“Don’t cry,” I murmured.
She let out a strangled half-laugh, half-sob. “Easy for you to say.”
I wiped all traces of moisture from her cheeks, then kissed the tracks her tears had made. And when fresh tears took their place, I repeated the process.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re undoing all my hard work.”
That did get a laugh. Well, sort of. A halfhearted chuckle, at any rate. “Stop trying to make me feel better. That’s my job.”
“You already have, just by showing up here.” I paused. Did I want to add the next part? Was I ready to make myself vulnerable with the admission? “I’m happy to see you.”
“Did you really think I wouldn’t come?” She drew back from me just enough to look into my eyes. Her hands were still threaded through the hair tumbling down across my neck. Her expression was dark, almost morose, and a nervous flutter tickled up and down my spinal column before landing directly on top of my diaphragm.
I shrugged and hissed at the pain in my shoulder. Damn it! Would I ever remember not to do that? “When you didn’t call…”
“You’re right. I should’ve called. I’m sorry. But you should know I have never, ever, in my entire life been as terrified as I was when I heard what happened to you.” She held my gaze as she said that, her voice low and teeming with raw emotion. She slid her hands around my face and cradled it tenderly between them, skating her thumbs across my cheeks. “I couldn’t book a flight home fast enough.”
I winced against the remorse that pummeled me at learning she’d been so upset, but then her words struck me. “You booked your flight home.”
Allison nodded. She’d caught her lower lip between her teeth, and her eyes told me she knew exactly what I’d just realized.
“Operations didn’t book it for you?”
“No.”
“You weren’t finished with your assignment.”
“No.”
“How did you convince them to let you leave?”
“I just said I had to go.”
“You told your boss you had to leave in the middle of an assignment?”
“Yes.”
“And did he ask for an explanation?”
“He didn’t have to. Considering I told him I needed to go home about three seconds after he finished briefing us about what’d happened to you, I think it was evident.”
Holy shit. I gaped at her as my mind spun helplessly. Her rushing here the way she had was a definite, concrete declaration about our relationship. Surely she had to realize that. How would she react when she finally comprehended what she’d done?
“Huh,” I finally came up with. Should I be pleased or concerned? Allison might be okay now, but after some time passed, she might freak the hell out. And that would land us right back where we’d started. I couldn’t go through that again.
“You know what’s funny?” she said, her dark eyes starting to twinkle and a dimple appearing on one cheek.
I shook my head, not even wanting to guess.
“Not one of the guys on that trip seemed surprised when I announced I wanted to beam myself back here to New York to be with you. Guess I wasn’t as good at hiding my feelings for you as I’d always hoped.”
I studied her, trying to determine whether she was as fine with that as she pretended to be. Again, I briefly suspected she might one day decide having the guys know we were—well, whatever we were—was a catastrophe. But before I could voice my concern, she went on.
“Maybe now’s a good time for us to have that talk.”
My insides combusted, then turned immediately to ash, and the sudden departure of heat made the cold that followed that much more pronounced. I tried to swallow and give a halfhearted nod. “Sure. I’m not going anywhere. Do you want to sit down?”
Allison shook her head. “No, thanks. I sat enough on the flight home to last a lifetime. I’ll stand.”
“Okay.”
“Do you know why I broke up with you, Ryan?”
I winced. Wow. Way to ease into this. Her words were like barbed wire. They caught on my heart and twisted, mangling tender flesh. God, the woman knew how to deliver a timely hit. I swallowed, successfully this time, and tried not to allow my pain to show on my face.
“Honestly? No. I have no idea.” And I hadn’t, because all she’d said to me had been, “Ryan, I’m really sorry. But this just isn’t working.” I’d questioned, pled, and attempted to appeal to her sense of fairness, but she’d refused to give me more than that.
If someone or something had pressed me—by, say, threatening to have a crocodile named Glocamorra maul me—I’d have guessed she’d wanted to stop seeing me because we’d been fighting so much about people finding out about us. I’d have speculated that I’d loved her more than she’d loved me and that she hadn’t wanted to deal with the depth of my emotions for her. But no one had pressed me, with crocodiles or otherwise, so I hadn’t been forced to articulate what I assumed her reasoning had been. Thank goodness. That wasn’t a conversation I’d been prepared to have—ever.
When she didn’t reply, I shrugged. “You weren’t exactly forthcoming.”
“I probably should’ve brought this up before now. I mean, I suppose it would’ve been best if I’d discussed it with you at any point during the past few years, but now I really feel like we should have talked before we…” Allison’s eyes flitted to the vicinity of my breasts. My breath caught, and I shivered as my nipples immediately hardened. “But I couldn’t stop myself from touching you long enough to think.” She smiled at me wistfully.
My heart soared, and I started tingling. I wanted to say something but decided she needed to get through this, so I remained silent.
“It was always that way with you, you know.” Allison’s voice was barely more than a whisper, and another nameless emotion glided beneath the surface of her eyes the way a shark slinks smoothly underneath the ocean.
“What way?”
“I always felt completely powerless around you. And confused and out of control. And wonderful.” And now the barest hint of a frown flowed across her face. “Did you know I used to spend most of my day sitting at my desk thinking about you?”
I shook my head. “No. I didn’t.”
“I don’t think I could quantify the amount of time I spent wondering what you were doing, who you were talking to, whether you were dazzling everyone with that gorgeous smile. I vacillated between dreading to see you, terrified anyone with eyes would take one look at me and know instantly how I felt about you, and hoping you’d storm into my office and kiss me breathless.”
Her words made me weak, and I hated to dispel the feeling, but I had to insert a very important truth. “You hated it when I came to your office.” True, I’d never kissed her in there, but toward the end of our relationship, the majority of my visits had earned me mostly dark scowls and clipped answers.
Allison shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”
“You acted like you did. You always seemed pretty annoyed to see me.” So much so, in fact, I’d stopped bothering. The look of irritation on her face when I turned up, even if I was there for a justifiable, work-related reason, had become too painful for me to handle.
Allison sighed, her expression becoming pensive. “No, I wasn’t. Well, not at you anyway.”
“Why, then?”
“I was annoyed at myself. Well, maybe a little bit at you for making me feel the things I felt, but mostly at me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you know what I love most about you, Ryan?”
I opened my mouth to make a smart-assed remark or comment on the present-tense classification of that statement but reined in the temptation. Instead, I simply shook my head. Her lightning changes in topic were giving me whiplash.
“You’re fearless.”
I snorted indelicately. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious. You are. It was the first thing I noticed about you.” And then she smiled. “Well, one o
f the first. The very first was your eyes and how when you looked at me, no matter how innocently, my heart stopped and I couldn’t think.”
That was a surprise. Allison had never waxed poetic about feelings, so all of this was news. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“But right after that, I noticed how easily you could just be you. You were completely comfortable in your own skin. You didn’t care what anyone thought. If someone said or did something you didn’t agree with, you told them. If you wanted something, you just went for it. You never let anyone else stand in your way.”
Guilt blossomed in me, and I struggled to keep it from showing. Her assessment of my character flattered me, but I thought she was founding her judgment on false pretenses. She also had no idea Ben was my father, and I was terrified her opinion of me would instantly change when she discovered the truth. The secret itself wouldn’t impact our relationship as much as the fact that I’d hidden it for this long.
“I was always a little envious of that,” Allison broke into my thoughts.
“I don’t know why,” I told her, still fighting with my inner remorse and trying to decide whether to come clean. “You seem pretty in tune with what you want. I mean, you’re on PPD. They’re tapping you to handle last-minute leads. You’re a shoo-in for a promotion when the time comes. I thought that was the plan. Isn’t that what you told me the first day we met?”
Allison sighed and looked away. “It was. Until it wasn’t.”
“I don’t understand.”
Allison’s eyes shifted back to capture mine, pain etched on her face. “I’ve always had one dream, Ryan. Ever since I was a kid and the news of the assassination attempt on President Reagan riveted everyone, I wanted to be a Secret Service agent. And then, when I got a little older, I set my sights on being the first female director. It was my all-consuming focus, and I put all my energy into working toward that goal. It defined me as a person.”
“No, that’s not what defines you.”
Allison smiled. “It is, though. Because I let it be. And I’d become so comfortable with just that image of myself that when I realized I might want something else, I was afraid. I didn’t know how to handle it or whether I even wanted to. And so I ran.”
“I don’t understand.” I felt like a broken record repeating that phrase, but I just didn’t see what she was getting at.
Allison took a deep breath, and I could see varying emotions at war in her eyes. “The day I broke up with you was the day I got the call that I was going to PPD.”
“Okay. So, you didn’t want to have a long-distance relationship, was that it? Because you could have just told me that.”
“That was only part of it, actually. And, be honest. With yourself if not with me. Tell me if I’d mentioned that you wouldn’t have come up with a hundred ways for us to work that out.”
I rolled my eyes, tamping down a grin. She had me there. “So what if I had?”
“Ryan, you drove me to distraction more often than not, and that was when I got to see you all the time. I was afraid that with you in New York and me in D.C., us having different days off and not knowing when we’d get to see one another again, we would’ve fallen apart.”
I gaped at her. “So, basically, you’re telling me you dumped me because you’d already decided how our relationship would play out, and you couldn’t be bothered to wait to see whether you were even right.” Bitterness stuck to my tongue even after I’d gotten the words out.
Guilt flickered in Allison’s eyes. “I never thought about it that way. It just seemed like the best thing for everyone at the time.”
“The best thing for you, you mean.” I’d thought those words would have an edge to them once I uttered them, but they came out sounding almost weary.
“No, I honestly thought that—”
“Don’t.” I impatiently waved my good hand. “Please. Don’t insult either of us by claiming you knew what was best for me and therefore had the right to make my decisions for me. It’s asinine and demeans us both.”
“Ryan.” Allison frowned.
“What? It is what it is, Allison. I’m not mad at you. I don’t agree with your reasoning at all. In fact, I strongly suspect you’re lying to yourself about your true motivations, and I really wish you’d consulted me before you started making changes that affected my life. But I can’t do anything about it. What’s done is done.”
That was a pretty pragmatic attitude, considering. And I really meant it. Well, mostly. I was hurt, and furious, but I had to accept the situation for what it was. No emotion would change anything, so I saw no sense in letting my feelings run wild. That’s what I was telling myself anyway. It helped me retain my forced calm. Sort of.
Allison sighed and focused on the ceiling, but she didn’t seem to be really seeing it. She was obviously occupied with something in her mind. Now I needed to be patient and not push her to speak before she was ready.
The silence lingered, making me even more uneasy, and it was my turn to sigh. I could barely keep my eyes, which had the consistency of sandpaper, open. The past several days had been the psychological equivalent of unsuccessfully navigating a minefield. Things had been exploding around me at every turn. At this point, I just needed to get some real, non-drug-induced sleep and postpone any further emotionally draining discussions until I could think coherently. Too bad life didn’t have a pause button.
“You’re right,” Allison said finally.
“You can’t possibly—Wait…What?”
“I said you were right.”
“I was?”
Allison smirked. “Yeah, smart-ass. You were.”
“Oh.”
“Not used to hearing that, huh?”
“Not from you, no.”
Allison scoffed.
“Okay. So, uh…What was I right about exactly?”
“I did think breaking up with you was the best thing for everyone at the time. But it was definitely more right for me.”
I cleared my throat. “Thank you for telling me.”
“There’s something else I haven’t told you.”
“What?”
“I almost told them no.”
“What?!”
I was stunned. That was definitely news. People waited for years to be called to The Show. As far as I knew, no one had ever turned down PPD when they’d gotten the nod. It was just too risky. You couldn’t be sure you’d ever be offered the opportunity again. Entire careers had been broken over less.
Allison nodded, her expression once again deadly serious. “I told them I needed to get back to them, and I spent most of the day thinking about it.”
“But…Why?” That made no sense. The very first day I’d met her, within the space of our first conversation, she’d told me she wanted to go to PPD. She’d wanted to use that as a stepping stone on the way to a promotion. I couldn’t imagine anything that would make her hesitate when she was offered the one thing she’d always wanted.
“Because I had you.”
I gaped at her. My thoughts were twisted and snarled, and while my lips were moving, nothing resembling words was coming out of my mouth.
A small, understanding sort of smile stole over Allison’s face as she watched me react to that bombshell. “I was actually considering changing the entire course of my career—my life—because I didn’t want to leave you. But then, when I realized what I was doing…” She bit her bottom lip again. “It terrified me. Wanting…Needing someone so much I was willing to throw away everything I’d ever dreamed of…It—I couldn’t.”
Comprehension clicked inside of me. Finally. For the first time since Allison had left, I actually understood why. She hadn’t left because she didn’t love me. She’d left because she’d been afraid.
Allison recognized the instant I realized what she couldn’t bring herself to say and looked away, appearing slightly embarrassed. Wanting to give her the illusion of a moment of privacy as well as garner a second for myself, I closed
my eyes.
“So, now you know.” Her voice was quiet and a little rough with choked emotion.
I tried to shift so I could settle more on my left side and rest my left cheek in the heel of my hand. I was slightly bitter that we’d wasted so many years apart because of her fear. But I didn’t have time to dwell on that. Not when so many important questions about the future remained unasked and unanswered.
“And now?” I managed to say.
“And now what? Are you asking if I still love you? Because I think I made that pretty clear.”
My heart boomed like thunder and threatened to drown out the sounds of regular life around me. My nerves were shot. I was terrified to continue down this path, but I needed to know something before I got in any deeper.
“No, I’m asking if you can now. You said you couldn’t back then, but I need to know if that’s changed. Because I have to be honest here, Allison. I’ve never loved anyone as much as I love you, and I’d kill for another shot at us, but I can’t go back to the way things were. I won’t.”
That’d been the hardest thing I’d ever had to say to anyone, and I’d been on the verge of throwing up as I’d forced those words out of my mouth. My hands were shaking, and my entire body was buzzing as I waited to see how she’d react.
Allison looked at me with regret, tenderness, affection, and her expression broke my heart. She cupped my cheeks in her hands and ran the pads of her thumbs across my skin. Her dark eyes looked intently into mine, and I trembled. She seemed to see straight to my soul.
“I’d never ask you to do that, Ryan. I was wrong to treat you that way. I was selfish, and I didn’t consider how much my attitude was hurting you. I’m so sorry.”
Relief flooded me, and I was glad I was already stretched out because I think my knees would’ve failed me otherwise. My heart swelled like the Grinch’s in that Christmas movie, and my smile was so wide my cheeks ached.
Allison grinned back. “So, we’re okay?”
“We’re more than okay.” I tried to lean up so I could kiss her, but her hand on my shoulder stopped me. “What?”
“Since we’re clearing the air, are you ready to tell me who Ashley was?”
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