smiled at his vocabulary. Obviously he was smart, just like his father. “Yes, I believe he is,” she replied. “But no one else in our family is an airplane.”
“You’re forgetting Uncle Matt,” he said, circling her again, apparently in a holding pattern.
“Uncle Matt’s an airplane?”
“He says he’s a cargo bus,” Chase said between bursts of jet-engine noises. “’Cause he carries around a lot of stuff inside.”
She stared at Chase in surprise as he landed and taxied toward her. She guessed Matt hadn’t been talking about freight. “When did he say that?”
“Just now. He’s parking the car. He said to tell you he was here in case you wanted to hide or something.” Chase frowned. “Does he mean like hide-and-seek?”
Rosie was caught somewhere between rage and horror. Matt was here! After two years of struggling with her bereavement, she was going to have to confront the only other person who’d gone as deeply into hell as she had. Only, he’d surfaced again within months, and hadn’t been able to wait for her to resurface, too. And then he’d left.
He wasn’t supposed to be here until tomorrow. But…today, tomorrow—what difference did it make? Thanks to Francie, she couldn’t avoid him. Sooner or later she had to look into the face that she’d once loved so much but that now would only remind her of the darkest part of her nightmare.
There was a firm knock on the door. Her heart leaped against her breastbone, then sank again, thudding dully. She wanted to take a moment, draw a breath, prepare herself, but Chase was already running to the front door. He had to use both hands to pull it open.
Matthew Antonio DeMarco stood in the oak-framed doorway. He was big, though in her painful memories she’d made him smaller. Long, jeans-clad legs, broad shoulders in a gray tweed jacket over a blue sweater. Dark hair unruly.
Even from across the room, she found it hard to look into his face. But after he affectionately ruffled Chase’s hair, his dark eyes sought her. He found her, though she tried to disappear into the spread of gifts. She would have sworn she heard the sound of their eyes meeting—metal on metal—like swords clashing.
“I told her you were here!” Chase said, taking Matt by the wrist and pulling him into the room. “But she didn’t hide. Maybe she doesn’t want to play, but I do! Want me to go hide and see if you can find me? Huh?”
Matt had always been one of Chase’s favorite people. Eighteen months did not seem to have dimmed that affection.
Matt gave him a very adult, guy-to-guy look. “Let’s find something to do after I put my stuff away, okay?”
“Okay. Grandma says you’re gonna stay in Aunt Rosie’s old room.”
“Old room?” Matt asked.
Chase nodded. “She lives in the guest house now. But she’s moving in here to take care of me when Grandma goes away. Want me to go put the light on for you and check under the bed for monsters?”
That was a duty Matt had done for Chase when he and Rosie had baby-sat their nephew years ago. But Chase prided himself on his bravery now that he was eight.
Matt laughed. “Yes, please,” he said.
“Want me to take your bag?” Chase reached for it.
Matt held on to it. “It’s pretty heavy. But thanks, anyway.”
“Full of all that old stuff you carry around?” Rosie asked. She hated that the first words out of her mouth were snide. She’d wanted to appear cool and remote, not reveal that he could affect her from the moment he arrived.
Chase, already on his way upstairs, hadn’t heard her. Matt nodded simply, his eyes turbulent.
Then he smiled politely, like a visiting stranger.
“Hello, Rosie,” he said. “Sorry I’m early, but connecting flights from Hartford come in only on Monday and Thursday. I didn’t remember that.” He walked farther into the room and stopped to look around him. Her mother had redone the living room since he’d left. The formal wallpaper and dark wood he probably remembered had been replaced by soft yellow walls, crisp white woodwork, and floral and ivy patterns in the upholstery and draperies. She’d put away Rosie’s father’s collection of sailboat models and had her own trinkets set about— Montovani statuary, crystal bowls filled with flowers, a Victorian lady fabric doll Aunt Sukie had made.
“It’s sunnier in here,” he observed.
“Yes, it is,” she had to agree. “Redecorating gave Mom something…something to do.” Her mother had insisted, furthermore, on doing the redecorating herself rather than hiring the work out.
Rosie had volunteered to help, grateful for something to do to keep her hands and her mind occupied.
Francie had stayed away as much as possible after their father’s and their brother’s deaths and Matt’s defection. She said the house was like a mausoleum and no amount of paint was going to change it.
Matt focused his attention on her as she replied, and now she pulled herself together. If he was going to be here for a couple of days, she had to find a way to cope.
MATT KNEW that gesture, that drawing up of her leggy height, the aligning of her shoulders, the tossing of her long dark hair and The Look. It was a superior angle of her chin, an imperious expression in her bright blue eyes. She was suppressing emotion in favor of appearing controlled. He hated that she could do that so well.
As she stood there, all graceful, slightly disheveled femininity, old anguish tightening her mouth, anger at him in every line of her body, he wanted to drop to his knees and scream his frustration to the world.
But he’d done that two years ago and it hadn’t moved her. And that had been a valuable lesson to him. As much as he loved her, as hard as it was to walk away from all they’d been to each other, she’d dug a hole for herself he wasn’t going to be able to pull her out of. He’d had to save himself, or he wouldn’t be around to try again to save her. And just before her father’s suicide, Matt had stumbled upon information about shady dealings on Hal’s part that could have hurt her further. He’d had to get away.
She looked as remote today as she had then, but he had to believe that the intervening year and a half had had some kind of effect on her.
“How’s the business doing?” he asked, looking for a topic that didn’t relate to family or their relationship. That was difficult. Everything had been so tightly bound together in those days.
“Oh, you know,” she said, dropping a pad of paper on what appeared to be a crystal bowl in a nest of tissue. “Sometimes really good, sometimes not so good. Mom’s convinced I’m going to be bankrupt by spring. But I think I just have to have faith in love and romance and the business it’s going to bring me.”
That remark hung between them like a foot of sizzling fuse. She shifted uncomfortably, obviously wishing she’d chosen her words more carefully. He was tempted to tell her it would have been good if she’d had a little faith in their love and its ability to heal, but instead he smiled politely again, extinguishing the fuse—at least for now.
“Where’s
