Her voice broke the silence as he continued to stare at the pin. “Don’t you remember dancing with me the night before graduation?”
Of course he remembered. Every word. Pinkie promise, or it doesn’t count.
“We’re both lieutenant colonels now,” she said. Her voice had not changed in seven years, not in sixteen. “Crazy how time flies, isn’t it?”
Their eyes met.
He felt something like anger. The seal on his memories had been broken. The emotions she was resurrecting were both painfully fresh and achingly familiar.
“I’m single,” he said, “but you’re not.”
“Divorced. He moved out for the last time three years ago. We’ve been divorced for two.”
Good God. All these years...trying to forget her, determined not to think about her. He hadn’t heard about the divorce because he hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from their old circle. It was easier to move on that way.
Except he hadn’t really moved on to anything. To anyone.
“Is divorced not the same thing as single?” she asked, and for the first time, her voice wavered. She dropped her gaze. Now she was the one staring at the silver rank of a lieutenant colonel. Her eyelashes were dark, feminine, alluring even as they hid her eyes from him.
After another moment of silence, she reached for the silver pin.
Evan closed his hand over the pin first. “That’s not the important question, Juliet. The real question is, shall we do this in the courthouse or a church?”
* * *
He couldn’t be serious.
Evan Stephens couldn’t be agreeing to honor their pact so easily. Why should he?
Suddenly, Juliet felt foolish for coming here to challenge him to keep it. It was a ridiculous promise. They’d practically been children at the time. They’d even sealed it by linking their pinkie fingers together.
Evan came to his feet. He was a battalion commander, and he looked every inch the military warrior. He couldn’t have gotten taller, but he seemed taller anyway. He was a little bigger, a little broader in the shoulders, and a lot more fierce in his camouflage than he’d been in shorts and flip-flops on a college green.
Her mouth felt dry.
She had things to say to him. To explain to him. The reason she wanted to gauge his willingness to honor their college pact. The gut feeling she had that he was the father her son needed.
Instead, she was mute as she watched him walk around his desk to stand before her, right before her, just close enough that she felt alarmed, and she took an involuntary step backward.
“Courthouse,” she said, her voice husky but still the voice of an officer. Decisive.
“You’ve already thought this through.” He took a step forward. “I’m fine with a judge instead of a minister, but what’s your reasoning?”
This is happening. This is really happening. And he was so very...real. Not a memory. Definitely not a senior in college. She’d grown into herself over the years, physically, losing the last of that lingering teen lankiness—but she hadn’t thought about the fact that Evan would have, too. He was all grown up, fully an adult, and damn, but a man in his midthirties was a man in his prime.
She cleared her dry throat. “The courthouse would be quicker.”
She was in high heels, but he still had to bend his head down an inch to bring his mouth to her ear. They might have been slow dancing, as close as he was to her, but he didn’t touch her with anything but his voice.
“Are we in a rush? How many children are we going to have before we retire?”
He remembered. He’d chosen the rank of lieutenant colonel because she would still be young enough...
She remembered, and he did, too, and it made something in her chest feel suddenly weightless.
But that wasn’t why she was here. Weightlessness wasn’t welcome. It only made her feel wobbly. This was supposed to be about Matthew.
“I already did that part,” she said. “I have a child.”
Evan touched her then, setting his hands on her waist lightly, but it gave her a little stability, a little strength. His eyes were really as blue as she’d remembered, a pure shade of blue that had left dozens of girls sighing in the bleachers at their college’s baseball stadium. She’d teased him for it, time and again.
Now those blue eyes were looking at her with something like...tenderness? Affection? Like he knew her. It had been so long since a man had looked at her so personally. Not as a subordinate or a superior. Not as a daughter or mother or commander or staff officer.
“I have—”
“A little boy named Matthew. I remember. Cute child.” The corners of Evan’s eyes crinkled just the slightest bit, a small smile at whatever he remembered about Matthew. “Did you have any more children after him?”
“No.” She supposed that was a reasonable question. It had been, gosh, seven years since that chance meeting in Afghanistan, when she’d mentioned going home to her son. But the question unnerved her, exposing how little Evan knew about her life. How could he have accepted her proposal as if he’d marry her no matter what, when he didn’t know anything about her? He hadn’t known she was divorced until two minutes ago. He didn’t know how many children she had. He hadn’t kept tabs on her.
She didn’t feel so weightless now. “Just Matthew. But I have full custody.”
“Rob never sees him?”
It was startling to hear her ex-husband’s name said so casually by someone else. For the past three years, if Rob had come up in conversation at all, it had been only as “Matthew’s father.” Polite, careful questions from new teachers: And will Matthew’s father be coming to the school play?
“He has visitation rights,” she told Evan. “He just doesn’t use them.”
Her polite smile was automatic. Matthew’s father lives out of state. However, my neighbor has agreed to be my designated caregiver if I’m unreachable in an emergency. For three years, her answers had been so polite, so practical.
“I’m sorry,” Evan said.
The teachers never said that. Sorry for her son? Sorry for her? For Rob? Evan didn’t explain himself further.
She explained herself instead, calmly—but her heart was pounding so hard, he ought to be able to hear it. “That means you’d be living with a child if we...if we went to the courthouse.”
“You still don’t scare me, Juliet.” He touched her face with the back of his hand, a light run of his knuckles from her cheek to just above her ear, before he leaned in again to speak softly into the ear he’d just barely caressed. “Children don’t scare me, either.”
“That’s because you’ve never lived with one.” But she couldn’t keep carrying off this calm conversation. She couldn’t pretend it was normal to be in Evan Stephens’s office on a Friday in February, discussing living together as a couple.
She moved away from his hand on her waist and paced a step or two before turning to face him. She let go of her dignity and her military bearing, threw her hands up and huffed out a sigh. “This is insanity. I can’t believe we’re even talking about following up on an old promise right now.”
At that, he half laughed as he half sat on the edge of his desk. “You can’t believe it?”
For the first time, she managed a smile and wrinkled