And he was suddenly, brutally, aware that he couldn’t reverse time, that he couldn’t return them to that golden slice of innocence where she would rush into his arms and return to him his happily-ever-after dream. That dream had died when Robert D’Angelo returned from leave wearing a grin and a wedding ring.
He’d been a fool to come. What had he been thinking?
His jaw tightened. Disillusionment lent a saving detachment to his outward appearance. Get tough, get through it and get out alive. His motto from Southeast Asia still served him in a crisis. He’d survived worse. He’d survive this moment with grace under fire and escape before his heart was a repeat casualty.
“I didn’t think… I wasn’t sure… I mean, I didn’t know if you’d—” She broke off the uncharacteristic stammer to demand, “What are you doing here? Why did you come?”
He read shades of meaning in her bewildered questions. After all these years. After abandoning our friendship. After no word for so long. Then her gaze toughened to, How dare you just show up now? Her confrontational glare helped him reinforce a wary stance.
“I heard about Robert.”
Anguish cut across her stare, crushing the momentary rebellion. Her right hand moved to cover her left, where she still wore a ring. She wet her lips, the gesture achingly vulnerable. Then the edge was back, a tight, honed look he’d never seen from her before.
But then a lot had happened since the last time they were together.
“That was over six months ago.” The accusation was unmistakable.
“I’ve been kind of isolated.”
“For the last thirty years?” Her gaze narrowed into an impressive demand for atonement. One he couldn’t make.
One he shouldn’t have to make. One he sure as hell couldn’t tell her about. Even if he knew. His own gaze chilled.
“You might say that.”
His mild answer wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Her response crackled with raw feeling.
“It was a nice funeral. You should have been there.”
“I would have been there, had I known. For Robert. For you.” That last was said more softly than he’d intended.
Anger and hurt built like thunderheads. Her glacial stare flashed lightning. Her voice rumbled thunder.
“Thank you for the sentiment. I’ll let my family know that my husband’s best friend who fell off the face of the earth for thirty years sends his condolences. And in person, at that.”
“Your friend, too, Barbara.”
“My friend,” she mused as if trying to fit that concept together with the disparity of his absence.
“I’m—”
“Sorry?” Her voice notched up an octave. “Don’t you dare say you’re sorry. Not about anything. You don’t have the right to be sorry.”
“I was going to say I’m here now. Or would you rather I not be?” His cool tone had her reining in her anger.
“Yes…no.” Clearly flustered, she stabbed her fingers back through her baby-fine hair and then fisted them. “I don’t know. It’s so…unexpected you being here. I don’t know what to think or feel.”
“I didn’t mean to crowd you, Barb. Maybe I should go.”
“No.”
She took an involuntary step forward, her expression sharp with alarm.
“Please take your seats,” the stewardess urged with a smiling forcefulness.
Without another word, Barbara abandoned her aggressive stance to slide into the window seat and fasten her seat belt. McGee settled beside her and did likewise. But what held them tighter, more constrictively, were the questions, the confusion over why they’d been brought back together.
Chet Allen.
Chet had arranged this meeting. Barbara fought back a surge of renewed despair. He’d brought Taggert McGee back into her life. Why? After so many years, why now? Why now, when she was just starting to get a new routine on track, would he derail it so abruptly with this ghost from her past? What kind of sadistic revenge was he manipulating her into, first by threatening her daughter and granddaughter and now by forcing her to deal with what she’d been trying to deny?
The fact was that Tag McGee was her daughter’s father, and despite the pain, the betrayal, the emptiness of loss, she’d never loved another the way she had loved him. Perhaps Chet had no idea what he was stirring up with his cryptic invitations.
Or perhaps he did.
Chet’s motives would have to wait. For the moment, it took all her energy just to maintain a shred of composure.
They began to taxi toward an unplanned destination, toward a purpose unknown to her. Much like this awkward and emotionally explosive meeting. She sat stiffly as the plane left the ground, staring out the window with a concentrated lack of focus as the plane parted the clouds in a climb toward cruising altitude. If only her thoughts would level out as easily.
Taggert McGee. The unexpected blast from her past Chet alluded to sent her heart for a loop.
She had imagined what she’d say to him if they ever met again. She’d imagined it a thousand times over the course of thirty years, even as the unlikelihood of that happening dimmed with the passage of time. She’d dreamed of the cathartic things she’d hurl at him, words of hurt and blame and retribution, demanding an accounting for his actions when no excuse, no reason could come close to justifying the agony he’d put her through. She’d planned the moment—what she’d wear, how she’d toss her head with indignant disdain, how she’d reduce him to shamed attrition. Her chance had come and gone with a whimper instead of a roar.
And now she had to decide how to treat this return of the prodigal lover under less than ideal circumstances. The scripted meeting was unfolding without a hitch, but it wasn’t at her direction. This time, she had more at stake than bruised pride and shattered dreams. Lives were at stake, if a madman’s words could be believed. That was just the wake-up slap back to reality she needed to look at Taggert McGee and really see him as he was, instead of through the eyes of a needy teenager.
He wasn’t that lean, wiry boy surrounded by shyness and a natural, easy grace. He wasn’t the all-star running back or the all-city catcher who dreamed of going to college on a sports scholarship. He wasn’t the boy with the engaging gentleness to his manner that belied his aggressive pursuits of sports, hunting and boxing. He wasn’t the same person who wooed her with his love of poetry and solitude rather than the acid rock and radical causes of the era. This wasn’t the Taggert McGee who, at eighteen, had stood with duffel bag in hand, his fair hair buzzed down to the scalp, his handsome features gaunt, his mild, deep-set blue eyes fierce with turmoil as the bus pulled in behind him. She hadn’t known then that that emotional image would have to last her for more than thirty years.
He’d been eighteen, her first love, and he’d broken her heart like none before or after.
This was no boy going off
