Did that mean she’d prefer him to be dead? Why? Why?
“I’m not playing games,” he replied, his voice curt with the pain he’d had to bury deep inside for too long. “I’m the one who never got any letters from you once I finally notified my family that I was alive. I’m the one who missed the calls that never came. I’m the one who’s been looking for you for almost two years.” He dragged in a breath. “I had to find out I was a father through my parents—but I discovered I had a daughter through a private detective. I had to learn her name through a stranger I paid to find you.”
She flushed and turned away, her hands fiddling in the deep pockets of her blue sundress. Her hair was the same, the silver-blonde curls worn loose; she was barefoot, like the hippie he used to tease her about being. He’d loved her that way—the barefoot angel, his sweet nonconformist. She’d kicked her sandals off at the party where they’d met—that had drawn him to her. In a place full of stuffed shirts trying to impress each other, she’d been a lovely phantom of freedom.
It seemed they still had that in common—no need to impress anyone or to be anyone but themselves. But what else did they have? Did he even know her anymore?
“You could have left a forwarding address, Sam,” he said, forcing calmness into his voice, willing his heart to the same. Anger and accusation would get them nowhere. “Were you so relieved that I was dead you just left me behind?”
“You know nothing about what I went through,” she said, her voice barely audible through its shaking. “Maybe you can understand that in my grief for a husband I barely knew, I decided that starting over was best.” She lifted her brows as she finished the words, trying for a sarcasm that didn’t come off. Sam had never been any good at sarcasm, he thought with an unwanted shaft of tenderness.
But my Sam was never a coward, either.
“By changing your name and leaving no forwarding address?” he repeated the point, as cool as he could manage. “You never thought of checking with my parents or Doctors for Africa, to see if I could be alive? My parents were frantic about you and their grandchild. You never considered they’d need her when they lost me—or that she’d love to know the only extended family she has?”
Her nostrils flared; her lips were white with strain. “I don’t have enough experience with loving families to have thought of that. Sorry.” She didn’t sound bitter, just resigned…yet something simmered beneath the surface, some extreme emotion she wasn’t willing to show him.
Once, Sam had shared her every thought, her every insecurity and bad memory with him.
You’ve been apart six years, his inner voice jeered. What did you expect—that while your life blew apart, time stood still for her?
He sighed. “I’d have thought your background was even more reason. You finally had a family, didn’t you? My parents welcomed you into the family—”
“Despite the fact that I was a nameless orphan,” she agreed softly, “and not worthy of the honour of gaining the affections of a Glennon.”
What the hell did that mean? “I never once thought of you that way.”
“I know,” she said, still expressionless. What was she hiding?
“My parents were good to you,” he growled, testing that particular water.
Something fleeting crossed her face, then disappeared—an emotion as heartfelt as it was private. “They were very good to me.” Her voice held no inflection whatever.
Oh, man. A far greater distance separated them than a mere twelve feet of space. He felt like a soldier invading a fortress on his own, ramming his head against invisible barricades.
So much for those years of dreams in Mbuka, envisioning the joy of their reunion. Those dreams had gotten him through a life so dark and vile, so alone, that he could barely stand to think about what it had taken just to survive. He’d focused on coming home to Sam. She was his hope, his joy, the future, the only reason to want to get out of bed each day. A day filled with patching up people with little chance of surviving another week; a day where he was a prisoner of war and his medical skills were all that kept him alive, doctoring people who held life so cheap they’d shoot their mothers for food…
In the compounds and ragged camps, deserts and dank jungles of Mbuka’s changing war zones, clinging to this moment had been his only hope.
Coming home hadn’t done a damn thing to stop the nightmares, the shaking, the times when he’d just zone out and not know where he was, lost in memories an Olympic sprinter couldn’t outrun. During two years of grueling physical therapy after the reconstruction of his knee, and repeated bouts of infection, he’d snatched the dying vestiges of his dream and hung on to them with a mindless tenacity that defied reason. He’d shut out the demons of doubt that whispered to him. She’d never been there for your calls from Africa…and her calls late at night had been strained, scaring the hell out of you. Remember?
But he’d blanked it out. Sam hadn’t left him; they’d been so happy! Surely when he found her, he’d find home at long last…because home was in Sam’s arms, in the heart he’d always known had been totally his.
Well, he’d found her again, and he’d seen how she felt about it. While he’d used every resource of strength he’d had not to haul her against him and lose his living nightmare in her loving kiss, inside her welcoming arms and body, all she’d done was scramble to put distance between them.
A distance as emotional as it was physical. A distance she seemed determined to keep there.
So his parents were right: she’d escaped from him; she’d been glad he was dead. She’d found a new life in Sydney, leaving a trail so faint that it took almost two years to get a handle on her whereabouts.
Was the memory of what they’d been to each other so insignificant in her eyes? Was he so unimportant to her?
The child was definitely his; he’d seen the pictures of their child, a girl named Casey. The eyes were his, as were the dimples. There was no way Sam could claim her daughter was another man’s. He’d get DNA tests if he had to.
But, damn it, he shouldn’t have to—not with Sam, his Sam, whom he’d once trusted with his life, his heart and his entire future. Never in his vilest dreams had he believed that Sam could be this hard, so selfish as to disappear without trace, to take his child away from his parents, to deny them the comfort of his only child when they believed he was dead.
“What happened?” she broke into his reverie, sounding as if she was driven to ask. “To your leg, I mean.”
Funny that he’d been the one so long in a war zone, facing life and death every day, fighting death more than once; yet the real question wasn’t about him. What happened, Sam? What changed you?
He shrugged, feeling the shadows fall down on him. If he was going to break through Sam’s barriers, he had to lower some of his own. But the memories of Mbuka—oh, God help him, would he ever forget? Just getting through each night without taking something to kill the dreams—dreams of what he’d lived through left him a shaking mass of pain, waking from fevered dreams drenched in sweat, screaming Sam’s name like a prayer—seemed a victory.
“Brett?” Her voice sounded tentative, and he knew she’d seen him shaking.
“Sniper shot.” If he didn’t keep details to the bare minimum, the dreams would be worse tonight. “A splinter tribe near the Congo needed a doctor. But this time the cruciate ligament shredded into strips, stabbed the cartilage and got infected. I was no use to the warlords sick, so they left me out on the road to die. I was picked up by a tribe on the run with some compassion. They dosed me up with traditional healing cures and left me with some UN volunteers, who got me to a camp hospital.”
“This