behind. You knew how much Tim cared about you. Surely you knew he’d regret what he’d done when he was sober? And he did, Mitch—but we both thought you’d come back. And how do you think I felt, waiting day after day for a call or letter to know you were safe? I had to call the Air Force a year later to make sure you were alive!” She whirled on him again, a delicate china tigress, even her sheathed and painted claws ripping his heart to shreds. “I loved you, damn it. You knew I’d worry myself sick about you, and you never once bothered to let me know you were alive and all right!”
“I knew. You and Tim were the only two people on God’s earth I was sure cared about me.” He turned aside, looking out the window to the vista of shimmering, sun-drenched fields he’d loved from first sight, seventeen years before. Breckerville and Lissa. The only sense of belonging he’d ever had; the only place he ever felt at home, at peace, where the tempests roaring inside him calmed like the waters of the Jordan at a word from the Messiah. “But when he did that to me right in front of the whole town, and you didn’t stop him, I didn’t know what to think. Sure I was out of line with the speech about you. I was stupid, jealous of what you two had, and more than a bit drunk, I’ll admit it—but I’d forgiven him far worse. Did he ever tell you why?”
Her voice came to him, strained. Hiding secrets. Hers or Tim’s? “I think that’s something he’ll have to tell you himself.”
So she was still loyal to Tim, even after all he’d done to her. He held the sigh in. The path he’d finally hoped clear was far from smooth. Mitch the dreamer strikes again—shot down as usual by the Red Baron of reality. “Where does he live now?”
“Sydney. Ashfield. He owns and runs a gym near the city with a partner. He comes up here every second weekend to see Jenny. Sometimes during the week, too, depending on his schedule. He’s become a father figure to the boys in the past five months. He takes the kids to football games, plays with them, helps them with school projects. Things like that.”
He turned to her, but she’d averted her face. She was talking too much. Lissa always did that when she was scared, or hiding something. “Does he stay here?”
“Yes.” She fiddled with the cloth on the counter. Waiting for the question. He knew it. He sensed the pot boiling inside her, the potent stew of dread and anger, daring him to speak.
Like a fool, he plunged on. He couldn’t stop the gut-deep jealousy eating at him, clawing with the sharp-edged talons of Iago’s cunning. “In your bedroom?” he rasped.
Like a flash she turned on him. “And who’s been in your bed lately, Mitch? Who’s filled your lonely nights the past twelve years? How many times have you sunk to doing things you hate so you’re not alone, even for a few hours?”
He’d expected her to shove the question back in his face, but not with such raw intensity. Oh, yeah, she’d walked his path, if from the other side of the fence. He understood that loneliness. The darkness of nights filled with aching. The sunrises and sunsets over concrete and stone, standing alone in a city of four million people, that city not where you ached to be, none of those people the one you hungered to be with. Even when he was on a mission, even when he’d saved someone’s life, it only patched over the gap for a few hours, before the gut-gnawing voracious need for home and family and Lissa. Dear God, how he’d ached for her; a devouring need to sink inside her, lose his pain in her smile, her arms and welcoming body forever left the wound open again, savage and unhealed and bleeding.
He’d learned long ago how to live alone. Taking another woman to his bed or hers—even women who knew the
