talk to you, even if you couldn’t talk back.” He dropped his hand, fighting the impulse to take hers. “When your father refused, I tried to find you myself. It didn’t go well.”
“I imagine you were a little insane. From the pain, no doubt.”
“Yeah. The pain.” But not just the physical pain. “It wasn’t one of my best ideas, but I needed to know you were all right. No one was telling me anything.” He’d been scared, desperate.
Maybe she saw it in his eyes, because she said, “I’m sorry. I’m sure my parents weren’t helpful.”
“I won’t repeat how unhelpful they were. But I didn’t blame them. They were angry and scared, just like I was. How did you find out?”
“Grandma left me a letter. I found it a couple of nights ago.”
“What else did she say?”
She shrugged. “Just…stuff. About how you wrote to each other when you were in prison. Her life.”
He could tell there was more, but he wasn’t going to push her on it. None of his business. Neither was her relationship with this Stewart, but he needed to know more. If she was committed to some guy, especially a military guy, that would make it easier for him to stand back. “So, you and Stewart helped each other.” He could well imagine just how they’d helped each other.
“I think we were drawn together because we felt safe with each other. Accepted. The therapist said exposing yourself, your scars, for the first time is the hardest. But it’s easier when you’re showing them to someone who also has them.” Her hand went to her chest, even though her shirt hid the scars.
“That makes sense,” Raleigh said, his voice going hoarse at the thought. “So he helped you to heal.” Something Raleigh couldn’t do.
“Yeah. We helped each other. But he’s angry. That’s how he deals with it. Angry at Al Qaeda. At the war. God. And as I felt the wrongness of blaming everyone else for your problems, I realized my parents were doing the same thing by blaming you. I’d kinda gone along with it, out of guilt. My decisions caused them a lot of pain and expense.”
She curled her hand over his. “As I listened to Stewart rail, I realized that it wasn’t really you my parents were blaming. Those years I fought the cancer, we all struggled not to blame God. It’s easy to blame some almighty entity. Or assign it to fate. Then again, you don’t want to piss off that God who can supposedly crush your life in a blink, right? So after the crash they had an outlet for all that repressed anger: you. It’s not personal. And it’s not about you.”
He leaned down and kissed her. There was no way in hell he could fight that. Even if she was seeing an angry military guy. He captured her mouth again and again, savoring the feel of her soft lips pliant beneath his. Just sips of a kiss, he promised, maybe one or two more. Forget about the intake of her breath at the first contact, the breathy sigh with each touch of their lips. But he couldn’t ignore her mouth opening to his, needing more.
He knew that need, felt it in every cell of his body. She moved into him, her hands sliding up his arms, to his shoulders. Her breasts pressed into his stomach, nipples hard enough to feel through their clothes. He slid his fingers into her hair, dislodging the clip and feeling the rain of silk as it fell down her back. His heart was hammering, the way it had the first time they kissed, and it felt as if something in his life had finally gone right.
And if all he got was absolution, and this kiss, that would be enough.
Right?
Their mouths opened simultaneously, their tongues coming together as naturally as they always had. Flirting. Dancing. Playing. He had to hold himself back from devouring her, from pinning her between his body and the wall. Her hair slid over his fingers as he twined them through her locks. He fought not to grip too hard, to anchor her, to hold her fast and never let her go. She tasted sweet and minty. He drew one hand down the center of her back, going all the way to where it dipped in at the base. He splayed his fingers, wanting to feel as much of her as he could, even if fabric separated them.
She made a sound—a groan or a