“They had the most volatile relationship. Jesse and Melanie were either fighting like cats and dogs or they were—”
He stopped abruptly. Their stares held as she finished his sentence in her mind.
“When Melanie first wrote me, she was in quite a state,” Faith said after a long pause. “Apparently she’d discovered that Jesse had slept with a lieutenant who trained airmen on computers at the airport. Melanie was pretty upset by it.”
Ryan grimaced. “Damn. I can’t believe Melanie did that.” He exhaled heavily. “Strike that. I can. She’d get herself into a real state at times, when it came to Jesse. I suppose she had herself convinced she was doing you a favor by pouncing on you with the news?”
Faith nodded. “Bingo. You’d think we were blood sisters, both betrayed by the devil.”
Ryan grunted. “When in reality, Melanie was feeling furious and rejected by what Jesse had done. She ran blabbing to you because she knew it would hurt Jesse. She never gave a thought or care about what she was doing to you. I’m sorry, Faith.”
“It’s not your fault. You have nothing to apologize for.”
A muscle flickered subtly in his cheek. She shook her head sadly.
“You are not responsible for Jesse’s actions,” she stated the obvious.
“I’m responsible for my own.”
Faith swallowed uneasily. Is that how he thought of her and the baby? A responsibility? A burden?
“What was Melanie like?” she asked shakily after a moment, trying to divert his attention.
Ryan shrugged and poured some cream into his coffee. “A good chopper pilot. Volatile. Bit of a daredevil. Feisty exterior with a vulnerable core,” he mumbled succinctly.
“She was...pretty?”
He glanced up, pausing in the action of setting down the small pitcher. “Some men might have found her attractive,” he said with what struck Faith as forced neutrality.
She stared at the snowy-white tablecloth. Much to her surprise, given the topic, she wasn’t that upset. She’d suspected all along she wasn’t as devastated by the news as she should have been that Jesse was unfaithful. She’d been hurt. Jesse had been her husband, after all, and she’d planned to spend the rest of her life with him—before she’d discovered his infidelities.
But deep down she knew that if Jessie’d been the love of her life, that email from Melanie—and Jesse’s eventual admission that Melanie’s accusations were valid—wouldn’t have just been an unpleasant shock. It would have been a lancing, debilitating blow to her spirit.
Jesse had been so full of life. She’d often reflected after she’d learned of his infidelity that she didn’t want to be Jesse’s wife anymore, but she would have wished him well. Always. It hurt, to think of him not out there in the world somewhere...raising hell, warming someone with his smile and his jokes, hopefully finding the happiness she couldn’t give him.
She became aware of Ryan’s gaze on her—warm, concerned, wary. So, he had known all along about Jesse’s womanizing. How did that knowledge factor into their impulsive, impassioned tryst on Christmas Eve? How would it play into the fact that they were going to have a baby together? It was becoming increasingly clear that Ryan felt some sort of misguided responsibility toward her.
“Don’t pity me,” she said.
“I don’t pity you,” he said, his eyebrows pinching together in apparent bewilderment at her quiet forcefulness.
“No?” she asked, calmly removing the chamomile teabag from her cup. “You don’t have some kind of knight in shining armor syndrome going on for the scorned wife? You said that you visited me last Christmas Eve because you wanted to make sure I was okay...safe. Now that I’m pregnant, I don’t want you feeling regretful, Ryan. I need a father for my baby, not a guilty lover. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.”
The spoon he’d been using to stir his coffee fell several inches to the saucer with a loud clinking sound. “That’s insulting.”
She met his stare levelly, difficult though it was. His eyes blazed like black fire. “Then why did you act so guilty about Christmas Eve? I’m not the fragile victim you’re imagining. If that was part of the appeal that night, you were misguided,” she said quietly.
He placed his forearms on the table and leaned toward her, his nostrils slightly flared. “I didn’t know whether or not you knew about Jesse and Melanie on Christmas Eve. For all I knew, you were still grieving the love of your life. I wanted you so much, I went ahead and did what I did anyway. So much for the idea that I’m pitying you.”
The anger clinging thickly to Ryan’s words didn’t have quite the effect on her that she would have thought. For some reason, the memory of their fevered joining chose that moment to bombard her consciousness like rapid-fire bullets—Ryan’s hands moving over her in carnal worship, his mouth closing over the tip of her breast and the answering sharp pain of longing in her womb, the feeling of him filling her until she was inundated by him, ready to burst with her desire.
By slow degrees she became aware that the blend of voices and clanking cutlery and china had become a distant buzz in her ears. Ryan blinked as if awakening from a trance and sat back in the booth.
“I am far from thinking that you’re a weak victim.” His gaze flickered up to meet hers. “I like you. I have from the first time Jesse ever read me one of your letters. I liked you even more when I finally met you. I respect the way you’ve built up your business and your life, even though you were a military wife and alone a lot of the time. I admired how you always managed to be so cheerful...convey so much warmth. I used to get resentful when Jesse didn’t return your letters regularly. I used to get resentful toward Jesse for a lot of things,” he mumbled under his breath, looking angry...torn.
“Can I bring you any dessert?”
Both of them blinked and stared at the waiter like he was an alien.
“Faith?” Ryan asked.
“No, nothing for me,” Faith said.
Ryan also declined and the waiter left. Faith took a long drink of her ice water.
“That all still sounds like you’re feeling sorry for me, Ryan,” she said shakily.
“I don’t pity you, but I do feel bad about some things that have happened,” he said quietly. “I feel like a heel for barging in on you and laying you down on a couch and having unprotected sex with you after I’d been in your house for all of a half hour.”
Her mouth fell open at his blunt words. Once again the remembered images and sensations swamped her awareness.
“Let me get this straight,” she said slowly. “You like me, and you respect me, but because you wanted to have sex with me that night, that’s a problem. Is that because you usually don’t like and respect the women you sleep with? Attraction and respect don’t go together in your mind?”
“That’s a hell of a thing to say.”
“Jesse used to imply that you liked female companionship, but weren’t
