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“Arden, I need a favor…”
It was only as he reached for the door of the restaurant that Colin realized he still held Nikki’s newspaper in his hand. He glanced at the headline again.
“Get out of town for a while,” Detective Brock had advised. “Go somewhere quiet. Keep a low profile.”
Good advice, but how the hell was he supposed to keep a low profile when the local media still believed he was some kind of superstar?
Colin knew better. The reality was that he’d failed at everything that had ever mattered. He’d failed as a player and a coach, and he’d failed to be the kind of husband Nikki deserved.
He shoved the paper into the garbage can and headed toward the counter, wondering if his careful planning had been compromised by that seemingly harmless headline.
He’d put his plan into action forty-eight hours earlier. The first step was a flight from Texas to Maryland, where he’d reserved a room in his own name at the Baltimore Courtland Hotel. He’d taken a cab from the airport to the hotel and checked into his room, with explicit instructions that he did not want housekeeping services. After unpacking some clothing and toiletries, he’d taken another cab to the bus terminal and paid cash for a ticket to Washington, D.C.
In Washington, he’d picked up the rental car his agent, Ian Edwards, had reserved for him. Then he’d found a small roadside motel, paid cash for the room and crashed for a few hours before driving through to Fairweather yesterday morning, where he’d checked into another Courtland hotel under Ian’s name.
He wasn’t convinced the circuitous route and subterfuge were necessary, but after what had happened in Austin he didn’t want to take any chances. If someone was looking for him, trying to track his moves, they’d be concentrating on the Baltimore area.
Unless they happened to pick up a copy of the Fairweather Gazette.
He’d told no one of his plan to return to Fairweather. It was just his bad luck that he’d run into Traci Harper as soon as he’d arrived in town yesterday afternoon. Traci was an old high-school friend, now a reporter with the Gazette. He should have anticipated that she would somehow turn a chance encounter into a news item.
His only consolation was that it was unlikely anyone outside of this smack-in-the-middle-of-nowhere town read the local rag. Few of his associates even knew he’d grown up in Fairweather, which made it the obvious place for him to find solitude and anonymity.
Or maybe what he’d really wanted to find was Nikki.
He took the two steaming mugs to a vacant table near the window, where he could see her.
He hadn’t let himself think about her until he was on the plane; he hadn’t been able to think about anything else since. After more than five years, he wouldn’t have expected that she’d figure so prominently in his thoughts.
Maybe it was the realization that he could have been killed, the stark reminder of his own mortality. Whatever the reason, he’d suddenly felt a compelling need to see her again—to explain something he still wasn’t sure he understood himself.
He watched as she disconnected her call, tucked the phone back into her purse. As she crossed the street, her short blond hair bobbed with each step.
She was dressed in casual work attire: short-sleeved sweater in a misty shade of blue, tailored pants a few shades darker, white running shoes. It wasn’t a seductive outfit by any stretch of the imagination, but he felt the familiar tug of desire, anyway. Just like the first time he’d seen her.
He’d fought it at first, refused to believe it. The coolly reserved, completely professional physiotherapist wasn’t anything at all like the women he was usually attracted to. But something inside him had recognized her as his mate.
He’d pursued her relentlessly, and when he’d finally broken through her barriers, he’d found an incredibly passionate woman—a woman who’d touched him on levels he hadn’t known existed before he met her. Whatever else might have gone wrong between them, the sex had always been phenomenal.
He shifted in his seat, cursing his body for choosing to remember that now.
“Thirty minutes,” she reminded him, sliding into the chair across from him.
He pushed one of the mugs toward her. “A little bit of cream, a half a teaspoon of sugar.” He’d remembered her preference, as he’d remembered everything about her.
She wrapped her hands around the mug, a wry smile curving her lips. “It’s been five years. A lot of things have changed in that time.”
“Some things never do,” he countered.
“Are you going to tell me the real reason you came back to Fairweather now?”
“You always did cut right to the chase.” It was one of the things he’d admired about her from the start. She’d been the first therapist assigned to work with him after the injury that had prematurely ended his career, and he’d always appreciated her straightforward approach—even when she was telling him things he didn’t want to hear.
“So why are you here?”
“I was ready for a vacation?” he suggested.
“And you chose Fairweather?” Her eyes narrowed speculatively. “Or is your sudden reappearance somehow linked to the explosion in your apartment?”
Talk about cutting to the chase. “How did you know about that?”
“It was on the news.”
Colin had caught mention of it himself during the previous evening’s sports highlights. The commentary was brief, mentioning only that police were investigating a suspected bombing at the residence of Tornadoes’ head coach Colin McIver. There was no mention of Maria Vasquez, the forty-seven-year-old mother of five, who’d been cleaning his apartment at the time and who was still fighting for her life in ICU.
“Was it a gas leak?” Nikki asked.
He only wished the explanation was something so innocuous. “The cause is still being investigated.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
“My apartment needs a little work,” he said, deliberately downplaying the situation. “But that’s only part of the reason that I decided to come back now.”
“And the other part?”
“To see you.”
She stared intently into her cup for a long moment before lifting her gaze. “Why?”
“Because I’ve spent some time in the past few weeks reevaluating my life, facing my mistakes, acknowledging my regrets.”
Her smile was sad. “Where do I fit in? A mistake? Or a regret?”
He reached across the table and covered her hand with his own. “The mistake was in letting you go.”
“You say that as if I wanted out of our marriage, but you were the one who left. You were the one who wanted the divorce.”
“I was too screwed up to know what I wanted. After my father died…” He shrugged.
“I know his death was hard on you,” she said gently. “I know you wished you’d had a chance to bridge the distance between the two of you.”
“I tried. I guess I just didn’t try hard enough.” The sense of regret, of guilt, still gnawed at him. “Did I ever tell you about the last conversation I had with him?”
She shook her head. “What happened?”
“We argued.” He smiled wryly. “It seemed like we were always arguing about something. This time it was about you.”
“Me?”
“He wanted—no, he demanded—that I give up coaching. He said it was past time for me to quit chasing a dream, to get a real job, to be the kind of husband you deserved.”
Richard McIver had berated Colin for even considering the coaching job, insisting that a woman like Nikki needed security and stability, not the kind of nomad existence his career would entail.
But without his career, Colin had nothing to offer his wife. So he’d taken the job, she’d stayed in Fairweather, and their marriage had become a casualty of geographical distance.
And his father had died as he’d lived: angry with and disappointed in his youngest son.
“I’m sorry, Colin.”
“So am I,” he said. “About so many things.”
He rubbed his thumb over her third finger, where his ring had once sat. “I thought you would have married again.”
She tugged her hand, but he didn’t release his hold.
“And I thought ‘till death do us part’ meant something longer than ten months.”
He winced at the direct hit. “I guess I deserved that.”
“What do you want me to say, Colin? Do you want me to tell you that there’s no one else in my life because I haven’t been able to forget about you? Well, I haven’t. I haven’t forgotten how devastated I was when you walked out on me, and I won’t ever risk going through that again.”
“I am sorry.”
She shrugged off his apology, glanced at her watch. “Your half hour’s almost up.”
Colin pushed back his chair and rose to his feet with her. He knew he should be grateful she’d even been willing to sit down and have a conversation with him. After five years, it was more than he’d had a right to expect. But it wasn’t nearly enough.
He walked with her across the street back to the clinic parking lot. She stopped beside her car, turned to face him. “Thanks for the coffee.”
So this was it then—the brush-off. He’d expected it, but he wasn’t prepared for it. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe that there was nothing left for them.
Testing her, maybe testing himself, he lifted his hand to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear and allowed his fingers to graze her cheek as he pulled back. He heard her sharp intake of breath, knew the casual contact had sparked something inside her. It had sure as hell stoked the fire that burned inside him.
“Is it really so easy to walk away?” he asked.
The warmth in her eyes cooled considerably. “You tell me.”
“No.” He dropped his hands to her slender waist, struggled against the impulse to pull her tight against his body. Events of the past few days had shown Colin how short life could be, and he didn’t want to waste any more time. He also knew if he moved too fast, he’d scare her off. “Leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
“But you did it.”
“I thought it was the best thing for both of us.” He stroked his hands down over her hips slowly, then back to her waist, his thumbs skimming her ribs. “Now I know I was wrong. Because even after five years, I can’t forget the way it was between us.”
“That was a long time ago, Colin.”
“It could be like that again.”
She started to shake her head.
He didn’t want to hear the protest he knew was coming, so he silenced her the most effective way he knew—with his mouth.
He felt her stiffen, but she didn’t pull away. In fact, her eyelids had just started to lower when the shrill ring of his cell phone intruded.
Later that evening, as Nikki sat alone on the front porch of her home, she would admit—if only to herself—that she’d never experienced with another man the kind of desire she’d felt just being held by Colin. The simple anticipation of his kiss had heated her blood more quickly and completely than any other man’s kisses ever had.
The physical attraction worried her. She’d never been the type of woman to let her hormones overrule her common sense. Except with Colin. The only man who could make her heart soar with a simple look, an innocent touch, was the only man who’d ever broken that same heart.
The thought terrified her, as did the realization that there was so much more at stake than just her heart this time.
She’d always known it was possible that he might come back someday. But it had been a remote concern, almost unreal, so long as he was halfway across the country. Now that he was here, she knew it was time to face the deception she’d lived with every day for the past five years.
She had to tell him. She couldn’t keep the secret any longer—she wasn’t sure she even wanted to. But knowing what she had to do didn’t make it any easier to find the right words.
Colin, you have a child.
It sounded simple enough, except that Carly was her child. Nikki was the one who’d been there every day of Carly’s life: when she’d cut her first tooth, taken her first step. She’d been the one to sit up with Carly through sleepless nights, to kiss her scraped knees, to worry over every cough and fever.
Still, she knew that biology gave him certain rights, not the least of which was the right to know he’d fathered a child. She had wanted to tell him about Carly years ago. She’d wanted to save her marriage, to be with the man she’d loved, but she’d refused to use their baby to do so. She’d loved Colin fiercely, completely, and it would have devastated her to know that he’d only stayed with her for their daughter.
So she’d kept her pregnancy a secret, consented to the divorce, and a few months later, she’d given birth to Carly.
Now he was back, and everything seemed to be spinning out of her control.
She heard the sound of a car approaching, breathed a sigh of relief that Arden was finally home from her meeting at the women’s shelter. Arden Doherty was her cousin, her roommate, and her best friend. And she was the only person Nikki could talk to about the chaos that had come to town with her ex-husband.
Nikki turned around as the vehicle pulled into the driveway. Her heart pounded frantically against her ribs as she realized it wasn’t Arden’s car. And it wasn’t her cousin who got out of the car.
It was Colin.
Her easy smile froze; panic clawed at her throat.
The shock of finding Colin outside the clinic where she worked didn’t compare to the sense of terror building inside as he moved toward the front porch of the house where she lived. Where their little girl was sleeping inside.
What was he doing here?
And more importantly, how quickly could she get him to leave?
She fought against the panic, forced her tone to remain neutral. “What are you doing here?”
He stepped onto the porch, leaned a shoulder against one of the upright posts. “Haven’t we already had this conversation today?”
“And didn’t we say everything we needed to say?” she countered.
He took a step closer, deliberately invading her personal space. “I think we have some unfinished business.”
His gaze dropped to her lips, and she knew he was thinking about kissing her again. Just as she knew she couldn’t let it happen.
She lifted her hands to his chest, intent on pushing him away. She could feel the heat of his skin through his shirt, the unyielding strength of his muscles, the thunderous beating of his heart.
