“Oh, no, nothing like that. Though I guess you could say he tried.” She managed a weak smile.
Grady sighed wearily. “Is he going to kill me for telling you where he is?”
“Probably.”
“I figured. What time is it?”
“Must be almost five o’clock.”
“There’s a bar around the corner from the mall called Rock’s. Give it an hour. Don’t worry, I won’t warn him.”
“Thank you, Grady,” she replied in earnest.
He inclined his head and hoisted the shovel. She spun to return to her car when he called her name.
One side of his mouth lifted. “When you see Chance, tell him I said he’s a whiskey tango lunatic and you could do way better. Say it just like that.”
“He’s a whiskey tango lunatic and I could do way better,” she repeated.
“You could,” he agreed quietly.
In response she lifted her chin and turned her back.
Tara didn’t give it an hour—she didn’t even give it five minutes. She drove straight to Rock’s and parked in the lot outside the cell phone shop across the street, giving herself a clear vantage point to watch the bar’s front entrance. She didn’t want Chance after two happy-hour tequila shots and a couple of beers. She wanted him sober, clearheaded, fully cognizant of the situation as it unfolded.
She didn’t want any blame-it-on-the-alcohol excuses. Not this time.
She had plenty of time to think as she waited, to worry and doubt and fear and then resolve anew. The mid-autumn sun angled toward the earth to send honeyed light slanting through the windshield, and she thought about the watery winter daylight on that fateful December morning, how surreal it felt, how intrusive, that sluggish dawn trying and failing to douse the raging heat fueling them through the night.
She’d glared defiantly at that self-insisting sun when they emerged from the casino that morning, then smirked at it through the car window on the ride back from the courthouse. Two unwelcome glimpses of reality before they plunged back into the new, artificially lit world they’d created, where there were no clucking tongues, no overdue notices, just him and her and an unconditional acceptance the likes of which she’d never known before—or since.
No matter how loudly her inner cynic scoffed at her girlish idealism, or how often her father sneered that she’d been used, or how carefully her coworker paused as she tried to find a gentle way to articulate that this was a huge mistake, Tara knew she had to recover what she’d found and lost with equal abruptness in those thirty-six hours with Chance. If it really was a one-off, if he couldn’t remember her, if she had to drive back to Kansas City and beg for her old job then so be it, but she had to try. She couldn’t live with the uncertainty anymore. She had to know, one way or the other.
A sleek, high-end pickup with an extended cab pulled into the lot and parked several cars over. Tara tensed, then relaxed. The driver who emerged from the truck was black, and anyway she couldn’t see Chance trading in his noisy, tricked-out orange Dodge Challenger for something so sensible. She returned her attention to the bar, vaguely registering additional door slams and the murmur of male voices. The two men had reached the curb by the time they came into her line of view, angling to cross the street to Rock’s, and suddenly Tara couldn’t remember how to breathe.
She didn’t need to see his face to know it was him. The loose gait, the long limbs, the head tilted ever so slightly skyward as if he was bored of earth’s challenges and wondering what other adventures the universe had to offer.
She’d never seen the ocean, and she wondered if this was how it felt to be knocked down by a wave. She was overcome, choking on a thick swell of joy and disbelief and terror and fury and the same reckless hope that had carried her through the last ten months. She was breathless with it, gasping, and yet some part of herself managed to shove open her car door and lurch out onto the asphalt, then stagger to the sidewalk.
The men had just made it to the other side of the street. Tara stuck her thumb and middle finger in her mouth and whistled.
He turned. Her knees weakened. His eyes widened. Even from this distance she could see they were exactly as she remembered, the lush green of late-summer leaves only days away from beginning to yellow.
She’d imagined this moment for months and months, rehearsed twenty different versions of what she might say or do. Instead she acted purely on impulse.
“Hey, McKinley, remember me?” She held up her left hand, the waning light catching the cheap, heart-shaped amethyst on her ring finger. “I’m Tara. Your wife.”
Two
“No way. No way. No way.” Chance muttered the phrase like a talisman, as though it might protect him from the most brutal flashback he’d ever had. Since coming home from Afghanistan he’d seen plenty of things that weren’t there, enemies with RPG cannons sneaking around corners of buildings, olive-skinned men he was sure he’d already shot and killed receding just beyond his peripheral vision.
But this? This was downright cruel.
He blinked once, twice. She was still there, her whole body trembling with the force of her anger. He squinted across the street, trying to pick up some inconsistency or jarring impossibility that would convince him she wasn’t real.
Nothing. She looked exactly as he remembered. Small. Curvy. Jaw-length dark hair pulled back in a short, careless ponytail that couldn’t capture the thick chunks still hanging against her cheeks. Too-big, too-black eyes set too far apart. Skin like over-milked tea, just as silky and way smoother.
“Black and white have gotten so mixed up in my family for so many generations, I’m not sure what we are.” She smiled down her body at him, chin tucked against her chest, framed by the chocolate points of her nipples in the undulating terrain of her body. “Whenever I have to tick a box for race on a form, I go for ‘Other’.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. This was seriously unfair.
“Hello? Earth to dirtbag, come in, Sergeant McKinley.”
His eyes popped open. She’d moved—her hand was on her hips, those sensuous lips set in a hard line.
“You’re here. It’s really you.”
“Were you expecting someone else? How many ex-wives do you have?”
He shook his head. “Not ex. We’re still no-shit married.”
“And you no-shit left me without a backward glance. What the hell, Chance?”
Her voice was level, but that tiny hitch on the last word betrayed how close she was to falling apart. He nearly laughed in disbelief at the thought—harder-than-cement Tara Lambert shedding a tear over his lost affection? Not in this lifetime.
Her lower lip trembled. She bit it so hard he bet she drew blood.
His heart fell into his feet. I did this. He’d hurt the one woman he thought was impenetrable, dented the only girl he’d ever met who seemed as unyielding as the asphalt beneath the soles of his shoes. He thought he was the only one who wore a scar from those two nights together. He was wrong.
