her up, then followed her off the mattress to inspect the memorabilia, starting at the left. A collection of little silver-and-gold baseball players perched on top of foot-high faux-marble pillars. She slid him a glance. “That looks pretty tame to me. America’s favorite pastime and all that.”
He just shrugged, and she moved farther along the shelving. Two hooks held a selection of medals suspended on ribbons, one for downhill skiiing, another for snowboard racing. Beside them were framed pictures of Vance. In each he bore the evidence of injury: a casted foot, a splinted set of fingers, a shaved patch of skull decorated by stitches.
“I think my mother put these on display in hopes they’d slow me down.”
“And did they?”
Instead of answering, he gestured to the right. Now it was trophies and medals for motocross and dirt bike races. They were partnered with more photos of a young Vance. In two he was in leathers and sporting a cut lip. A third showed him holding his arm in an odd position across his chest. She peered at it, then glanced at him.
“Broken collarbone.” Then he picked up a shark’s fin–size fragment of bright yellow fiberglass. “My first surfboard—or what’s left of it after we both wound up hitting some rocks. Damn, I loved that thing.”
At the end of the shelves was another trio of enlarged photographs. Each depicted a spectacularly crashed vehicle. A truck in a ditch. A sports car against a fire hydrant spewing water. An overturned SUV resting on its side like a dead bug.
“Vance.” Layla had to stop and suck in a breath. The accident scenes made her a little sick. “These are—were your cars? Your mom framed pictures of these, too?”
He was staring at them as if he’d never seen them before. “No,” he said slowly. “That was me.”
She widened her eyes. “Why would you take the photos in the first place?”
After a hesitation, he grimaced. “I...I was proud of them.”
She blinked. “Proud?”
He rubbed his hand over the lower half of his face. “Proud that though I totaled the car I walked away without a scratch.”
The tense note in his voice had her placing her palm on his back, stroking it in a little circle like his mom had done to her in the kitchen. She could feel the stiffness of his spine and the rigid muscles surrounding it seemed to vibrate.
“Can you believe that?” he muttered. “I was an idiot.”
“Vance...” she said, her voice soft. “You were a kid.”
“A waste,” he said, still staring at the photos. “I was a fucking waste.”
“You were a thrills and chills kind of guy,” she countered, troubled by the growing darkness of his mood. “Some people are.”
“It’s no excuse for what I put them through. No wonder...” Shaking his head, he retreated from the shelves, stumbling on the carpet until the back of his legs hit the bed. Then his butt.
Layla crossed to him, sitting close so they were thigh to thigh. “Are you all right?”
His eyes still focused across the room, he didn’t appear to have heard her. “Vance?”
With a sudden movement, he turned his head, his gaze pinning her. “Any one of those should have been the end of me,” he said, his face going hard. “Why the hell did I survive?”
The question chilled her. He was right. He had cheated death, it seemed to her, any number of times. As a child, as a young adult. Again as a soldier at war. She swallowed, hard.
“None of us can know—” she started.
“I know that I was careless with things,” he said, pointing to the automobile photos. “I know that I was reckless with my life.”
But he wasn’t that careless and reckless Vance any longer, Layla thought. As a combat medic, he needed calm control, gentle hands and a compassionate heart for those wounded and hurting. Qualities, she suspected, that were the unforeseen yet fortunate consequences of those very youthful escapades he seemed now to despise.
Turning to him, she took his face in her hands. Her gaze bore into his. “But you’re a good man now,” she told him. “Such a good man.”
The man I’ve fallen in love with.
Everything inside her stilled. Oh, my God. I...
I’m in love with Vance.
The understanding didn’t come as a thunderbolt. It didn’t feel like an anvil had fallen on her head. There was no pain in it—that would come later, she supposed, because he was still just temporarily in her life. For now, though, it was like the sunlight parting coastal clouds,