RunningWildAmazon

by Reece, Christy

  “You deserve more, Anna. You deserve everything good.”

  She leaned up and kissed his cheek. “I’ll settle for the here and now and that delicious-smelling pasta.”

  Her humor and forgiveness broke the tension. Grateful for the reprieve, Aidan went back to work, determined to make as many memories as possible before this time was up.

  While Aidan mixed the pasta and sauce together, Anna tossed the salad. She wanted them to get back to their easiness of before. Blurting out that she’d love to meet his family had been an impulsive response—one that she would make to any friend who talked about their family with such love. For a brief blip of time, she had forgotten that this new and close relationship was only temporary. Once the danger from Ruiz and Garcia had passed, she and Aidan would return to their lives.

  Since it hurt to think of that, she set about thinking of other things. Like the amazing meal in front of her.

  “Can all LCR guys cook like this? Riley told me that Justin is an amazing cook.”

  “Yes. McCall sends us to cooking school.”

  He made the statement with such a straight face, she believed him for half a second. His slow grin told her he knew he’d gotten her.

  She took a bite of the pasta and forgot all teasing. “Oh my gosh. You should teach classes.”

  “You’re easy to please.”

  For whatever reason, she took those words in a sexual context and found herself blushing to the roots of her hair. Aidan had pleased her over and over again. Dropping her gaze to her plate, she concentrated on her meal.

  “When we’ve finished dinner, I’ll let you explore anyplace you want.”

  She raised her head and faced a grinning Aidan. “You’re doing that on purpose.”

  “What?”

  “Embarrassing me.”

  “Like I said, you’re easy, Bradford.”

  Refusing to let him bait her anymore, she asked, “How long have you and your family owned the island?”

  “About six years.”

  “When you first told me about it—when we were talking about getting Riley and Justin together—you said no one hardly uses it anymore. Why’s that? I would think this would be a perfect getaway.”

  He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Too busy, I guess.” He nodded toward her empty plate. “You want more?”

  There were many things that Aidan Thorne was good at. Changing the subject smoothly wasn’t one of them. She was learning the parameters in what he would and wouldn’t talk about. Anything to do with his family, with the exception of the most basic things, was off-limits.

  “Anna? You want more pasta?”

  “No, thanks. It was delicious, though.”

  Aidan stood and held out his hand. “Let’s take a walk on the beach before it gets dark.”

  She allowed Aidan to pull her to her feet, and then, as if she did it every day of her life, she went into his arms.

  Burying his face in her neck, he breathed in and released a shaky sigh. “Oh, Anna, what am I going to do with you?”

  Though his words were soft, even tender, she heard the frustration in his voice. Even as she wished she could help him with whatever was troubling him, she knew this was something Aidan would have to deal with alone. She just hoped he’d share it with her at some point.

  Knowing they needed a lighthearted moment, she leaned back in his embrace and gave him her best effort at a wicked grin. “Is that another sexual innuendo? Because if it is, I have a few suggestions.”

  He barked out a laugh. “I’ll bet you do. Let’s take a walk and talk about them.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Aidan held Anna’s hand as he showed her around the island. He had never brought a woman here before. And other than arranging the meeting between Justin and Riley a few months back, no one other than his family had stayed here since they’d owned the island. Only a select few knew that the property belonged to the Thorne family. It was hidden deep beneath a couple of shell corporations and various fake names. This place was one of two locations Aidan and his family used for get-togethers. It was their safe haven.

  After walking the entire length of the beach, they stood for a while and watched the tide come in, washing away the tiny prints sanderlings had made seconds before. The hand he held, small and delicate, felt perfect in his own, and Aidan felt something he hadn’t experienced in years. Peace.

  Anna’s heartfelt gusty sigh seemed permeated with satisfaction.

  He smiled down at her. “Nice, isn’t it?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  The island wasn’t especially large. The entire circumference covered just over three-quarters of a mile. But the sand was sugar white, the water a crystal-clear blue, and the trees and bushes surrounding the house were filled with exotic flowers and several species of wild birds.

  Even though he’d been here many times before, Aidan couldn’t remember a time when he’d been more relaxed. He was intelligent enough to realize that the beautiful woman beside him made all the difference. He was also smart enough to recognize the danger of that thought.

  “The island was given to my father as a thank-you.”

  “Given? You mean someone actually gave this island to your dad as a gift? What on earth for?”

  “My dad is a pediatric oncologist. He saved the life of a young boy, and his father wanted to do something special for him. It’s not Dad’s way to accept gifts, especially something so extravagant. Saving a child’s life is gift enough for him, but it was offered to him at a difficult time in my family’s life—my life. So he accepted it for us.”

  “You and your family come here often?”

  “At first, it was just me. I needed to…” He struggled with the right wording. “I needed some thinking time. Then we started coming here for family gatherings. Lately, with everyone so busy, we don’t come here as often. My dad is semiretired, but my mom’s practice is thriving.”

  “Your mom’s a doctor, too?”

  “Cardiologist.”

  “So medicine runs in the family.”

  “Yeah. My sister is an orthopedist.”

  “Wow.”

  Aidan let her absorb that, knowing questions would inevitably follow. He needed to explain things to her. She deserved to know everything. He had made love to this woman. Despite the fact that he’d warned her that no relationship was possible, she, more than anyone else, deserved to know the reason why.

  Anna being Anna surprised him once again. “Do you have any ice cream?”

  Smiling, he pulled her to him for a hard hug. “I think I have a few gallons of your favorites on hand. Let’s go.”

  Her mind was once again buzzing with a thousand questions, but Anna wasn’t going to ask them. The grim set of Aidan’s mouth had told her he expected them. She’d learned in her profession and in her life that asking difficult questions involved more than just a curious mind. It also involved sensitivity and timing. She wanted to know Aidan’s story because she cared about him. And because she cared, she wasn’t going to pry. When and if he was ready, then so was she. Until then, she wanted to see something in his eyes besides the darkness he carried with him.

  While Aidan cleaned up the remains of their meal, Anna scooped out generous bowls full of ice cream. Caramel vanilla for her. Fudge ripple for him. By the time she was finished, Aidan was through with the cleanup.

  “Let’s eat this outside by the pool.”

  Anna couldn’t believe she’d yet to see the pool. For that matter, she hadn’t seen the entire house either. As much as she wanted to do just that, she feared she’d have to wait till tomorrow for more exploring. Lethargy was already pulling at her muscles. After her ice cream, she was headed back to bed. Would Aidan join her again? She might be too tired for anything other than sleep, but the thought of him staying in another room after what they’d shared seemed preposterous. They might never have a future together, but they had the present. And she wanted to spend every moment possible in his arms.

/>   Aidan led her through sliding glass doors onto a balcony surrounded by thick green foliage and blooming bougainvillea. Three steps down from the balcony was a lagoon-like pool with a small waterfall.

  “Amazing. Riley tried to describe it to me, but now I know why she had such difficulty. This defies description.”

  “My nieces and nephews would spend every day here if they could.”

  “How many nieces and nephews do you have?”

  “Two of each. Emily is the oldest at six. Cameron is four. The two youngest are two-year-old twins, Samuel and Serena.”

  She settled into a cushioned two-seat glider and patted the cushion beside her. The instant he sat down, she dug into her melting ice cream and closed her eyes as the creamy ice-cold confection hit her tongue. Heaven!

  For a few moments, the only sounds were the clanging of spoons against their bowls and the occasional appreciative sounds Anna couldn’t keep from escaping from her mouth.

  “How did you know about my ice cream addiction?”

  “Riley.”

  “Best friends are the best.” She glanced over at him. “Who’s your best friend?”

  If she had stabbed him in the chest with a butcher knife, she didn’t think he could have looked more pained.

  She put her hand on his arm. “Aidan, I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for. She only knew she wanted to get that tortured expression off his face.

  “You have nothing to apologize for, Anna. I just…” He faced the pool, his eyes blank and distant.

  And then, without the least amount of effort, Aidan found himself telling her everything. “I was what some people call a child prodigy.” He glanced over at her, his smile crooked. “Yeah. Hard to believe, I know.

  “I graduated high school when I was fifteen. Went to college, which was where I met Simon Cook. He and I were the same age, so we naturally gravitated to each other. After graduation, we started at the same med school in Michigan. That’s where we met Melody. She was a year younger.”

  “So you were like a little group of Doogie Howsers.”

  “Something like that. We were book smart but not people smart. Didn’t have any real-world experience. My family is well-off. Simon’s was even more so. Melody had nothing. Her parents were dead, killed in a car crash when she was twelve. She was there on scholarships and grants. She had no extra spending money. Simon and I had more than enough, but we were all kind of in the same boat, maturity-wise. Made sense that we all became best friends.

  “And I guess it was inevitable that I would fall in love with Melody. She was a bright, shining star. So full of energy and life.

  “I got lucky and Mellie fell for me, too. We tried not to leave Simon out. He knew how we felt about each other and seemed to accept it as the natural way of things. Didn’t act like he resented it. I never saw a hint of jealousy. Simon didn’t date much, but we were so busy, none of us had a lot of free time.

  “We graduated from med school and started our residency. Mellie was going into pediatric oncology. Both Simon and I were going to be surgeons.

  “Mellie and I wanted to get married. My parents loved her, but thought we were both too young. They were right, but telling that to a headstrong twenty-one-year-old and a determined twenty-year-old did no good. We had the wedding, an abbreviated honeymoon, and that was that.

  “We moved into a two-bedroom apartment close to the hospital where both Mellie and I worked.” He took a breath. “And then we made the first big mistake.”

  “Don’t tell me. Simon moved in with you.”

  “Yeah. Stupid, I know. But we talked about it, and leaving Simon out, especially since we’d been through so much together, just felt wrong. So we moved in together. Stupid…so very stupid.

  “Carving out time for just the two of us was hard. When we weren’t working, we were sleeping. Some days we’d go without more than a peck on the cheek as one of us was headed out the door and the other to bed.

  “We didn’t get into Simon’s business a lot. He started spending more and more time away from the apartment. Mellie thought he had a girlfriend. I wasn’t so sure.”

  He paused for a second. “Did I mention that Simon worked in a different hospital?”

  She shook her head.

  “He did, so neither Mellie nor I knew what was going on with him. Turns out that though Simon was a brilliant man, building personal relationships was difficult for him. Having to deal with patients, listen to their complaints, wasn’t his thing. He got reprimanded a couple of times. I didn’t know that until later. He was spiraling out of control, and I was so damned caught up in my own life, I completely missed the signs.

  “Everything came to a head one day. I was taking a shower when I heard Simon and Mellie shouting at each other. I walked into the living room. It was a dumb argument over who took the last yogurt from the fridge. Turns out Mellie had lost a patient that day. She had worked a twenty-four-hour shift and was bone-tired, too. She complained about Simon taking the yogurt, he snapped at her, and it escalated.

  “I broke it up. Simon shut himself up in his room, and Mellie and I had our first major fight. She wanted Simon gone. Said she wanted the privacy to walk around the house naked if she wanted. I was stupid and stalked out. I didn’t really disagree with her thinking. Guess everything had gone so smoothly for so long, I was resistant to making any changes. I went for a run and gave her words a lot of thought. By the time I came back home, I knew what I had to do. Simon needed to move out.

  “Mellie was already asleep, so I went to Simon’s room, told him he needed to find his own place. He agreed. Didn’t even seem upset. Said he’d been thinking about it, too. I thought everything was fixed. Still amazes me how damn naïve I was.

  “I showered and went to work. Called Mellie during a break but got her voice mail. I told her Simon was moving out.

  “I got busy at work. It wasn’t until late that afternoon that I thought to check on Mellie again. Got her voice mail again. Figured she was still sleeping. She’d been exhausted and was due back at the hospital at midnight.

  “It was a little after nine when I got home. I’d stopped on the way and got Mellie some flowers.”

  Some things were frozen forever in his memory. He saw himself standing on the front stoop of that apartment with a bouquet of half-wilted flowers in his hand, and the thought had come to him that it was the first time he’d ever given Mellie flowers. He thought about how wrong that was. Mellie deserved flowers every day of her life. He had made a silent vow that he’d make sure that happened.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw the look on his face right before he put a hand on the doorknob, not knowing his entire world was about to be turned upside down. He’d been young in both years and wisdom. Book smart but so damn naïve about life. A cocky, wet-behind-the-ears doctor without any real knowledge of the gut-wrenching agony that can happen in the blink of an eye.

  “I walked into the apartment. It was eerily quiet. Noticed immediately that Simon had moved out. His lamp on the desk in the living room was gone. Also, some weird painting that both he and Mellie had liked and put over the mantel had disappeared. I was kind of sad but glad, too. Mellie and I didn’t have to worry about our privacy anymore.

  “Since it was so quiet, I thought she might still be sleeping. The apartment smelled like disinfectant and bleach, so I figured she’d woken up, done some cleaning to tire herself out, and then had gone back to bed. She did that sometimes when she was too wired to sleep.

  “I remember opening the fridge and taking out a beer. Drank half of it down, almost decided to watch some television. Then I thought I’d order some Chinese, and Mellie and I could spend some time together before she had to go into work. I was off the next day and was thinking about what I could do to make everything up to her.”

  He shook his head. “We always think about those things when it’s too late.

  “I went to the bedroom. Mellie was in bed, on her side, facing away from me. Some
kind of chill zipped up my spine—like a warning. I’d never felt that before. Anyway, I leaned over to kiss her on her cheek. Noticed that her hand was drawn up in a clawlike position.

  “I said her name and turned her over. She had this look of horror frozen on her face. Her eyes were open and fixed.”

  Aidan swallowed hard. The look on Mellie’s face still haunted him. Late at night, when he was drifting off to sleep, he’d picture the awfulness of what her last moments of life must have been like. In the middle of the night when a nightmare jerked him awake, he imagined he’d heard her screaming his name. When he was planning an LCR mission, he’d think about how he hadn’t been there to save her. About the only time he didn’t get hit with those images was when he was on a mission. One of the reasons he stayed busy. Idleness brought the pain to the forefront.

  His eyes dropped to his lap where Anna’s delicate hand covered his own. He’d been so lost in the memories, he didn’t know when she’d done that. A small frozen part of him warmed at her touch.

  “She was…gone?”

  “Yeah. Had been dead for hours. I don’t know how long I sat with her. A rational part of my mind told me I needed to call 911, but I could do nothing but stare at her.

  “Finally, I don’t know if it was five minutes later or an hour, I called the police. The thought came to me then that I’d never get to hold her again, touch her. I wasn’t thinking rationally. Fortunately, I wasn’t stupid enough to pick her up, but I did lie beside her, touch her hair, talk to her.”

  For the first time in forever, tears stung his eyes. Those last few moments with Mellie were the hardest and the sweetest in his memory. He’d said all the things he should have said, all the things he’d always meant to say. All the things he’d never get to say again.

  Aidan felt a soft squeeze on his hand and looked down. Anna’s hand again, giving him comfort, support…strength to continue.