Ryan raised his head. “Done what?”

“Kissed you.”

MONDAY MORNING WALKER woke up in a crappy mood. He wasn’t sure of the cause. Maybe the awkwardness yesterday between himself and Elissa was to blame. Maybe it was the need to keep moving that had begun to bother him more than usual. Maybe it was the growing sense that he wasn’t going to be able to find Ben’s Ashley.

Whatever the cause, he started the day ready to rip someone’s head off. As that wasn’t possible, he did the next best thing. He visited his grandmother. The way he was feeling, Gloria couldn’t do much damage.

He found her on the cardiac care ward, in a large private room. She was sitting up in bed, several pillows behind her head. The TV was off and a book lay on the table next to her, but when he entered the room, she was staring out the window.

“It took you long enough to visit,” she said by way of greeting.

“Good morning. How are you feeling?”

“I’ve had a heart attack and I broke my hip. How do you think I feel?”

“But your spirit remains intact.”

She glared at him. “I’ve spoken with the doctors. I should be leaving here in a few days. Apparently there is no way around two weeks in a skilled nursing facility. But once the break heals enough, I’ll be going home.”

“So he told us. Reid is already looking into hiring private duty nurses.”

“Reid,” she said with a sniff. “How wonderful. I’ll have attendants with large br**sts and no brains. That should speed my recovery.”

He smiled for the first time that morning. “Reid will choose competent people,” he said, thinking they would also have to be patient and thick-skinned to deal with Gloria for eight hours straight.

“What’s happening at the company?” she asked. “What changes are you making? I know you are, so don’t try to deny it. You won’t be able to resist meddling.”

“Business is great,” he said easily, ignoring the insult as he pulled up a chair and sat down. “No one has quit in nearly a week.”

“You say that like it’s a good thing. If they’re too feeble to handle the pressure, they should go.”

“Why do you feel compelled to frighten your staff?” he asked conversationally. “Who does it help?”

“I don’t frighten them. I have high standards.”

“You have a love of terrorizing.”

“What do you know about business? You’ve been playing soldier for the past fifteen years.”

More than playing, he thought. But he wasn’t going to get into that with her. Despite the tough words, she looked…frail. Not a word he would have ever used to describe Gloria. But it was true. She was pale and without her carefully applied makeup, she seemed much older. Her white hair hung limp and even in what he would guess was a designer nightgown, she appeared small and helpless.

“You’re not still seeing that woman, are you?” she asked. “She’s a complete waste of your time.”

All his worry for her evaporated. “Not your business,” he told her, not willing to give her the pleasure of saying he wasn’t. Not in the way Gloria thought.

“I forbid it,” she told him.

“By what power? Are you going to fire me?”

“I’m your family. You will respect me and do what I say.”

“Not so much,” he said as he stood. “I’m going to head to the office now. I’m sure Cal and Reid will be by soon.”

“As they should,” she told him. “But not Dani. Tell her I don’t need to see her. She’s not family.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ELISSA TOSSED ASIDE the tiger’s eye she’d been working with. The small stone bounced on the desk and came to a stop by a few freshwater pearls.

Nothing was going the way it should tonight, she thought irritably. She felt more restless than creative. How had everything gotten so out of hand so quickly? Her life used to be relatively simple. Sure, it was a financial struggle, but everything else was fine. Suddenly she was dealing with family and Walker and too many orders for her jewelry. Although based on how Walker had bolted after taking her tire in to be fixed, she had a feeling he was going to be less of an issue in the future.

Which was starting to piss her off. How dare he do that to her and then disappear? It wasn’t polite. It wasn’t reasonable. Why did he get to decide?

Zoe was already in bed, so when Elissa heard Walker drive up, she hurried to her front door and stepped out into the night. She waited until he was nearly at the stairs leading up to his apartment, then said, “I’d like to talk to you.”

He didn’t appear startled, which probably meant he had known she was there all along. Had he planned to just walk past her without stopping?

She motioned to her open front door, then waited until he’d gone inside to follow him. But once they stood facing each other, she suddenly didn’t know what to say.

“How was work?” she asked, feeling stupid.

“Good. Busy. I stopped by to see my grandmother and that always puts things in perspective.”

Gloria Buchanan was not a topic to make Elissa sleep better that night.

“I…I’m sorry you had to come to my parents’,” she said, which wasn’t at all what she’d planned but now seemed appropriate. “It can’t have been comfortable.”

He shrugged. “It wasn’t that big a deal.”

“I hadn’t realized they wouldn’t accept my statement that we were friends. My father admitted he grilled you.”

“It’s a guy thing.”

It was a waste of time. She wasn’t looking and he wasn’t interested. She got that. Well, part of her did. Her body continued to ignore the message.

“Thanks for talking to Zoe,” she said. “I don’t know why I thought I could reconcile with my family and not fight with my mother. It’s scary the way we’ve picked up right where we left off. Shouldn’t the eight years apart have made a difference?”

“It will. Give it time.”

She motioned to the sofa. “Want to sit down?”

She thought he might refuse, but then he surprised her by taking a seat. She sat across from him in the club chair.

“She won’t believe anything good,” Elissa told him. “I explained that while I was with a rock band and even sleeping with a member of the band, I didn’t get into drugs. She’ll accept that I slept around and didn’t mean to get pregnant, but she won’t believe me about the drugs. She kept asking if I was still using and did I want Zoe exposed to that. I hated it.”

“Maybe she’s trying to help.”

“Could she do it in a less annoying way?”

“Maybe she doesn’t know how.”

“I hate it when you’re reasonable.” But this wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. “Why did you do it?”

He drew in a deep breath. “Can’t you accept it and let it go?”

“Not really.” She opened her mouth, then closed it. “I don’t know what to think. We’re neighbors and you’ve been great. You’ve helped me and Mrs. Ford, and Zoe likes you. I know you’re worried about getting too close to her and I appreciate that. You’ve made it clear you’re not interested in anything with me and I have a plan to avoid men for another thirteen years, so I’m okay with that. But something has happened here and not talking about it isn’t going to make it go away.”

“Are you angry? Do you want me to apologize?”

“No to both. I just want to know why.”

He was quiet for so long, she began to think he wouldn’t answer. She had the feeling he was going to simply walk out and she would never see him again.

But finally he said, “I didn’t plan on leaving the Marines when I did. I was going to stay in until they kicked me out because I was too old. But one day I woke up and I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t kill, I couldn’t send men off to die. There was already too much blood. So I left and I came home. Only there isn’t a home anymore. I have my brothers and Dani, I have money, but there’s nothing else. Nothing permanent.”

His emptiness burned her with an aching cold.

“I do it on purpose,” he continued. “I stay away, disconnected. It’s my choice. But sometimes there are temptations I can’t resist. Like you.”

Elissa thought of herself as many things, but never a temptation. “Me?” she squeaked.

He shrugged. “The way you move, the way you smell, how you never give up. I knew better but I wasn’t willing to act on that. I made love to you because I needed to, Elissa. I needed to kiss you and touch you. I wanted to know what you felt like. How you tasted.”

She felt herself blushing and getting aroused. His words were as powerful as his touch had been.

“Then why did you stop there?” she asked.

“Have you ever been in love?”

The question came out of nowhere. “I…No. I thought I loved Neil, but I loved what I wanted him to be.”

“I have. Once.”

Unexpected pain cut through her. Something dark tightened her chest. “Who is she?”

“Her name was Charlotte and she was my high school girlfriend. I took one look at her and knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with her.”

Elissa got a bad feeling inside. She wanted to stop him talking, but at the same time she was desperate to know what had happened between them.

“She transferred in my junior year of high school,” he continued. “She was beautiful. Tall with red hair and the biggest green eyes I’d ever seen. I introduced myself and I guess she felt it, too, because we were together every minute after that.”

“Sounds nice,” Elissa managed through a very dry throat.

“It was. I knew she was the woman I was supposed to marry. We decided to go to college in California together and then get married after graduation. I never had to propose, we both just knew. We were each other’s first time, the night she turned seventeen.”

Elissa had to force herself to sit still. She wanted to curl up in a ball and press her hands to her ears. She wanted to order him out of her apartment and demand he never return.

Instead she listened.

“One afternoon when we were making love, I felt something in her breast. It hadn’t been there before. I told her and she told her mom and she went to the doctor. It was cancer. Breast cancer.”

Elissa blinked. “But she was too young.”

“That’s what we all thought. But there are about five hundred cases every year in women under twenty. Charlotte was one of them.” He shifted so he sat on the edge of the sofa and rested his elbows on his knees.

“She had a lumpectomy. Because she was so young, the doctors didn’t want to take her breast. No one knew, except me. I remember walking next to her in the hallways, careful to keep on the side where she’d had her surgery so no one would bump her. I remember how she cried the first time we made love afterward, how she was afraid I wouldn’t still love her and how long it took for her to believe that I would never stop.”

Elissa drew in a shaky breath. She didn’t know what to think, what to feel. The knot in her gut told her the story wouldn’t end well.

“It came back,” he said flatly. “By April of our senior year they realized their mistake in treating the cancer so conservatively. It was back and it was everywhere. She was given less than six months to live.”

He stared at the floor. “She couldn’t tell me herself. She had her mother do it. I was scared, so scared. I didn’t want to believe it and then I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t watch Charlotte die. She knew it, too. When I went to go see her, she saw it in my eyes. She cried and I cried and she told me to go away and never come back.”

“But why? To spare you?”

He nodded. “I knew she needed me. I knew she wanted me to stay. But I pretended her words made it okay and I ran.” He raised his head and looked at her. “I told everyone I went into the Marines to screw with Gloria, but that’s not true. I went in because I couldn’t stand to watch Charlotte die. I disappeared the day after graduation. I never called, I didn’t leave a note. I just walked out on her.”

Elissa hadn’t seen that coming. She stiffened in surprise.

“Her mother called me,” he said. “She begged me to come home. She said Charlotte needed me. It would just be for a few more weeks. That this was her baby and she would do anything to convince me. She asked for herself. Charlotte never said a word. I joined the Marines and went to boot camp.”

“When did she die?” Elissa asked softly.

“August. She wrote me a letter saying she loved me and knew I loved her. I couldn’t bring myself to read it for a year. I never saw her family again. They moved away.”

He stood and moved toward the door. “That’s who I am, Elissa. I’m the guy who couldn’t be there for the woman I loved. I would have died for her, but I didn’t have the balls to watch her die. Don’t trust me with anything important because there are better than even odds I’m going to let you down.”

He stepped out into the night and was gone.

Elissa let him go. She sat alone in her living room and cried. Whether it was for herself, Walker or a brave young woman who had faced too much too early, she couldn’t say.

“WE’RE HAVING an intervention,” Mindy said the following Tuesday when she, Elissa and Ashley had locked the front door of the diner. Frank had already left to go to the bank and the cleaning crew wouldn’t be there until later, so it was just the three of them.