that kind of protection. I’ve had it for… since… a long time.”
He closed his eyes as if she’d punched him. She leaned forward to grab her bag so she didn’t have to look at him or feel his referred pain. Pulling out the address, she tried to read, but the words danced in front of her eyes.
“It’s not too far,” she said, forcing herself to read and think about where they were and where they were going. Literally, on this street—not emotionally, in her head.
“Jocelyn.”
She ignored the tenderness in his voice, the warmth of that big hand, the comfort it always gave her. “Two more lights,” she said, her voice tight.
“I know.”
She cleared her throat as if that could just wipe clean the conversation about protection and hurt and shells she stayed inside of. “So why didn’t you look at this place again?” she asked, grasping at small-talk straws.
“I decided he needed to be home.”
The words jolted her. The caring. The concern for a person who had threatened to ruin his life or end it.
“I can see you don’t like that.”
“Am I supposed to, Will?”
He blew out a breath, letting go of her hand to turn the wheel. “I know he’s your dad, not mine, and you resent that I take care of him.”
Was that what he thought bothered her? That he took care of her father? He didn’t even remember what took them apart. What had left a hard shell around her?
She had to remember that he didn’t know everything.
“I just couldn’t sit at my house and ignore the fact that he needed help,” he said.
Well, they had that in common. Wasn’t that the reason she was in this situation in the first place, with Coco? “You should have just picked up the phone and called me. I’d have taken care of the situation.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
He threw her a look. “Maybe because I felt like I owed you something.”
Her? What could he owe her? “Me? Why?”
“Because if it weren’t for me, that… night would have never happened. You wouldn’t have left or you would have come home.” He swallowed, his voice thick with regret and remorse. “I blame myself for what happened that night.”
“You shouldn’t,” she said simply. “You should put the blame where it belongs.”
“On you?” He sounded incredulous.
“No, Will. On Guy Bloom.” She pointed to a large white stucco building set back on a lawn, a simple sign at the parking lot’s edge. “We’re here.”
When he pulled into the lot and parked, she started to open the door, but he took her hand and pulled her closer.
“What’s it going to take?” he asked.
The question and the intense look in his eyes stunned her. “To decide he shouldn’t go into a home?”
“No.” He reached over and grazed her jaw with his knuckles, his touch fiery and unexpected and chill inducing. “To break that shell?”
“I’m sorry, Will. It’s unbreakable.”
But he just leaned in and breathed his last few words, the closest thing to a kiss without actually touching. “There’s no such thing.”
“Doesn’t your husband want to come in, too?”
Outside the director’s office door, Will turned to catch Jocelyn’s slightly surprised look and the color that rose to her cheeks. It was a natural assumption on the woman’s part. They’d never said they weren’t married during the tour, just that they were there for Jocelyn’s father.
“I’ll wait out here while you talk,” he said, gesturing toward the lobby.
Jocelyn’s dark eyes searched his, but then she nodded and stepped into the office of the admissions director. Admissions. Like it was a freaking college instead of an old folks’ home with the patently ridiculous name of Autumn House.
Should be Dead of Winter End of Days House.
Will had seen enough of their rainbows and happy-face bullshit in the past twenty minutes of walking through the special areas where visitors could go. Nothing he wanted to know would be visible during that surface skim. And the truth wasn’t going to come out behind that director’s door when Jocelyn asked more hollow questions like “How often are they fed?”
For Christ’s sake. This wasn’t a kennel.
Or was it?
But he had swallowed all those comments while Bernadette Bowers, director of admissions and patient relations, spewed the party line.
A year ago he’d visited two similar facilities. Neither one had been as upscale as this place, he had to admit as he cruised through the softly lit lobby of the main house and nodded to the receptionist hidden behind a plastic palm tree. But they were the same