have! What happened to—”
“The previous owner? Max Rossiter?” He shrugged. “He’d been ill for a long time and he passed away a couple of months ago—”
She made an odd sound, like the croak of a parched frog.
Intrigued by her reaction, he kept talking and watched her with fast-growing curiosity. “Shortly before that, he’d put the house up for sale—it’s only two miles out of town and it has the greatest view, so I bought it. It had been mortgaged to the hilt—the old guy had had a stroke several years back and he just couldn’t keep up with his extra expenses so in the end he was forced to sell…”
If she’d been pale before, she was ashen now. Alarmingly so.
He walked over to her. “You need to sit down.” He reached out a hand to take her arm in support, but she tried to twist away and his fingertips accidentally brushed her breasts before he cupped her elbow. “You look all in—”
She wrenched herself free and stumbled back. “Don’t touch me!” She glared at him. “Don’t you dare touch me!”
Stunned by her hostility, he stepped back, his palms up. “Whoa, hold on, lady. You’ve got the wrong idea. I’m not looking to ravish you.”
Her eyes had become icy cold, but her cheeks were fiery red. “If you were, Matthew Garvock, it wouldn’t be the first time.”
Jolted more by the bitterness of her tone than the fact that she knew his name, he gaped at her. Had they met somewhere before? If so, he had no memory of it. He tried to see beyond the pale skin and the pale hair and the pale clothes, to the person vibrating with such blatant antagonism behind them.
And finally, just as he was about to give up, he recognized her.
“Good Lord.” He felt his heart tremble. “It’s Beth.” Emotion threatened to close his throat. “I can’t believe you’ve come back. After all this time.”
She had regained her composure. And she fixed him with a gaze so stony it tore him apart.
“Yes, it’s me, Matt. I’m back…and I’m here to stay. As to Laurel House being your ‘home’—”
At last he’d found his voice again. “You’re welcome to stay here, for as long as you want—”
Her laugh was harsh. “Oh, I plan to. You see, Matt, this is rightfully my home, despite what my father may have led you and his lawyer to believe—”
He was hardly listening to her. He could scarcely believe she’d come back after all these years. Thirteen years. Thirteen years during which he’d never managed to shake free of the racking guilt and the aching regrets—
“…so tomorrow,” she was saying, “I’ll go see Judd Anstruther, my father’s lawyer, and I’ll sort everything out.”
With an effort, he focused on what she was saying.
“Judd’s retired,” he said.
“Who took over his practice?”
“I did. Whatever you decide to do, I’ll be involved.” Agitatedly he raked a hand through his shower-damp hair. “Beth, we have to talk. About…what happened, thirteen years ago—”
“No.” Her throat rippled convulsively. “You have nothing to say to me that I would want to listen to. But I have two things to say to you. And I want you to listen, because I don’t want to say them twice. The first is, don’t call me Beth. I’m no longer that naive teenager, and I no longer go by that name. If you have to call me anything, call me Liz. Or Ms. Rossiter. Either will do and I answer to both…but in your case, I’d prefer the latter.”
He had slipped the pizza into the oven to keep it warm while he had his shower; now he noticed the steamy smell of pepperoni and grilled cheese, and he knew he would always associate that specific aroma with this specific moment.
“And the second thing?” he asked.
The faint lines bracketing her mouth deepened. “Don’t ever,” she said, “try to talk to me about the past.”
Uh-uh. No way. He wasn’t about to go along with that. “But I want to t—”
“You want to what? To say you’re sorry?”
“I want you to know that afterward I tried to—”
“Afterward?” Her mocking tone made him wince. “Matthew, I have absolutely no interest in what happened afterward.”
“But—”
She stopped him by slashing a hand between them. “But what?” she asked fiercely. “Do you have anything to say that can change what happened? Can you change the past?”
She had broken his heart when she’d disappeared out of his life. But he knew he must have broken her heart, too. And while he had deserved all the agony he’d suffered, she had not.
“No,” he said wearily. “No, I can’t.”
“Then please don’t try.” Her tone was crisp. “And please don’t ever bring up the subject again. I’ve put the past behind me. And you,” she said as she turned away, and started toward the door, “would be wise to do the same.”
He moved fast and got to the door before she did. Blocking her exit, he said, “Where are you going?”
“To bed.”
“I’m not budging from the house. I paid good money for it. And I have all the papers to prove it.”
As soon as he’d spoken, he felt like a heel. Now that he was close to her, he realized she was even more fragile than she’d seemed. Fragile and vulnerable.
And here he was, confronting her, in the way a school bully would challenge a weaker child. Remorse poured through him like bile.
“So what are we going to do now?” he asked gruffly. “It looks as if we’ve reached an impasse.”
Fragile and vulnerable she might be, and bone-tired by the looks of her, but she was one thing, he saw as she straightened her spine, that she hadn’t been as a teenager.
Liz Rossiter was a fighter.
She looked up at him, and in her beautiful khaki eyes he could have sworn he saw a spark of cynical humor.
“You’re bigger than I am,” she said, “and as I recall you were a champion amateur boxer, so I won’t even try to throw you out. At least, not bodily. But you’d better start looking for another place to stay, because I promise you, Matthew Garvock, I’m going to win back this house.”
“Is that,” he asked softly, “a declaration of war?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, in a tone that was equally soft—as soft as steel, he thought, sheathed in a velvet glove!— “a declaration of war is exactly what it is!”
CHAPTER
