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“He’s here,” she whispered. “He’s early.”
“You’ll be fine, okay? Put down the phone, close your eyes for a few seconds, then go to the door. Okay? Just say ‘okay.’”
“Okay.” Jessica thought her head might fall off she was nodding so hard.
She placed the phone down without saying goodbye.
He was here. Ryan was actually here.
Waiting outside her front door.
How could she know this man almost as intimately as she knew her best friend, yet be terrified of meeting him?
She looked at the letter on the table, reached for it, then tucked it into her jeans pocket. She didn’t need to open it to know what it said. She remembered every word he’d ever written to her.
Jessica squared her shoulders and shook her head to push away the fear. Ryan was here, waiting for her, and she had to be brave. It felt like she was about to meet a lover she was so nervous, but it made her feel queasy even thinking that way. One of her closest friends was standing at the door, and for some reason she was paralyzed with fear.
Bella had gotten her all wound up in knots, and for what? She wasn’t interested in meeting a man in that way, especially not now. And she didn’t want Ryan to be anything more to her, no matter what he looked like. What she needed in her life were good friends, and he had proven that he was there for her when she needed someone.
Another knock made her jump.
This was it. There was nowhere she could go but forward, down the hall.
Unless she escaped out the back window …
A flash of brown streaked past her and she groaned. Hercules. She’d put him out the back with a bone and hoped he’d stay there, but he must have squeezed through the doggie door when he’d heard the knock.
At least he’d be a good distraction.
Ryan wondered if it were possible for fingers to sweat. His were curled around the paper-wrapped stems of a bunch of white roses, clenching and unclenching as he tried to figure out what to do with them. Out in front seemed too contrived, behind his back looked ridiculous and hanging at his sides just seemed more ridiculous, like he was trying too hard. Why flowers? Why had he felt the need to complicate things by bringing flowers?
He was going insane. He’d survived the trauma and heartache of years serving his country, and now a stupid bunch of flowers was tying him in tight coils. He was a United States Army Ranger. Practised, strong and unflappable. He’d never have made the special ops unit with nerves like this.
Clearly he was losing his touch.
Perhaps he should throw them into the garden? He looked over his shoulder, beyond the porch, then listened as the door clicked and a small dog started barking.
He was out of time. Ryan slowly, cautiously turned back toward the house. He wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, walk back down the steps and start all over. Without the flowers dangling awkwardly from one hand, and instead standing at ease on the doorstep in front of her.
Ryan spun around as the door swished open.
“Jessica.”
He exhaled the word as if he’d been waiting a lifetime to say it. In a way he had.
Ryan was pleased he’d never asked her for a photograph. It couldn’t have done justice to the reality of her features. Hair the color of rain-drizzled sand was tucked behind her ears, eyes the shade of the richest dark chocolate peeked out beneath dark lashes. She smiled like she was greeting her first date—nervously, expectantly, unsurely.
Worried. Just like he was.
After so many months of writing one another, meeting in person was kind of surreal.
He went to move and something tiny hit him in the knees and almost made him fall. By the time he looked down a small dog was doing laps around his feet, before disappearing back into the house with as much speed as he’d arrived with.
Ryan laughed then looked back to the woman waiting to meet him.
“Jessica.” When he said it this time it made him smile naturally, rather than feeling like a word-stuck teenager. “It’s so good to finally meet you.”
She grinned as he walked toward her, then opened her arms to him.
“Ryan.”
Even the way she said his name did something to his insides, but he pushed past it. He was a soldier. He was trained to deal with difficult situations.
“I’m really glad you made it, Ryan.”
He let the flowers drop to the porch as he opened his own arms to hold her. Jessica stepped into his embrace as if she’d been made to fit there, firm against his chest, arms tight around him. She hugged him like someone who cared about him.
Like he hadn’t been hugged in a long time.
It had been years since his wife had died. Years since he’d felt the genuine embrace of a woman, one that wasn’t out of pity, but out of something deeper, warmer.
Ryan inhaled the scent of her—the tease of perfume that reminded him of coconuts on a beach. The soft caress of her hair that fell against his neck as she tucked into him.
It felt good. No … even better than good. It felt great.
He cleared his throat and stepped back, not wanting to make her uncomfortable by keeping hold of her too long. Jessica leapt back from him like a bear from a nest of hornets, her face alternating between happy and concerned.
“I …”
“We …”
They both laughed.
“You first,” he said.
Jessica grinned at him and rocked back and forth, arms crossed over her chest.
“I don’t remember what I was going to say!”
Ryan shook his head and laughed. Laughed like he thought he’d forgotten how to, cheeks aching as he watched her do the same.
He bent to collect the fallen flowers.
“These are for you.”
She blushed. When had he last seen a grown woman blush? It made a goofy smile play across his lips.
“Me?”
He nodded.
“It’s been a long time since anyone gave me flowers.”
Ryan watched as she dipped her nose down to inhale them, her eyes dancing along the white silhouette of each rose.
It had been a long time since he’d given a woman flowers.
“Do they give me passage inside?”
Jessica looked up at him with an expression he’d only seen once before. His wife had looked up at him like that from her hospital bed, full of hope, happiness shining from her face.
He clenched his jaw and stamped the memory away, refusing to go there. This was Jessica, the woman who had made an effort to write to him when most Americans seemed to forget what U.S. troops were facing overseas. This was not a time to dwell on the past.
“Yes.” She looked sideways, away and then back, but he didn’t miss the twinkle in her eyes. “Yes, it does. So long as you’re prepared to meet Hercules properly.”
“I take it Hercules is the small fur-ball who almost bowled me over.”
Jessica reached out to Ryan and grinned. “Maybe if I’d given him a more insignificant name he wouldn’t be quite so full of self-importance.”
Ryan took the hand she offered and let himself be led inside. It felt too normal to touch his skin to hers, too casual, but when she looked over her shoulder at him and smiled, her fingers trailing away from his until she was just a woman walking ahead of him, he felt the loss of her touch like a limb had just been torn from his body.
The shock of doing normal things was something hard to get used to, after months being surrounded by other men in the desert. Each day started to merge with the next one … and home seemed like just a scene on a postcard.
Being back here wasn’t something he had looked forward to, it was something he’d feared and wished he didn’t have to confront again. But Jessica had been there for him, eagerly writing him back so he’d had something positive to concentrate on.
When everything else was gone, snatched away from him, Jessica had been there.
She’d come into his life when he’d been losing his way. When he’d almost felt as though his soul had been defeated, like he had lost his purpose. It was Jessica who had held each piece of him together when he could have lost hope.
Maybe she could help him now he was home, too. Because nothing else had fallen into place since he’d returned.
A man could only hope.
Jessica set the flowers to rest in a vase on her bench and turned back to her guest.
“Shall we have lunch here or go out for something?”
Ryan shrugged. “I don’t mind.”
“But …?”
She laughed as he squinted at her.
“How did you know there was a but?” he asked.
Jessica tapped her nose. “You’d be surprised what I know about you.”
Ryan flopped down on the sofa and crossed his legs at the ankle. He looked at home here, comfortable in her home. Aside from her brother, she wasn’t used to seeing men in her space.
She didn’t want it to bother her, but it did. Having a man around had become foreign to her. It felt too intimate, being so close, seeing him so … at ease.
Funny, she had expected being back in America to be hard for him, but it seemed like she was the one struggling.
“Okay, you got me.” He gave her a smile that made her almost want to look away, but she didn’t. The way his mouth curved, his eyes creasing gently at the corners, was exactly as she’d imagined he would look. Hoped he might look.
Her stomach twisted, as if her organs had been flipped then dropped. She wasn’t meant to be thinking about him like that. Not now, not ever.
“The sun’s shining, the ground is still wet from the rain last night and I’m desperate to be outside in the open. You’ve got no idea how good it feels—smells—outside here,” he said.
Jessica beamed at him. She was still nervous, but the quiver in her belly felt as if it were less from worry than excitement. A day out with someone with whom she could just be herself was exactly what she needed.
Besides, it would be easier being around him on neutral territory. Even if he was just a friend, she wasn’t ready to see a man in her house, on her sofa, like that. Not after Mark. Not after what she’d gone through this last year.
It sent a shiver down her spine just thinking about the last twelve months.
“Give me five minutes, I’ll get my handbag and we’ll go to the park.”
“I’m guessing we have to take the mutt?” he teased.
Jessica cringed as she heard paws racing on the timber floor in the kitchen. Hercules was like a missile, as if he’d known exactly what they’d been talking about.
He sprung through the door and leapt onto Ryan’s lap, tongue frantically searching out his victim’s face.
“Hercules! No!”
Ryan grabbed him and held him at a safe distance.
“Five minutes?” He raised an eyebrow, ignoring the wriggling dog.
She nodded. “Sorry about him.”
Ryan stood, eyeing Hercules. “I’ll start the clock now.”
She turned sedately and walked toward her bedroom as slowly as she could manage. She wanted to run, to sprint to her room and grab her things and not miss a moment of being in his company.
Ryan. His name was circling her mind over and over, like a record she couldn’t turn off. Ryan.
He was everything she’d imagined he would be and more. When they’d first started writing, he was just a soldier. He was a man serving their country and she felt good giving support to him. But when they’d realized they had grown up within ten minutes of one another, something had started stirring within her. Then when he’d made noises of coming back home to California, to Thousand Oaks, she’d started wondering. That despite her insecurities, despite her worries about herself, she had a connection with this man. A man who understood her and wanted to meet her. But a man she only knew on paper, who wouldn’t feel pity for her or treat her like an almost-broken doll because of what she’d been through.
And he was hardly a disappointment. In the flesh, he was even more commanding than he was on paper. Well over six feet and built like a man who could protect her on a dark stormy night in the meanest streets of Los Angeles. A man with dark cropped, slightly disheveled hair that begged to be touched, ice-blue eyes that seemed to pierce straight through her body. And beautiful lips that, despite all he’d seen and experienced, still hovered with the hint of a smile as he spoke.
Jessica scolded herself. Smiling over mental pictures of him while she was alone was exactly what she didn’t need to be doing. Ever. Until she reached the five-year mark, until she knew she was in complete remission, men were strictly off her radar.
Jessica stole a quick glance at herself in the mirror as she passed and fought the urge to cross her arms over her chest. She was still self-conscious, but it was getting better. After all they’d said to one another, all they’d shared, she hadn’t told Ryan. Couldn’t tell him. Not yet. It was still too fresh for her, too raw, to share with anyone.
And she wanted him to just like her for herself. Treat her like she was normal and not a fragile baby bird in need of extra care.
She picked up her purse, squirted an extra spray of perfume to her wrist and reached for a sweater. She didn’t know why, but today felt like a fresh opportunity, a new chance. She wasn’t going to let her insecurities ruin it. Not when she had a man like Ryan waiting to spend the day with her.
