Flushed down the toilet.
Thrown out the window.
Turned to dust by what she’d learned in that interrogation room in Miami.
She needed to tell him about it. Tell him all about it. Trouble was, there was so much of it—a lifetime’s worth—that she was having trouble figuring out where to start.
She decided to begin with something easy. “How are you feeling?” She studied his profile as he watched a pod of dolphins plowing through the surf near the reef. He looked good. Better than good in green board shorts and a white T-shirt that emphasized his tan and assured her his hospital pallor was long gone. “How’s the pain?”
He narrowed his eyes as he scanned her face. “Good. Except for when I take a deep breath. Then it feels like someone jabbed me with a hot poker. Which sucks because part of my PT is to take deep breaths.” He scratched his goatee and chuckled. “But as Doc likes to point out way too often, and with way too much sadistic glee, no pain, no gain.”
This was what had drawn her to him from the beginning. This easiness. This comfort. This sense of safety.
He’d never pushed her or made demands of her. He was always perfectly patient, waiting for her to be the one to poke her head out of her hard, protective shell.
And because she felt comfortable and safe around him, she didn’t think it’d hurt anything if she teased him. Just a little. Just to take the edge off her nervousness. “Deep breaths hurt, huh? I guess that means blow jobs are out of the question for a while.”
He smiled. She’d known he would smile, and still it pierced her heart like a harpoon fired from a speargun. He was such a beautiful man. Inside and out. When he smiled, both facets of his beauty shined through.
And he’s mine, she thought with no small amount of wonder. Then she was hit with a terrible notion. Unless he no longer wants me. Unless I blew my chance.
Of course, his next words put her at ease. “Oh, don’t say that. I’m more than happy to push past the pain.”
She giggled and shook her head. “Men. Sometimes I think the world could be ending and you wouldn’t notice so long as someone was polishing your knob.”
“But that’s the whole point,” he countered. “The perfect time to have my knob polished is when the world is ending. I mean, what a way to go, right?”
They both laughed then. But he sobered first, and his melting-chocolate eyes caught and held hers. “So...” he said tentatively. “You want to explain what this”—he lifted their joined hands—“is about? After you ran out of my hospital room, I thought you might not get within ten feet of me ever again.”
He didn’t try to hide the hurt and confusion in his face when he talked about their last conversation. When she’d run out on him like a...yellow-bellied coward, in the parlance of Granny Susan.
Knowing she’d caused him even a moment of pain had a lump forming in her throat. “It’s hard to stay away from someone who is as much a part of you as the blood in your veins and the air in your lungs,” she admitted quietly. “Plus, I don’t want to stay away.”
The wind ran loving fingers through his hair, tussling it around his face. It was the only thing that moved on him because he’d gone statue still, as if he thought any movement might cause her to turn tail and run.
And why wouldn’t he think that? You’ve given him every reason to believe you’re exactly that kind of flight risk.
“What’s changed?” he asked softly.
“Everything. And I’m so sorry!” she blurted, the lump in her throat making room for her heart to sit beside it. “I’m so sorry for leaving you alone in the hospital. For anything I said to hurt you. I wish I could take it all back.”
She swallowed the tears that burned the back of her nose. “My only excuse is that I was scared. Scared of what I felt for you. Scared of what you felt for me. But mostly I was scared of who I was. Scared that if I told you who I was it’d change the way you felt about me.”
“And you’re...not scared now?” His words came slowly, as if he picked them carefully.
“No.” She shook her head. “Because I’m not who I thought I was.” She frowned. “Or maybe it’s more correct to say I’m not what I thought I was. You remember when you asked me why I’ve never considered marriage?”
“You told me it was because you didn’t have the first clue how to make a relationship work long-term.”
“That’s only a small part of the truth,” she admitted. “The bigger part is that even though I don’t have the first clue how to make a relationship work long-term, I felt...I still feel certain that one sure way to make it not work is to begin it with a lie. Even a lie by omission. And I couldn’t stomach the thought of revealing myself to anyone. Especially not to someone like you. Someone so open and outgoing and virtuous and good and...all the things I’m not. Or...” She shook her head. “All the things I thought I wasn’t.”
“Mia.” He turned toward her and grabbed both her hands. His callused fingertips rubbed against her palms, and she shivered slightly at the memory of them rubbing against other parts of her. “I’m sorry. I’m really trying to follow along here. But I’m having trouble—”
“I thought I was a murderer,” she exclaimed. “I thought I’d killed my baby brother.”
His chin jerked back. “Didn’t you tell me your brother killed himself?”
She nodded, trying to arrange her thoughts into some sort of coherent order so that she could lay it all out comprehensibly for him. After a couple of seconds, she gave up on the endeavor and simply said, “I’m going to ramble a bit here.” When she saw him blink, she amended her statement. “Or I’m going to ramble more. But just stick with me, okay? I swear I’ll do my best to try to make everything clear by the time I get to the end.”
He made a rolling motion with his hand.
She nodded gratefully. And then she told him. Everything.
About always feeling responsible for Andy’s illness, because even though she’d only been seven years old at the time of the overdose, and even though her mother had said the pills were candy, she’d known they weren’t. She told him how that guilt had led to her developing a strong sense of responsibility toward her brother, which had, in turn, led her to taking on the role of Andy’s guardian—maybe not legally, but literally and unmistakably. She told him about how anything Andy had ever asked for, she’d gotten for him. About how whatever Andy had ever asked her to do, she’d done.