Squaring her shoulders, she walked back to the man who had twisted her heart into knots and then torn it apart.
She hoped she wasn’t being stupid.
* * *
The night outside began to sprinkle big white flakes of snow, just a dusting, but the flakes glittered like jewels under the streetlights. Spring was late this year.
Jack Milkin stood three doors down from Brianna’s house. He liked Brianna. She was one of the few people who seemed to go out of her way to notice him and be nice to him. Mostly he felt invisible, but not when she was around. He’d been interested in her for a long time, but was always reluctant to ask her out. He knew she didn’t date much. There’d been a few guys she had gone out with but it never lasted.
Jack figured he could make it last if she would just let him try.
So he’d been trying to learn everything he could about her so he could please her. Soon, he had promised himself, he would ask her out for a movie or dinner. Some safe little date. If she said yes, then he’d set about proving just how good he could be for her. If she didn’t say yes, well, he’d find another way.
But now a strange man had just been invited into her house. A wrinkle. Competition? A possible threat? He thought he knew nearly everything about her, but she had seemed to know this guy, a guy who wasn’t on his list of things he knew about Bri.
He approached her house at last, and when he was sure no one could see, he climbed the big old tree and then pushed through her attic vent. From up here, he could see what he needed to see and hear what he needed to hear.
The attic was empty, but it was not too cold. Heat from the house seeped up here. She needed more insulation on the floor, and he’d been meaning to offer to put it in.
Being quiet as a mouse, he eased toward the voices that drifted up to him. A minute later he was facedown on the attic flooring, looking through a tiny hole he had put there. One for each room. Stretched out, he could watch Bri. He could hear Bri.
He could find out everything about her life and all the ways he could please her.
* * *
Bri faced Luke in the living room. Naturally he’d settled on the sofa. That was his expansive style. She took the Boston rocker, safely across from him. The silence that ensued would have been funny if it hadn’t been so tense. He’d wanted to talk, and now had nothing to say. She couldn’t think of anything, either. She’d never expected to see him again, and she didn’t like the way old hurts were rising in her.
Even less did she like realizing that she still found him attractive. Three years and a lot of pain hadn’t changed that at all. Her hands curled until her nails bit into her palms. This was insane.
“I was asked,” he said finally, “to evaluate the land that was purchased for a ski resort. Take a look at what problems we might face.”
“That’s going to be hard under all this snow.”
“Some of it will be.” He’d been sitting with his arms outflung, one on the arm of the couch, the other along its back. Now he rubbed his chin, sweeping her with his gray eyes.
“You’re a little thinner,” he remarked.
She battled an urge to tell him he had no right to comment on her appearance. None at all. Instead she chose to change the topic. Letting him get under her skin would be a mistake. “There’s been talk of a ski resort forever. It hasn’t happened yet. The land just keeps getting resold. Any reason to think it’s going to be different this time?”
At that he smiled faintly. “Well, I’m on the job.”
It was an old joke he’d always made, but now bitterness made her wonder if it was a joke at all. Maybe his ego really was that big. “Oh?”
He gave a slight shrug. “I’m checking it out, is all.”
“It’ll die like it always does. The county doesn’t have the money to expand the airport to handle more than a few executive jets.”
“The company I’m working for is planning on doing the airport as well.”
The county could use the jobs and the tourist income. It would change things around here, although whether for the good remained to be seen. But she was in no mood to be thinking about the entire county. All she could think about was that if this project went ahead, Luke would be around for months, if not a year or more.
Longer than he’d been around at any point in their marriage. Wow. Didn’t that say everything?
“How are you doing?” he asked after a moment.
“Fine.” Short and unrevealing. What was he expecting? A heart-to-heart?
“Still in nursing?”
“Of course.”
He nodded. “You always loved working with patients.”
Nothing to say to that, either. She was definitely not enjoying the tension.
A sound from the attic above caught her attention and she looked up. “Another raccoon?” she said more to herself than him.
“Want me to look?”
“No. I have someone who takes care of that for me.” She couldn’t climb ladders because she had a bad knee. Wrapping it properly allowed her to work, but climbing? Not since she’d been knocked off her bicycle by a careless motorist.
“Is it a common problem? Raccoons in the attic?”
“It happened last fall. Jack, the guy who takes care of it for me, put up some chicken wire to keep them out, but it might have worked loose.”
“Raccoons are pretty smart. They could figure it out.”
“Probably.” This conversation was pointless. He must have come for some reason other than to warn her that he’d be around. “Luke, what’s the real purpose of this visit? Not to talk about raccoons.”
He rose from the couch, and she recognized that they were about to get to the meat of the matter. He could never hold still while discussing something important. Funny that she remembered him so well when she had spent so long trying to forget him.
“As much as it hurt when you left me, I can live with it. What I can’t live with, even after all this time, is you thinking I’m a liar and a cheat.” He faced her, and his gray eyes seemed to flame. “I never lied to you and I never cheated on you.”
He’d said that before. “You think I want to beat this horse all over again?” she demanded, rising to her feet. “It’s dead. It’s in the past. We went our separate ways.”
“Because you believed I lied to you. That I cheated. And that matters to me.”
God. How was she supposed to handle this? Old hurts were returning, opening wounds she had thought healed. All because...because why? “What difference does it make whether I believe you now?”
“It does.”
Bald, uncompromising, no excuses or wiggle room.
“Okay. Whatever. You didn’t lie and you didn’t cheat. Feel better?”
“Why don’t you try telling me the truth? You don’t believe that.”
Her hands had begun to ache from being clenched for so long. She tried putting them on her hips to ease them. Man, she could barely stand to look at him right now, as refreshed emotional agony tore into her. “Just leave, Luke. There’s no point rehashing this. You said you didn’t do it back then. You say now that you didn’t do it. You can’t prove it. And I’m the one who got the phone call telling me otherwise.”
“And