the bathroom—but there’s really no need. Another few seconds, and I’m gone.”
“No, it’s your house—”
“Excuse me?” Boots on, I stood. I looked in his direction. “Would you please say that again?” He didn’t, of course. Point made, I reached for my scarf.
Incredibly, though, he wasn’t done. “I just need socks and shoes. Then I’ll hit the road.”
“In what?” I asked. He might have found my front door key, but only that. When he appeared at the loft overlook, I dangled the others for him to see, dropped them in my bag, and wound my scarf.
“Let me take your truck now. Later I can call your tow guy for mine.”
“I should walk to work?”
“Edward can drive you.”
“I’m not going anywhere with Edward.”
I had one arm in my coat when Edward said in a low, deep voice, “You said you weren’t a coward.”
“The new me is practical.” I stuck the other arm in the sleeve but didn’t bother with buttons. “When there’s a pothole in the road, I go around it.” Shouldering my bag and grabbing the tote, I went out the door.
The path would have been slippery after yesterday’s rain if it hadn’t been for the muddy boot marks underneath. After a few seconds of crunching over those shallow, ice-coated ridges, I was in my truck. I had just enough time to toss my bags on the passenger seat, buckle my belt, and press POWER, when the side door opened.
In one move, Edward shoved the bags to the floor and slid into the passenger seat. “If you want to do it this way, we’ll do it this way,” he said and slammed the door shut.
I glared out the windshield. “I don’t want to do it at all.”
“Not even after last night?”
“What difference does last night make?”
“We had sex.”
“Really.”
“Look at me, Mackenzie.”
“It’s Maggie,” I said, with a glance in my rearview. The sight of his black Jeep blocking my truck did nothing for my mood. I could maneuver around it—lovely thing about living in the woods and having a driveway that extended to the trees—but it galled me. “You had sex with me to get me to talk?”
“No.” He added a more controlled, “No. I told you. I didn’t plan on the sex. But the fact that it happened makes a statement.”
“Which is?”
“That we both have unresolved issues.”
“Sex means that?” My hands shifted on the wheel, itching to put the truck in gear, but how to get Edward out of the cab? “For the record,” I said, “I might as well have been with a complete stranger, for all I know of the man you’ve become. For the record, if it hadn’t been the safest, the safest time of the month for me, I’d be heading for the pharmacy right now for a morning-after pill. I’m not having another child, not with you, not with any man.”
“Look at me and say that.”
I looked at him and repeated the words. But then curiosity got the best of me—curiosity and an odd fascination—and I couldn’t look away. He was as compelling as ever, if completely different, and it went beyond stray shots of gray hair. His eyes were tired, the lines at their outer corners deeper. His mouth was more tense, his beard a cropped mask on an iron jaw. His hair, which had always been short when I’d known him, had grown out thick and striking. Combed by fingers rather than a tool, it broke over his back collar and split in a natural part in front, leaving two broad spikes arcing over his brow.
I knew professional layering when I saw it. He hadn’t grown it longer out of neglect but design. He wanted to be someone else, just like I did.
“You have bangs,” he said.
“So do you.”
“To cover the scar?”
“Yes.” That raised the same urgent point I’d tried to make with Liam. “I’m a different person here, Edward. No one knows where I came from, because if they did a quick Google, it might lead them to Mackenzie Cooper, and if the truth of that comes out, I’ll die—I mean, literally, die. I can’t live through that again. So you and I did not know each other before—”
“We lie?”
“No one will ask. They won’t suspect anything unless you give it away, which you have no need to do, unless you did come to punish me. Last night, you said you hadn’t. Do you stand by that?”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him. Forgiveness was easier to discuss than to do. But I had