He had a point, which yanked her defenses even higher. She crossed her arms. “Craving one thing doesn’t mean I like your attitude about another.”
“But you—” He stopped, closed his eyes, reopened them. “The fish will take a few minutes to grill. Why don’t we put your stuff in the bedroom and I’ll show you the rest of the house?”
She lifted one shoulder, secretly grateful for the route out of her hostility.
Tara studied Chance’s heels as she followed him through the living room to the staircase, longing to steal a glance at his tight, denim-wrapped butt but convinced she hadn’t earned it. She was doing it again, using belligerence as armor, wrapping herself in anger until she was so tangled up she could barely breathe.
Her dad said she was born bad-tempered, and a lifetime of report cards full of behavioral missteps seemed to agree with him. Then there were all the doors slammed behind departing lovers, usually punctuated by words like bitch and psycho. Just four days ago her boss slipped up and called her crazy, then hastily backpedaled and chose aggressive and unprofessional instead. She wasn’t offended—she understood he had to be careful about his terminology, considering he was in the middle of firing her.
And he was right. She knew she was a crazy bitch. She just didn’t know how to be anything else.
The wooden beams protested as they climbed the stairs to the small, slope-roofed second story. Even the house was moaning at her to leave. Maybe she should. Maybe this was the wrong decision after all, made in the heat of the argument with her father, fueled by forty-eight hours under his roof and the prospect of thousands more while she looked for a new job. Maybe it was unfair to inflict herself on Chance after all this time. He obviously hadn’t missed her—how much clearer could his signal be?
He stepped back and gestured for her to precede him into the bedroom. With one foot over the threshold her conscience twanged its objection and she spun, the suggestion to seek an annulment already forming on her tongue.
That was when she saw it.
He snapped his gaze up to her face, but not quickly enough. She caught the hot shine in his eyes before they cooled, the looseness in his jaw before he tightened it, the haunted yearning sharpening his expression before he smoothed it into placidity. She knew that look. He’d worn it that night at the bar, not realizing she could see him in the mirror when she turned to pour his drink, and in the instant when she opened her eyes after their first kiss as husband and wife beside the gurgling fountain in the casino’s atrium, and in the darkened hotel room as she’d peered at him through her lashes, letting him think she was still asleep.
She smiled. He did too.
“Sorry about the mess.” Chance brushed past her into the bedroom, dropping her bag on the bed as he rushed to gather up various articles of camouflage clothing and dump them on an already overflowing chair in the corner.
“There’s only one bedroom,” he explained, frowning in evaluation at a pair of army-green socks before adding them to the pile. “The room across the hall became an equipment closet and general clutter graveyard. I’ll change the sheets after dinner so you can have the bed. Couch’ll suit me just fine.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I’ll take the couch.”
“Now what kind of gentleman would that make me?” He paused in shutting a drawer to shoot her a lopsided grin. Tara stabbed her thumbnail into her palm to mitigate its effect.
“The kind who’s a foot taller than me and probably has to work in the morning.”
“I do. Speaking of work, did you tell the bar you’d be back, or—”
“I got fired.” She lifted her chin, daring him to judge her. Instead he nodded.
“Was that guy with the mullet still your boss?”
“Yep.”
“Probably for the best, then. What happened?”
“Customer had one too many, got lippy, tried to cop a feel when I came around to collect the empties. So I kicked the stool out from under him.”
She waited for him to roll his eyes at her outburst or frown at her overreaction, but all he did was raise a mildly skeptical brow. “Giving a drunk-ass lecher what he deserves is a firing offense?”
“He was an old dude, raised a stink about his bad hip, threatened to sue, blah blah blah.” She waved a dismissive hand. “I was due for a pay raise so they would’ve found a reason eventually.”
Chance leaned against the wall behind him, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Is that why you decided to come out here and look for me? Because there was nothing holding you down in Kansas City and you didn’t want to go home to Fayetteville?”
“Springdale,” she corrected. “And I did go home. Then I came back.”
“Your dad hasn’t dried out, huh?”
She managed a tight, bitter smile. “He fell off the wagon so long ago the horses could up and die and he still wouldn’t find his way back on.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah.”
They lapsed into thoughtful silence. Tara thought back to that long conversation they’d had when her shift ended and they moved to a table at the back of the bar, hushed and hidden from the steady stream of casino patrons taking a midnight break before heading back out to the slots. That was before the alcohol really began to blur the edges, yet he was so open, explaining that he was the youngest of five kids from four fathers, he joined the army to get out of Biloxi and away from his chaotic family, but he started sending money home after Hurricane Katrina and now he couldn’t seem to stop, that even Iraq and Afghanistan hadn’t felt far enough to break the cord tethering him to his sexually voracious mother and lazy sisters and ever-expanding number of nieces and nephews.
Then she told him about the mother she couldn’t remember, the aunt who resented having to take care of her while her father was in prison, the day a strange woman in a pants suit picked her up from school and drove her to an emergency foster care placement where she ate dinner at a table for the first time in her life.
It was different from the slurred, tedious oversharing she so often endured when being a bartender made her a captive audience. They both spoke with urgency, not much above a whisper, beer bottles sweating and forgotten on the edge of the table. When she finished they shared a silence not unlike this one, each digesting the weight of the other’s story and recovering from the exertion of their confessions.
Then Chance had covered her hand with his, leaned across the sticky tabletop and kissed her.
She looked up to find him watching her from across the bedroom. She wondered if he was remembering the same thing. She inhaled to speak but he beat her to it.
“Why are you here, Tara? Why now?”
His slight emphasis on the last word made the question feel rhetorical, like he knew she didn’t have the answer but wanted to ask anyway.
A slew of safely offhand replies sped through her mind. I was hoping you had a new girlfriend I could run off as revenge. I was planning to go all the way to Colorado but I ran out of cash. Let’s be honest, Chance, the sex was amazing.
“I missed you.”
She clenched her hands at her sides, bracing herself for his laughter at her pathetic response and the meek voice in which she’d offered it, but he was silent. He straightened where he stood, eyes dark and unreadable, and she couldn’t decide whether he was about to kiss her or kick her out. He squared his shoulders, withdrew his hands from his pockets—
