A vision of Emily as he’d last seen her, dressed in nothing but his white linen sheets and a soft, pink flush, drifted through his thoughts and rubbed every raw edge of his conscience. He might not recall what happened that night, but he would never forget the morning after. Her wariness, his clumsy questioning, her insistence that nothing had happened. Except, hot on the heels of that “nothing”—while he and Joshua were traveling to Annabelle’s funeral—she packed her bags and disappeared.
Frustration twisted his gut into a tight, hot knot as he pulled into the car park behind the Lion and switched off the engine. Six months wondering and worrying over the consequences of that night, and he didn’t think he could wait another minute, certainly not the hour until closing. From the near-empty lot he figured she wouldn’t be too busy—the impending rain had kept most sane folk home. He jumped down from the cab, shut the door and—city habit—paused to lock up. He almost missed the small, female figure that slipped from a side entrance. As she hurried off down the street, the wind tore at her hooded parka. Long hair, stick straight, shone silvery pale under a streetlight.
Emily.
His pulse kicked, an instant response to the tumult of sensations that swamped his body. Most of them he didn’t want to identify, so he concentrated on the quick surge of anger. She was walking home alone, through the dark streets, and she didn’t even have the sense to pull her hood over that luminous beacon of hair. Might as well shout, Here I am, young, blond and female. Come and get me.
Suddenly the door to the bar swung open, and two men veered toward Mitch, two men he recognized as former classmates at Plenty High. He had nowhere to hide as Dean Mancini did a classic double take.
“Mitch Goodwin? Stone the crows! I heard you were coming back. Moving into the old Heaslip place, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.” Beyond the mens’ shoulders, Mitch could see Emily’s rapidly retreating figure. “Sorry, mate, but I—”
“Lucky break, your sister getting married and letting you take her place.” Rocky O’Shea rode right over the top of Mitch’s attempt to end the conversation. “But then you always were a lucky bastard.”
Dean planted an elbow in his mate’s side and Rocky, eventually, caught on. His gaze skittered, his Adam’s apple bobbed, and Mitch didn’t really want to hear whatever fumbling words came next. “I have to be somewhere,” he said shortly. “Catch you another time.”
Dean cleared his throat. “Sorry about your…you know.”
“My ex-wife?”
Both men shifted their feet, awkward and ill at ease, but Mitch was already climbing into his truck. Powerful engine gunning, he wheeled the vehicle into the street, but his irritation faded as quickly as it had flared, replaced by a tinge of sympathy for the discomfited pair.
What were you supposed to say to a man whose wife ran off to chase her dazzling career without a thought for their three-year-old son? A wife whose glamorous must-have lifestyle placed her in a doomed jet in a Caribbean thunderstorm?
Even six months after her funeral, he didn’t know what the hell kind of etiquette covered that.
When the first spots of rain dotted the pavement a block from home, Emily huddled deeper into her parka and walked more briskly. She didn’t run. Running would be like ceding defeat to the fear crouched low in her belly, woken by the dreaded combination of rain and darkness and the revving of a powerful motor.
“For pity’s sake, Emily Jane, you’re not even in the car,” she muttered. “Plus you’re in Plenty, not Sydney.” Reasonable points, but the sweep of headlights turning into her street sent her memory into a tailspin.
Her car stopped at traffic lights. The door wrenched open. The man, the knife, the icy clutch of terror as he told her to drive.
Emily was jolted back to the present by the sound of a vehicle slowing and pulling into the curb behind her. Now she should run but her stupid, scared legs refused to cooperate.
“Emily.”
At the sound of her name—of that voice—her heart stuttered, then resumed at the same frantic pace, except with a different kind of panic. A Mitch Goodwin kind of panic. She’d heard talk of his imminent move from Sydney to his family’s hometown, had known he wouldn’t let sleeping dogs—or nannies—lie. That was Mitch’s way, ever the journalist, needing the full story, fact by painful fact.
Six months she had spent constructing her version, preparing for this moment, and now her brain appeared to be in meltdown. Wonderful. With a fatalistic sense of doom, she turned toward the car…correction, truck. Mitch Goodwin sat behind the wheel of a crew-cab truck that could have been tailor-made. Big, dark, rugged. A shivery tension weakened her limbs as he stretched across the front seat to open the passenger door. The cabin light cast tricky shadows across his darkly stubbled face, and his deep-set eyes, too, looked unfathomably dark. Emily tried not to stare at his lips, not to remember their determined heat as they—
“Get in,” those lips said. “It’s starting to rain.”
Her first reaction, innate, unthinking, was to get in. Emily Warner, always eager to please, to avoid conflict and make life easy for herself and those around her. But the combination of his arrogant demand— “Would you like a ride?” or even “Get in, please,” may have worked—and a festering pique set her back on her heels. She was angry about him appearing without forewarning, for following and scaring the daylights out of her, and she was more furious with herself for reacting as always—same old want, same old need.
“You’re getting wet.” Curt, impatient.
“I did notice that, actually.” She lifted her face, and a score of heavy raindrops spattered her heated skin. “But I don’t have far to go and I would rather walk.”
She didn’t run, she walked, and when his truck door slammed, she barely flinched. When he grabbed her arm and swung her around to face him, she did flinch. His gaze narrowed but he didn’t let her go, and she was mad enough to lift her chin and glare right back at him. “What do you want, Mitch?”
“To get you out of this rain,” Mitch fired back, burning from the way she’d refused his lift and jumped from his touch.
“Then perhaps you had best let go of my arm.”
He lost all patience. Tightening his hold, he ushered her the last thirty yards, through her front gate and onto the sheltering verandah. When he tipped her face to catch the glow of a nearby streetlight, a raw tightness gripped his gut. Her skin felt as baby soft as he remembered, but her face looked strained with a new weariness. And her eyes…still deep, warm, mellow, but no longer trusting. They shifted under his scrutiny, her expression edged with a wariness he’d seen only once before.
That morning in his bed. Damn.
“You’ve been working too hard,” he muttered, stroking the dark circle under one eye with the pad of his thumb. Wishing he could erase it along with that leap of reaction in her wide eyes. Fear?
When he let her go, she backed up so quickly she almost tripped over her feet. Mitch’s gut twisted with consternation. “What’s the matter, Emily? Why are you so jumpy?”
That chased the wariness from her eyes. “You drove up behind me and scared me half to death. You manhandled me into my own yard. Do you really have to ask?”
Put like that… “I’m sorry for frightening you. I meant to catch you before you left the pub.”
Distrust darkened her gaze but she didn’t look away. “Why? What do you want, Mitch?”
The directness of her question swept all contrition aside, leaving only the hot, churning frustration born