Melissa James - Who Do You Trust?

He bit the inside of his mouth. Somewhere along the line, his gentle Lissa had grown feisty. She’d squared up to him like Mike Tyson in a prematch slanging bout. What the hell had he said to make her quiver with fury like that? “I’m sorry.” He stumbled over the long-unused word, jerking a hand through his hair, and cursed when it caught in his tangled curls. “I hated leaving you. I’ve missed you like crazy the whole time I’ve been gone. Not a day’s passed when I didn’t think about you, want to see you, call or write—but Tim made his feelings pretty final.”

“But I didn’t,” she snarled, startling him with the vivid passion in her face. “You just left me—left us both behind. You knew how much Tim cared about you. Surely you knew he’d regret what he’d done when he was sober? And he did, Mitch—but we both thought you’d come back. And how do you think I felt, waiting day after day for a call or letter to know you were safe? I had to call the Air Force a year later to make sure you were alive!” She whirled on him again, a delicate china tigress, even her sheathed and painted claws ripping his heart to shreds. “I loved you, damn it. You knew I’d worry myself sick about you, and you never once bothered to let me know you were alive and all right!”

“I knew. You and Tim were the only two people on God’s earth I was sure cared about me.” He turned aside, looking out the window to the vista of shimmering, sun-drenched fields he’d loved from first sight, seventeen years before. Breckerville and Lissa. The only sense of belonging he’d ever had; the only place he ever felt at home, at peace, where the tempests roaring inside him calmed like the waters of the Jordan at a word from the Messiah. “But when he did that to me right in front of the whole town, and you didn’t stop him, I didn’t know what to think. Sure I was out of line with the speech about you. I was stupid, jealous of what you two had, and more than a bit drunk, I’ll admit it—but I’d forgiven him far worse. Did he ever tell you why?”

Her voice came to him, strained. Hiding secrets. Hers or Tim’s? “I think that’s something he’ll have to tell you himself.”

So she was still loyal to Tim, even after all he’d done to her. He held the sigh in. The path he’d finally hoped clear was far from smooth. Mitch the dreamer strikes again—shot down as usual by the Red Baron of reality. “Where does he live now?”

“Sydney. Ashfield. He owns and runs a gym near the city with a partner. He comes up here every second weekend to see Jenny. Sometimes during the week, too, depending on his schedule. He’s become a father figure to the boys in the past five months. He takes the kids to football games, plays with them, helps them with school projects. Things like that.”

He turned to her, but she’d averted her face. She was talking too much. Lissa always did that when she was scared, or hiding something. “Does he stay here?”

“Yes.” She fiddled with the cloth on the counter. Waiting for the question. He knew it. He sensed the pot boiling inside her, the potent stew of dread and anger, daring him to speak.

Like a fool, he plunged on. He couldn’t stop the gut-deep jealousy eating at him, clawing with the sharp-edged talons of Iago’s cunning. “In your bedroom?” he rasped.

Like a flash she turned on him. “And who’s been in your bed lately, Mitch? Who’s filled your lonely nights the past twelve years? How many times have you sunk to doing things you hate so you’re not alone, even for a few hours?”

He’d expected her to shove the question back in his face, but not with such raw intensity. Oh, yeah, she’d walked his path, if from the other side of the fence. He understood that loneliness. The darkness of nights filled with aching. The sunrises and sunsets over concrete and stone, standing alone in a city of four million people, that city not where you ached to be, none of those people the one you hungered to be with. Even when he was on a mission, even when he’d saved someone’s life, it only patched over the gap for a few hours, before the gut-gnawing voracious need for home and family and Lissa. Dear God, how he’d ached for her; a devouring need to sink inside her, lose his pain in her smile, her arms and welcoming body forever left the wound open again, savage and unhealed and bleeding.

He’d learned long ago how to live alone. Taking another woman to his bed or hers—even women who knew the score—had only ever intensified the loneliness, the anguished yearning. An hour, a minute of mind-numbing forgetfulness nowhere near compensated for weeks of self-hate, using a woman as a replacement for the only woman he’d ever truly wanted.

Kerin’s fall from grace completed the lesson forever. He’d used her in his unhealed grief for Lissa, taken Kerin’s eager smile and giving sexuality as a shallow replacement for real love, and discovered too late the abyss of unbalanced emotion that lay beneath. But by then, she was pregnant with his children, and leaving her wasn’t an option.

But now Kerin was gone, Lissa was free—and his heart and body, primed and hard all day, thudded till the pounding need roared in his ears, reminding him they’d been starved way too long.

In his whole life he’d never known love the way Lissa used to give love to him. She sneaked him food when Old Man Taggart left him hungry again. She helped him with his homework, even did it for him when he didn’t have time. She sat and talked to him by the pond that joined their farms when the sun went down—the loneliest time for him, when families gathered around the tables to be with their kids—often giving up her own family time to be with him. She’d listened to him as he talked about his hopes and dreams for the future, and confided hers to him. Sweet Lissa Miller of the popular crowd at school really cared about unknown, unimportant Mitch McCluskey. She worried about him, fussed over him, poured her heart and soul’s care over him until he’d swum in it, drowned in it, lived and breathed the love filling him. Even when she started dating Tim—damn Tim for asking her to their formal first!—Mitch never felt less than special, less than loved by her, even when he’d been jealous enough to murder Tim when he touched her, kissed her.

Even now the memory had the power to make him burn.

How could he feel so much, hurt so much, and she not know it?

Deep inside, he’d always known this sort of love only came to a man once in a lifetime. He’d learned long ago that to have another woman in his arms and bed was nothing more than an empty cheat, fool’s gold, a poor substitute for what he wanted. To have and to hold the woman he loved, forever. To have, not just her body, but her trust, her joy and pain, to grow old beside her at the place they loved best. To love and be loved in return.

And if he’d been the one to marry Lissa he’d never have walked out, never left her. He’d have loved her forever, kept that innocent joy glowing from her eyes—eyes now filled with the cloudy shadows of suffering and rejection.

Suffering Tim had put there. Shadows he’d have to erase before she’d even consider his proposal.

Why had he ever stood aside for Tim? Why didn’t he ever tell Lissa how much he wanted to be the one?

Never a time, never a place, he’d always thought. But the simple truth filled him with self-contempt. Because you were a bloody coward, always terrified she’d say she only loved you like a sister. Too scared you wouldn’t be enough for a girl like her.

He still was. He, who regularly looked death in the face, was too scared to look into the eyes of a delicate, five-foot-four woman and tell her he loved her. If only Tim hadn’t walked in on them on her seventeenth birthday—but Tim had. And then he’d had to walk away. Tim had a home, a life, security—a family to offer Lissa. He, Mitch, didn’t even have a real name to give, just the minister’s surname from the church steps his mother had dumped him on as a newborn. He was a hooker’s unwanted bastard, pushed from place to place all his life, a worker begrudged even the basics of life, like food or affection. How could he ever think she’d love someone like him, beyond the miracle of her friendship?