“But?”
He sighed, sudden shadows in his eyes. “A few weeks before we were to take the bar exam, she found out she was pregnant.”
She tried to picture a younger version of Richard as she remembered him, perhaps with a few less laugh lines around the corners of his eyes. The Richard she knew always took his responsibilities seriously. She wasn’t at all surprised that he would step up to take care of the child he fathered, only that he and Ethan’s mother would make things official.
“Marriage is a huge leap of faith for two people who were set to go their separate ways, even with a child on the way.”
“I think we both badly wanted to believe we could make it work. On paper, it seemed a good solution. We were both attorneys, we had shared interests, we enjoyed each other’s company. I think we both tried to convince ourselves we were in love and could make it work. But Lynne wasn’t ready for a family. She tried, but I could see what a struggle it was for her. She…wasn’t really cut out for motherhood. When Ethan was four months old, she received an unbeatable job offer overseas. Her dream position as lead counsel for an international shipping conglomerate. We both decided there was no good reason for her not to take it.”
She heard the casual tone he tried to take but she also picked up the subtle sense of failure threading through his words.
He had always been competitive—captain of the debate team, a star on the baseball diamond, school valedictorian. He hated losing at anything and she imagined this particular failure would have hit him hard, especially with the loving example he had of marriage from his own parents.
The urge to touch him, to offer some small degree of comfort, was almost overwhelming. But they didn’t have that kind of relationship, not anymore, so she curled one hand in her lap and picked up her wineglass with the other.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “That couldn’t have been an easy situation for you.”
“We’ve done okay. My mother has been a lifesaver. I would have been lost without her.”
They were quiet for a moment, the only sound Lilli’s soft huffs and the rain clicking against the skylights.
“What about you?” he asked after a moment. “Any relationship mistakes in your past?”
Besides leaving you? The thought whispered through her mind unbidden and she had to shift her gaze away from his so he wouldn’t read the truth in her eyes.
“Not really. Nothing serious, anyway.”
“Why not?” Richard asked.
She decided to keep quiet about the fact that she hadn’t had enthusiasm for dating in a long time, if ever. She had been too focused on her work, in making a success of herself—okay, in proving to her family that she could have a successful life outside medicine.
“I don’t know. It hasn’t really been a priority for me, I guess.”
“I suppose it’s a little tough having a long-term relationship when you travel so much.”
“Something like that.”
She really didn’t want to discuss her love life—or decided absence of such a thing—with Richard Green.
“Okay, I just came up with the first dangerous topic of conversation. It’s your turn.”
“I thought I just asked you about the men you’ve dated. That’s not dangerous enough for you?”
“Not at all. Trust me. The men I date are usually a boring lot. Accountants. Stockbrokers. Mild-mannered, one and all.”
Not like you, she thought. Richard radiated a raw masculinity, even during a casual dinner at his home with his five-year-old sleeping only a few dozen feet away.
He studied her for a moment, and she had the vague impression of a lean and hungry wolf moving in for the kill.
“All right. You want dangerous? Why don’t we talk about why you broke my heart eight years ago?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Anna stared at Richard across the table, his mother’s delicious lasagna congealing into a hard, miserable lump in her stomach.
The noises of the kitchen seemed unnaturally loud in the sudden tense silence, the whir of the refrigerator compressor sounding like a jet airplane taking off.
She wanted to scoop up her dog and race away from the awkwardness of his question and the guilty memories she couldn’t escape.
“I didn’t break your heart,” she mumbled.
He lifted his wineglass in a mocking salute. “Excuse me, but I think I’m a little better judge of that than you are. You haven’t seen me or my heart in eight years.”
Though his words were light, she saw the barest hint of shadow in his eyes. She thought of all her reasons for leaving. What seemed so compelling eight years ago now seemed like a coward’s way out.
“You couldn’t have been too heartbroken,” she pointed out. “You were married a few years later.”
She didn’t want to remember how she had holed up in her tiny shared apartment in New York City and wept for an entire day when Ella had called her with the news.
He was quiet for a moment and then he sent her a quizzical look. “Would you like to see a picture of Lynne?”
His question threw her off stride, especially in the context of their discussion. Why would he possibly think she would want to see a picture of his ex-wife right now?
She shrugged, not quite sure how to answer, and he slid away from the table and moved to a mantel in the great room off the kitchen. Through the doorway, she saw him take a picture from a collection on the mantel and a moment later he returned and held it out for her.
A younger, chubbier version of Ethan’s winsome face filled most of the frame but just in the background, she could see a stunning woman with blond hair and delicate features. She looked at her son with love, certainly, but also a kind of baffled impatience.
“She’s very beautiful.”
“You don’t see the resemblance?”
“I can’t really tell. Ethan certainly has her eyes.”
“You don’t think she looks at all like you?”
Shocked to the core, she stared at the woman again. Is that the way he saw her? Cool and lovely and…distant?
“Her hair and her eye color, maybe,” she protested. “That’s all.”
“You’re absolutely right. That’s where the resemblance ends. She’s not you. Not at all. But here’s the funny part. I asked her out for the first time because she looked a bit like you. Since I couldn’t have the real deal, I tried to convince myself an imitation was just as good. It was an idiotic mindset, one I’m ashamed I even entertained for a minute, but what can I say? I had been abruptly dumped by the only woman I ever loved.”
Anna froze, reeling as if she’d just been punched in the stomach.
“Richard—”
“I didn’t mean to say that. Withdrawn.”
She had no idea what to say, to think. He had said that night he was falling in love with her but she had always attributed it to the heat of their passion.
After a long, awkward moment, he gave a rough laugh. “Dangerous is one thing when it comes to topics of conversation. Excruciatingly embarrassing is quite another.”
She had to say something. She knew she did, especially after he stood up and returned his plate of half-eaten lasagna to the kitchen.
She rose, shaky inside. Lilli scampered ahead of her into the kitchen.
“I convinced myself it wasn’t real,” she finally said quietly when she joined him there. “What we shared that night. It was magical and beautiful and…miraculous. But I tried to tell myself we were just carried away by the night and…everything. You were my friend. Maybe my best friend. I couldn’t let myself think of you in any other way or I wouldn’t have been able to…to do what I knew I had to.”
“Leave medical school and basically cut things off completely with your family.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I loved my family. You know that. But you also know what things were like for me with them. In my father’s mind, there was no other possible career for any of his children. He refused to see how I wa
s struggling that first year. How much I hated it. I tried to talk to him—all summer I tried! His advice was only to stick it out, that the second year would be better. Wilders aren’t quitters. I can remember him telling me that as clearly as if he were sitting right here with us.”
“He wanted you to follow in his footsteps.”
“That’s what he wanted. Not what I wanted. I was suffocating in med school. I hated it. The blood, the gore. The unending stress. Especially knowing I couldn’t help everyone.”
She could clearly remember the first time a patient whose care she had been observing had died. It had been a woman in her late fifties with end-stage breast cancer. She could remember the dispassionate attitude of the attending and the residents, in sharp contrast to the vast, overwhelming grief of the woman’s husband and teenage daughters.
She had left the hospital that day feeling ill, heavy and ponderous, as if she carried the weight of that grief and the responsibility for their pain. Ridiculous, since she was only a first-year med student who hadn’t even really been involved in the woman’s care, but she hadn’t been able to shake her guilt and the cries of the survivors that haunted her dreams.
“I knew if I made it through the second year, I would be trapped. I had to go, Richard. I didn’t see any other choice.”
He shrugged. “You could have stayed and stood up for yourself, fought for what you cared about.”
Including him, she thought. She should have stayed and fought for what they could have shared.
“I missed you like crazy those first few months in the city,” she confessed. “I think I missed you even more than I missed my family.”
He leaned against the kitchen counter. “Forgive me if I find that a little hard to believe. At any point that year you could have picked up the phone or sent off an e-mail. But you cut me off completely. What the hell was I supposed to think? I just figured I was crazy and had imagined everything that happened that night.”
“You didn’t,” she whispered, more miserable than she had been those first early days after she left.
“It doesn’t matter now. Eight years ought to be long enough to get over a broken heart, don’t you think?”
Something shifted between them, a subtle tug of awareness. “Yes,” she managed.
“I thought I had done a pretty good job of putting you out of my head. Of course, then you had to ruin everything by coming back and making me remember.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
His long exhalation stirred the air. “So am I.”
Before she realized what he intended, he stepped forward and pulled her into his arms.
She caught her breath, unable to focus on anything but the blazing heat in his eyes as his mouth descended on hers.
The kiss was raw and demanding and she tasted eight years of frustration in it. Despite the undertone, everything inside her seemed to sigh in welcome.
Oh, she had missed this. Missed him. No other man had made her blood sing through her veins like Richard.
She knew she shouldn’t return his kiss. If she were smart, she would jerk away right now and leave this house that contained so many memories for her.
She couldn’t do it, though, not with this heat and wonder fluttering through her.
Her hands were trapped between their bodies and she could feel his heart pound beneath the cotton of his shirt, rapid and strong.
She spread her hands out, marveling at the taut muscles under her fingers. He might be an attorney but Richard still had the lithe athleticism of the baseball player he had been in high school.
His mouth deepened the kiss and she leaned into him, lost to everything but this moment, this man.
She wanted him. Just as she had eight years ago, she wanted him with a wild hunger that stole her breath.
He was the first one to pull away, wrenching his mouth free of hers and stepping away with such abruptness that she could only stare into the blue of his eyes, turned dark by desire.
He studied her for a long moment while she tried to catch her breath and catch hold of her wildly careening thoughts.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” he asked after a moment.
She might, if she could manage to string more than two words together in a brain that suddenly seemed disjointed and chaotic.
“That was…unexpected.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Was it?”
“Richard, I…”
He shook his head with a rough-sounding laugh. “Don’t. Just don’t. I was trying to remember what you tasted like. My curiosity has been appeased so let’s just leave it at that.”
That’s all it had been? Curiosity? Not the kind of stunned desire that still churned through her body?
“Look, it’s late. I’m due in court early tomorrow.”
She drew in a shaky breath, mortified at her wild reaction to what had been purely experimentation on his part. “You’re absolutely right. I never meant to stay so long.”
If she had left fifteen minutes ago, none of this would have happened. She wouldn’t have the taste of him on her lips or the scent of him, masculine and sexy, on her skin or the memory of his kiss burned into her brain.
She scooped up Lilli, absurdly grateful for the comfort of the dog’s tiny, warm weight in her arms. He walked her to the door and helped her into her jacket, careful not to touch her more than completely necessary. He then held her umbrella while she slipped on her shoes.
“Thank you for dinner,” she finally said.
“You’re welcome,” he answered, as formally as if they were two strangers meeting for coffee instead of lifelong friends who had just shared a moment of stunning passion.
She should say something more, but for the life of her, nothing else came to mind. “Good night, then.”
He held the door open for her and she walked out into the night. She didn’t bother with her umbrella, hoping the rain might cool her feverish skin and douse the regret that burned through her like a wind-whipped wildfire.
* * *
Richard stood at the window of his house watching her taillights gleam on the wet street before they disappeared.
So much for his intention to remain cool and composed around her. He had been about as calm as a blasted typhoon.
What had he been thinking to kiss her? It had been a mistake of epic proportion. Catastrophic.
He should have known he would skate so close to losing his control. She’d always had that effect on him. What was it about Anna that revved his engine like that?
She was beautiful, yes, with that shimmery blond hair and those luscious blue eyes and skin that begged for his touch….
He jerked his mind away from all of Anna’s many attractions. Beautiful as she might be, he had been around lovely women before, but Anna was the only one who ever tempted him to forget every ounce of common sense.
A few more moments of their embrace and he didn’t know if he would have been able to stop—and that was with his son sleeping only a few rooms away.
She could break his heart again, if he let her.
Richard sighed. He wasn’t about to let her. Not this time. He had learned his lesson well. Anna Wilde wasn’t a woman he could count on. She had made that plain eight years ago. His foolishness over her had led him to some fairly disastrous mistakes.
He couldn’t afford to lose his head over Anna again—not only for his own sake but for Ethan’s.
He couldn’t forget his son in this whole situation. Ethan had suffered enough from Richard’s poor choices. If Richard had kept his wits around him, he would have known what a disaster his marriage to Lynne would be, that his choices would leave his son without a mother.
Richard’s own mother did her best but she was now in her sixties and didn’t have all the energy needed to keep up with a busy five-year-old boy.
For Ethan’s sake, Richard couldn’t afford to risk an involvement with a woman who already had a track record for leaving the things she cared about in pursuit
of her career.
Hadn’t that been exactly what Lynne had done? She had tried the whole family and motherhood route but had fled when the responsibility had become too constricting.
Richard just had to use his head when it came to Anna Wilder. He was fiercely attracted to her and apparently that had only intensified over the years, so the only smart course would be to minimize contact with her as much as possible.
He couldn’t avoid her completely. The NHC negotiations made that impossible, but he had to do everything he could to make sure their interactions in the future were formal and businesslike and as brief as he could manage.
It was the only way he would get through her temporary stay in Walnut River without hurting himself again.
* * *
The resolve managed to last more than a week.
Though he never lost focus of the hospital’s fight for autonomy, other clients’ legal issues took precedence for the next several days. He was busy, first with a trial date then with several evidentiary hearings.
He might not have seen Anna during that time, but unfortunately she was never far from his thoughts.
At random moments he found himself remembering the silky softness of her hair or the way her mouth trembled when he kissed her or her hands smoothing against his chest, burning through the fabric of his shirt.
He blew out a breath on his way to an appointment with J.D. to discuss strategy for the final board of directors’ vote coming up in less than a week.
He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised when he walked into J.D.’s office to find Anna sitting in one of the office chairs, but the sight of her still stopped him in his tracks and he fiercely wished he could just turn around and head back out of the hospital.
She looked prim and proper again in a black jacket and skirt and he was furious at himself for the instant heat that jumped in his stomach.
Her eyes flashed to his and he saw an edge of discomfort, but not surprise. She must have had a little advance warning that he would be joining them.
Lucky her. J.D. rose from his desk and shook his hand. “Hi, Richard. When I told Anna I was meeting with you this morning, she decided to steal a few minutes of our time so she could ask a couple of questions about our vendor accounting practices, since I told her I couldn’t respond without legal counsel present.”
Reunited in Walnut River Page 8