Can You Forget?. Melissa James

got them out,” she said, and now she was touching him, a hand on each of his upper arms, pushing up on her toes as if not a day, a lie, stood between them. “You did everything humanly possible.”

      The lines of his face tightened. “So did you.”

      The words were so quiet she wasn’t sure whether she’d heard them or imagined them.

      “You should go now,” he said, and the disappointment cut to the quick.

      He stepped back but did not release her, kept his hands on her body as he openly inspected her, his gaze sliding from her face to the damp, smoke-stained shirt and jeans clinging to her body. “Take a shower,” he said. “Get some rest.”

      She felt her back go a little straighter. “There’ll come a time for resting, Tyler, but it’s not now.” Lifting her chin, she again extended the glass. “Now here, drink.”

      His eyes sparked, reminding her for a brief heartbeat of the brash young man she’d first seen on television one Sunday afternoon, telling anyone who cared to listen the proper way to saddle a horse.

      “I know what you think of me,” she said, swiping a tangled strand of sooty hair from her face. “But I’m not that spoiled girl you remember from six years ago.”

      He took the lemonade and brought it to his mouth, drank it in one long sip. But his eyes never left hers. “You have no idea what I remember.”

      From a starkly cloudless sky, the sun seared even hotter. “Then tell me.”