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  Balancing his weight on his forearms while he recovered his senses, he pressed his face into the beautiful tangle of Tate’s hair. It smelled like fresh mint leaves. Her skin smelled even better, nothing but sweet, warm woman.

  He sighed and lifted his head to look down at her, waiting to see what her reaction would be now that the fantastic reunion sex was over. When she gave him a faint smile, the anxiousness tightening his chest eased off, but it didn’t disappear completely. He withdrew from her body and rolled onto his back, staring blankly at the ceiling until he summoned the energy to get up and deal with the condom.

  He quickly washed up and flipped off the bathroom light. When he walked back into the bedroom, Tate sat on the edge of the bed fastening her bra. The rest of her clothes were still in the foyer, along with his.

  “Are you hungry?” He sat down beside her. “It wouldn’t take me long to whip us up something.”

  “I still have laundry to finish.” She winced after she muttered the excuse not to stay. That wasn’t the reason why she wanted to leave, but Ryan wasn’t going to press any harder. If they had to do this in baby steps, then so be it. Although what just happened felt more like a giant leap off a ten story ledge.

  Trying to hide his disappointment, he stood again. “I’ll go grab our clothes.”

  When he returned, he asked, “You’re not upset with me for lying to get you over here?” She took her clothing from him, and he stepped into his jeans.

  “After what we just did, I don’t think I have a right to be.” Her eyes drifted up his torso before finding his face. “At least you copped to it rather quickly. The lying that is. I guess you’re making some progress on the truthfulness front.”

  Ouch. “Okay, I deserved that. But how long are you going to keep punishing me?”

  She began jerking on her clothes. “It’s not meant to be a punishment, Ryan. Or maybe it is, I don’t know. I just need you to tell me why you left me like you did. It’s the only way I’m ever going to finally bury all that old pain, put it behind me for good, and I want desperately to do that.” She blinked away a sheen of tears and turned away from him, scooping up her shoes before walking out of his bedroom.

  Ryan followed, his heart pounding so hard he thought it might crack a rib. “Tate, listen. I’ll tell you why I left … I just…” She stopped dead in her tracks and faced him, ready to hear what he had to say. Only thing was he didn’t think he could spill his guts just yet. The past was a topic that hurt like hell to talk about. “I had a valid reason, okay? But it’s something that’s not going to be easy for me to tell you.”

  “Why not? I don’t understand why you can’t just say it! Did you kill someone?”

  “No!”

  “Cheat on me and knock some girl up and now you have a child somewhere?”

  He gritted his teeth and glared. “Fuck no. I never even looked at another woman when I was with you.”

  “Then what is it?” she asked, her voice growing louder. “Dammit, just spit it out!”

  “It was my family, all right?” She jerked like he’d slapped her, her lips parting in surprise. Ryan swallowed the bile that rose in his throat and shook his head. “It wasn’t me or you. It was my family, and I had no choice but to leave you. I’m not lying to you about this. And that’s all I’m going to tell you tonight, so you’re just going to have to fucking trust me. Please, will you at least do that much?”

  She drew a stuttered breath, some of the tenseness in her body easing away, before nodding weakly. “I’ll let it go for now. But if you expect me to trust you ever again, you’re going to have to do the same with me.”

  Tate opened the door and walked out. Ryan pressed his forehead to the cool wood, realizing his days were numbered. If he wanted Tate back in his life for good, he had to come clean very soon. Otherwise, she’d slip through his fingers again like sugar. And that thought made him even sicker.

  Chapter Five

  For the next three days, Tate worked herself into an exhausted stupor on purpose. She’d even covered a few partial shifts for other doctors, just so she wouldn’t have time to think about what Ryan had said. It was all for naught. She puzzled it out in the car on her way home, over the sink as she brushed her teeth, and in her bed before sleep overtook her. Then somehow her dreams formed conclusions and wove together ridiculous scenarios that made absolutely no sense whatsoever, but when did dreams ever make any sense?

  Whatever the cause of Ryan leaving was, it obviously still caused him a lot of pain to talk about, and for that reason Tate now felt like a selfish asshole for seeing things so one-sidedly. She’d made giant assumptions that he’d left Atlanta for purely self-serving motives, and that might not be the case at all. There was no room in her professional life for assumptions, so why she’d made such a monumental one in her personal life was beyond her realm of comprehension.

  Perhaps she owed him an apology. Or maybe not. She didn’t know what to think, really. At least not until he finally decided he was ready to talk and could clear up this problem that hung between them like a dense, gray storm cloud.

  In the interim, he called or texted. Just little short, sweet messages asking how her night had been, or what the last movie was that she’d seen. Did she think to eat dinner. And they were working. Tate could feel herself melting like candlewax, forgiveness edging out the old hurt and resentment until the only thing left was want.

  She had to hand it to him. He’d played his cards well. He’d known the sex would serve as a potent reminder of the physical connection they’d shared. Now he was slowly filling in the gaps with his tender, caring gestures that played on her heartstrings like only he knew the chords. And didn’t he? She’d never let anyone else get as close as Ryan. His leaving had left wounds she never wanted to reopen, so she’d erected barriers too impenetrable for any man to break through. Until now, when the one person who’d been responsible for those barriers shredded them as if they were made of tissue paper.

  “It was my family, and I had no choice but to leave you.”

  That one sentence kept running through her mind in an unending loop, punctuated by the pain and earnestness she’d heard in his voice as he’d said it.

  She tried to think of things her family could’ve done to her to make her drop everything and go to them against her will, something that she wouldn’t want anyone else to know about, not even those closest to her, and everything she came up with was grim. Dark, deeply disturbing subjects like murder or sexual abuse.

  Ryan had a younger sister, Dannie, who he was extremely close to. Tate had met her a few times when she’d come to Atlanta for a quick visit with Ryan’s parents. She was a beautiful, bright girl, full of joy and typical teenage enthusiasm for everything. The thought of her being abused, physically or mentally, made Tate’s stomach turn over. Dannie would’ve been around thirteen at the time Ryan left. Could that have been it? Did their father or mother mistreat her in some way and Ryan intervened? That would certainly be something painful that would be hard to discuss. Everyone felt shame and guilt in those instances, even when it wasn’t necessarily warranted.

  Tate buried her fingertips into her stinging eye sockets in a futile attempt to rub away the fatigue and accepted that she’d already been privy to too much darkness in the ER. Her imagination had been seeded by all the horrific abuses she’d seen firsthand. Now her brain was permanently corrupted. She’d become jaded about the world, and that made her sad. On a few rare occasions she saw the good side of humanity, but mostly she saw the awful. The attempted murders, drunk drivers’ victims, domestic violence, and rapes. It was hard to keep your perspective sometimes.

  Tonight was a prime example.

  There’d been a six-car pileup on I-75, instigated by a drunk driver crossing the median into oncoming traffic, and Atlanta General had absorbed the brunt of the aftermath. Everywhere Tate looked was carnage and death. Blood pooled beneath gurneys, leaking from broken bodies faster than it could be replaced through transfusions.
Cries of agony became the soundtrack of the evening, punctuated by the monotonous beeps and alarms of machinery and the shouted orders of staff members trying their best to save the lives they could.

  During these challenging times, Tate’s training took over, and she ran on autopilot, doing what was necessary, blocking out the human emotions like sadness and frustration and anger. There was no place for any of that to creep in during the heat of the moment. Letting it in would only serve as a distraction, and those could cause deadly mistakes in the ER.

  When the last patient had finally been stabilized enough to transport to surgery, Tate stripped off her gloves and looked down at her scrubs. She was splattered with blood, the spots so thick in some areas they formed Rorschach patterns against the blue background of the material. Her white leather Nikes were speckled with deep crimson droplets. Unfortunately, she hadn’t remembered to put a spare set of clean scrubs back in her locker since the puking incident several shifts ago.

  The hospital had protective booties and gowns to cover clothing when working messy cases like they’d had this evening. Tate found them mostly cumbersome, and usually by the time she thought about putting something on, she was already too focused on the patient to care about her attire. Besides, they were scrubs—if they didn’t come clean in the wash, she tossed them out.

  She’d worked many overwhelming, stressful nights, but for some reason this particular shift hit her with the force of a locomotive. She felt drained of life, as though she’d been one of the accident victims, too.

  Strangely, tears began to sting her eyelids. Not wanting anyone to see her lose it, she ran for the nearest bathroom, locking herself inside a stall and collapsing on the seat of the toilet. She rolled off a wad of tissue and dabbed at the wetness on her cheeks, cursing this abrupt, crashing vulnerability. A few minutes later, she heard the door open and the squeak of sneakers on the linoleum.

  “Tate, is that you?” Colleen asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  Tate sucked in a deep breath through her mouth in hopes of avoiding more of the blood smell, then slowly released it. “I will be. Everything just got to me out there for a second.”

  “Want to grab a coffee and talk?”

  Tate exited the stall and walked to the sink, splashing her face with handfuls of cold water. “Thanks, but I think I’m going to head home.”

  Colleen placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently. “Something’s going on with you, and it’s not work. Does it have anything to do with the sexy chef from your past?”

  “He wasn’t a chef in my past.” Tate dried her face with a hand towel and tossed it in the trash. “He was just the cute guy from my Dramatic Lit class who hated Shakespeare as much as I did. Then one day he brought me chocolate chip muffins after I casually mentioned they were my favorite. He’d made them himself from scratch.” Tate smiled weakly. “To this day it’s still the best fucking muffin I’ve ever tasted. So I guess maybe he was born to be a chef, and he just hadn’t realized his full potential back then.”

  “Why does his reappearance have you so emotional?”

  Tate sighed. “Things ended badly between us. Not with either of us cheating or fighting all the time. If we’d broken up over something like that it might’ve been easier to accept and recover from. Instead, he just up and disappeared. Not one word of explanation as to why.”

  “Not even a note or a phone call?”

  “Nope.”

  Colleen looked as perplexed as Tate had felt the day it happened. “God, who does something like that?”

  “Never in a million years would I have thought Ryan.”

  “Obviously you were deeply in love with him, though.”

  Rubbing the back of her neck, Tate had to agree. “Obviously.” Otherwise it wouldn’t still hurt as much as it did after all this time. She wouldn’t still carry it around inside of her like an ulcer, an open sore that wouldn’t heal.

  “Did he love you back?”

  “He never said the words, but I felt sure he did. But then again, I never professed my feelings either. Not verbally anyway.”

  “You don’t always have to speak the words to convey the sentiment.”

  “Then why do we hear so many people say they wished they’d said ‘I love you’ one last time?”

  “Because they weren’t doing the rest of it right. If you show them every day, they’ll know without having to hear the words.”

  “Is leaving someone in the middle of the night showing them you love them?”

  Colleen shook her head. “Not at first glance, no. But he doesn’t sound like the type to just give up on someone overnight. He went to the trouble of baking you homemade muffins. After all these years, he remembered your favorite flower, and he cooked you and practically the entire ER staff an Irish dinner. Amongst all of the hospitals and care centers in Atlanta, he sought you out and found you. Honey, to me that speaks volumes about how he still feels about you.”

  Emotion swelled in Tate’s chest, filling her throat until she thought it would split her in half. Colleen was right.

  Colleen was always right.

  She patted Tate on the back and left her alone in the bathroom to mull over what she’d said.

  Twenty minutes after her shift ended at midnight, Tate found herself standing in front of Ryan’s door. Somehow her car had just steered its way over there, and her tired feet had carried her up the two flights of stairs to his landing. She should’ve called first before showing up so late and unannounced. He was probably asleep, exhausted from a busy night, too. Or he might be out with friends, having a drink and a laugh. She hadn’t thought to look for his motorcycle parked on the street. She hadn’t really thought of anything, her mind too spent to think logically. Perhaps not even rationally. It just seemed as though her body knew what it needed and made the decision for her.

  She raised her hand and knocked, then listened quietly for the sounds of movement on the other side of the door. After a moment of nothing, she started to walk away when she heard the chain slide through the hasp and the deadbolt turn.

  “Hey,” he said gruffly when he opened the door. His hair was mussed, his beautiful blue eyes languid from sleep. All he wore was a pair of dark green boxer briefs. “Come in.”

  Tate stepped across the threshold, running her damp palms over her hips, while he shut and locked the door behind her.

  “I…” she started before she realized the purpose for her impromptu visit was selfish and somewhat irrational. There was no simple way to explain why she was there.

  He frowned down at her scrubs. “Is all of that blood?”

  She sighed tiredly. “It was a very bad night.”

  “Looks like it.” He ran his hand across his hair, causing the muscles on the left side of his chest to lengthen. “Is that the reason for the late night visit? Stress relief?”

  I’ve gone numb, and you make me feel something again.

  She swallowed her shame. “Yes.”

  Ryan stepped closer, his fingers going to the bottom of her top. “Then let’s start by getting you out of these reminders.” Tate nodded, lifting her arms obligingly.

  They left a trail of her clothing on the way to his bedroom, stripped piece by piece in between deep, wet kisses. By the time the bed was reached, both of them were blessedly naked, desperate for each other, and Ryan was donning a condom.

  Together they melted onto the bed, a warm tangle of limbs and eager, seeking mouths. He stripped the elastic band from her hair and massaged the back of her scalp with his fingertips. Tate closed her eyes, groaning softly in pleasure from just that simple, tender gesture.

  His lips found every sensitive spot on her throat while his hand cupped her breast, thumb teasing the nipple to a hard peak. He captured it between his lips and tortured it with his tongue, until Tate writhed and whimpered beneath him, clawing at his shoulders with her nails, pulling him closer still, his cock sliding into the juncture of her thighs where she w
as already slick and achy with need.

  He encouraged her to turn onto her side, curling his bigger body against her back. Draping her leg over his thigh to open her up, he eased inside her so slowly Tate had to bite her lip to keep from begging him to hurry. There was no rush.

  And God, it felt wonderful to have him take her like this—patient and careful—despite the lateness of the hour and their shared fatigue. The two of them just fit together like puzzle pieces, always had.

  Ryan’s hand caressed her breasts and belly while he slowly rocked his hips. His mouth brushed her ear, making her shiver. Tate turned her head to look up at him. The expression on his face was tender, the soft smile on his lips familiar. He kissed her, long and languidly, never feeling the need to speed things along. Still, an orgasm built between her hipbones, gathering strength with every lazy thrust.

  Back when they were together in college, she and Ryan had made love so many times it was impossible to keep count. He’d known her body as well as she did. Knew how to make her squirm in a room full of people and burn hotter than the sun when they were alone. It had become embarrassingly easy for him to make her come. He could get her worked up with just the briefest of touches, glances, a few dirty words whispered into her ear. She was almost capable of an orgasm on command.

  Sex since then had been adequate at times, unfulfilling others. It was telling to acknowledge that she’d often fantasized about Ryan when it wasn’t working with another man, but she didn’t want to think about that right now. Not when her own personal sex god fucked her like something out of a wet dream. She didn’t even need to hear him say anything. The sounds of their soft, blissful moans and warm bodies moving together were enough.

  His hand moved down her stomach, unerringly finding her swollen clit. Tate wavered on the brink of a blinding climax. She made a rough gasping noise in her throat, a wordless plea for more, more, more, and Ryan gave her what she needed. Gripping his hip in her hand, she broke apart beneath his deft touch.