Say Goodbye (Romantic Suspense #25) - Karen Rose Page 0,44

with him since she was seventeen years old.

Fritz had caught her staring at Tom’s NBA team photo once, before they’d first started dating. Luckily, he’d been more interested in the fact that she knew the Tom Hunter than that she’d been mooning over another man.

Guilt filled her at the thought of Fritz. He deserved more than she’d been able to give him. He deserved to at least be claimed verbally as the man she’d married. So far, she hadn’t told anyone about him. Not stateside anyway. His family knew, as did their friends in the army. And they’d grieved with her, not knowing that most of her grief was guilt for not loving him enough.

Closing her eyes, she leaned against the wall as far from Tom as she could get. “What’s up?”

There was silence. Long, long silence.

Finally, she opened her eyes to find Tom staring at her as if she were a stranger. “What is up?” she asked again, enunciating every word.

He swallowed audibly. “What the fuck, Liza? What were you thinking?”

GRANITE BAY, CALIFORNIA

WEDNESDAY, MAY 24, 12:55 P.M.

Tom closed his eyes. Of all the things he’d wanted to say, that hadn’t been on the list. “Shit,” he muttered. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Liza said. “Now, if you’re finished, I need to go home and walk your dog.”

He opened his eyes to see her holding herself rigidly. She was a tall woman, five-ten without her boots. With her boots, she could meet his eyes with a chin lift that, at the moment, seemed more vulnerable than defiant.

Fuck. Now he’d hurt her feelings. “That’s not what I meant to say,” he whispered, taking a step closer. She backed up a step—or would have if she hadn’t already been up against the wall.

Something stirred within him, a desire he’d tamped down years ago, right after they’d met, in fact. It still reared its head from time to time, but he was usually able to smack it back down.

She’d been too young, only seventeen to his twenty. Then she’d been deployed. Then . . . Tory had come along and he’d thought he’d found his forever. But . . .

She’s not too young anymore. She’s not deployed anymore. She’s here. And Tory is not.

That last one had him taking a step back. His Victoria was dead. It had only been a year.

What am I thinking? Nothing smart, that was for damn sure. “Are you all right?”

Her smile was brittle. “Of course. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

He frowned, having no idea what to say next. Then he remembered Molina’s words from that morning. “You know I’m proud of you, don’t you?” And if the words sounded a little desperate coming from his mouth, that was understandable, because he was desperate.

She blinked, her lips parting in surprise. Then her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

He stared at her, at a loss for words. “What do you mean, why?” he finally asked.

“Because when you start with ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ and progress to you being proud of me, you have to admit it sounds a little suspicious.”

“Fair enough,” he acknowledged. The slight relaxation of her rigid shoulders made him relax a little as well. He’d been genuinely afraid there for a moment. “I was worried.”

The rigidity returned, and with it the brittle smile. “Mercy and Abigail are fine.”

He blew out a frustrated breath. It was like she was turning his words upside down and inside out. He hadn’t meant just Mercy and Abigail, and she knew it. “What’s wrong with you?”

Which was the exact wrong thing to say.

Because she swallowed hard and tears welled in her usually warm brown eyes. “Clearly too many things to count,” she whispered. “Tell Irina I’ll be back tomorrow.”

And with that, she fled from the laundry room into the Sokolovs’ garage. Follow her, you idiot. But his feet wouldn’t move, his body frozen in place at the sight of her tears. What had he done? Why was she crying?

A moment later, the rumble of the garage door going up finally got his feet moving. He made it into the garage in time to see her back as she retreated to her car, parked at the curb. She paused a split second to wave at Irina’s husband Karl, who was pulling into the driveway.

Tom stood there, completely at sea. Liza wasn’t a crier. Well, sure, she cried at sad movies, but so did he. They often spent the evenings on his sofa watching movies, sometimes sharing a box of tissues between them before she retreated