Leaping forward, she caught the gum in midair with two hands, struggling for a second not to drop if before holding it up victoriously. He thought it was probably best not to tell her she’d just hopped right over a pygmy boa constrictor.
She peeled off the wrapper and pulled out a piece. She tossed the pack back to him and unwrapped her stick. Popping the gum into her mouth, she chewed slowly, sensually, taking so much obvious pleasure from that bit of spearmint, he found his mind zipping uncomfortably back to the cleaning closet. He forced his attention back onto her words.
“My parents taught me that if I worked hard enough, anything was possible.” She trailed her fingers over a bush, her fingers snagging on the bloom of a yellow elder, the national flower, which bloomed year-round.
“I sense an until coming.”
“My marriage.” She shot him a thumbs down. Joshua threw the pulpy remains of his plum into the bushes as if to punctuate Amelia’s anger. “Big fat F. Failing grade. But you already know that.”
“His fault, his failing grade, not yours.”
She blew a small bubble with the gum, popping it. “I know that now. Still sucks though. I tried so hard to do everything right. I ran an organized house. Even my spice cabinet is in alphabetical order. I read relationship books, went to marriage retreats, shopped at Victoria’s Secret.” She shook her head, twirling the stem of the yellow elder between two fingers. “And still the rat bastard cheated on me. He left me for a totally disorganized, lovely person who couldn’t balance her checking account if you implanted a calculator into her palm.”
He took the bloom from between her fingers and tucked it behind her ear. Memories of their time together at the hospital filled his mind, hell, even seemed to pack the space between them. “Your jerk of an ex didn’t appreciate how lucky he was.”
“That’s nice of you to say.” She cupped his hand against her cheek for a second before starting out again. “I can’t even hate his new wife, because she’s stuck with him.”
“You should hate her,” he said forcefully. “She screwed a married man, and the jackass had such a small, uh… ego, he couldn’t handle being married to one of the strongest women I’ve ever met.”
“Only one of?”
“By the end of this, I may be willing to give you top honors.”
She laughed wryly. “Heaven knows, I work for grades.”
“It’s a wonder you don’t have ulcers.”
“Yet. Give me time.” Her smile faded. “What I really hate is how those people—Oliver and Tandi—caught me unaware. I should have been smarter than that. I should have been on guard.”
“How? How could you have seen that coming?” Thank God she’d caught them in time. The thought of the kid at the mercy of those two… Anger turned the sunset a deeper haze of red.
“It’s my job as a lawyer to see through crooks. I put puzzle pieces together in a flash all the time to get to the truth.”
“You got two loud screams off without dying.” The echo of those in his head still sucker punched him. “That’s pretty impressive.”
“But what if I missed something because I was distracted… from earlier?”
No doubt about it, the memories weren’t just in his mind anymore. They were out in there in front of them, as tangible as the sand and waves. “From when you walked out on me before I could zip my pants?”
“If I’d stayed with Joshua”—her hand gravitated to the sleeping boy’s head as it rested on Hugh’s shoulder—“none of this would have happened. He would be safe.”
He needed to keep her spirits up, as important as her energy on a trek like this. “People like those are determined. They would have found another opening when you went to the bathroom or fell asleep. You’re human, you know.”
“Easy for Superman to say.” She picked her way over a fallen tree. “I’m sorry for how I handled things afterward, back at the school. Being with you wasn’t what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“Less.”
He just smiled, ready to take this conversation down to a less serious level, to ease the stress lines on her face.
She smacked his shoulder. “That wasn’t a size comment, you Cro-Magnon.”
“Hey, just an attempt at some lightheartedness.” Except he wasn’t usually the one to crack jokes in a crisis. That was squadron funnyman Liam McCabe’s forte. “It’s been an intense time, with the earthquake, that time underground. We were both on edge and those aftershocks just sent us over. We needed an outlet and we found it. Together.” He held her eyes with his. “I don’t regret that.”
Yet rather than being reassured, her faced scrunched with even more worry. “I just wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t walked away. Or if I had made it back to the nursery. Or never left in the first place.”
“Life is so full of what-ifs, you can drive yourself crazy.” He knew all about regrets and self-recrimination. He should have realized he couldn’t make this any lighter for her.