LITMIR.BIZ

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pushed back her hair. “Okay, but can I deal with my finger first? I don’t want blood all over my furniture. Make yourself useful—put on some coffee—and we’ll try to get that closure you seem to need.” She turned and disappeared.

      “So you don’t need closure?” he called as he searched the white-tiled counters for the coffeepot.

      “No. I got past us a long time ago,” she yelled from the back of the house.

      “Yeah? Well, I don’t think so,” he muttered as he pulled out the carafe and walked to the sink. “You think you’re over me, but your body didn’t get the memo, sweetheart.”

      And obviously neither had his.

      Which could end up being a big problem if he wasn’t careful.

      * * *

      RENNY TRIED TO CONTROL her trembling hands as she pulled the backing off the bandage. Shaking was becoming a habit ever since Darby had stalked across that rice field and back into her life. Her body felt not her own. Obviously. She’d just about tossed her clothes to the floor of the kitchen and climbed on top of Darby moments ago. Yeah, control might be an issue.

      Her words to her mother earlier that afternoon rang in her ears. Okay, she hadn’t actually jumped his bones upon first sight. Did second sight count?

      “Coffee’s ready,” Darby called, his voice echoing through her bedroom into her restored turn-of-the-twentieth-century bathroom. She closed the mirrored cabinet and glanced at herself.

      Good gravy. Her lips were swollen from his kiss. And her hair swirled around her wantonly, making her look like some sexed-up wild woman. She grabbed a ponytail holder and a brush. After taming her hair and tucking her T-shirt into her well-worn jeans, she felt stronger. She even shoved her bare feet into the sheepskin mules sitting beside her closet.

      There.

      Ready for closure.

      She walked back into the living room and found Darby sitting on her pink sofa stroking Chauncey. Something about his very masculine hands stroking the back of her cat made her mouth grow dry.

      “He was meowing, so I let him in,” he said, crossing his legs casually and picking up a steaming mug of coffee. “I fixed yours the way you like it. One sweetener and a dollop of cream.”

      “I drink it black now.”

      Darby gave her a smile that would make a less stable gal drop her panties. “Grown-up girl, aren’t you?”

      “Mmm,” Renny said, scooping Chauncey up for the second time and carrying him toward the door. “He’s spoiled, but he’s going outside no matter how much he cries.”

      “Not just grown-up, but tough.”

      She turned around, closing the door with a definitive click. “You have no idea.”

      He stared at her as she walked back, picking up the mug from the old trunk that served as her coffee table. For a few seconds, neither of them said anything.

      “I didn’t leave you, you know.”

      Renny averted her gaze and took a sip. Sweet and creamy. A cup of coffee for a naive girl—the girl she’d once been. “Well, I thought you had. When I woke up, you weren’t there. You were in Virginia.”

      “Not by choice.”

      “It didn’t feel that way, Darby,” she said, all those old feelings flooding back, hurting her all over again. “Come on. We were in our senior year. You were eighteen. A man. You had the choice to stay with me, but you didn’t. When the going got tough, you got going...in the wrong direction.”

      “So you would think, but that’s not what happened. Not when faced with my father’s wrath. Not when faced with an ultimatum.”

      She sank into the reupholstered armchair that wasn’t so much comfortable as it was beautiful. “Ultimatum?”

      “After the doctor released me from the emergency room, the sheriff put me in his car and took me to the parish jail where my father waited. He’d already made some kind of deal with Ed Bergeron, the D.A. Dad dragged me to the car, took me home and told me to pack my camp trunk. He said one way or the other I was leaving Beau Soleil.”

      “He kicked you out?”

      “Not exactly. He gave me the choice—hit the streets with nothing but the clothes on my back or go to Winston Prep in Virginia where he’d already bought me late admission.”

      Renny took another sip, accustoming herself to the taste of the sweeter brew. Martin Dufrene had always been something of a bastard. Hard-nosed businessman who controlled all aspects of his life with an iron fist. When the one thing he couldn’t control spiraled away from him—the kidnapping and presumed murder of his daughter—he’d become even more intolerable. His crushing dictates and forcing of his will on his remaining children had had varied effects. In Darby it had manifested itself as rebellion. Darby had been as wild as the creatures that crept along the bayous and prowled the Louisiana woods. And he had taken her along for the ride.

      “So you just did what he wanted?”

      Darby frowned. “I didn’t see it that way. I thought of it as buying us some time. If I went to Virginia, graduated and saved enough money, I could find us a place in Baton Rouge. I wrote all of that in the letters I sent. I thought you’d understand I went to Virginia because it would be better for us in the long run.”

      “I never got any letters.”

      “I mailed one a day for a month and a half.” His words sounded almost accusatory, as if he thought she lied.

      She didn’t say anything because her mind reeled, trying to pull out fact from the fiction painted so long ago. She was married. Darby hadn’t abandoned her. Her mother had lied. Her brain was at full capacity on what it could deal with and Renny felt on the verge of hysteria.

      She took a deep breath and exhaled. “So you’re saying you didn’t ‘leave’ me. Just went to Virginia to buy time? You’re saying everything I believed was a lie? And you’re saying our parents sabotaged us? But you didn’t know this until...?”

      “Tonight?” His steady gaze said it all, and she knew it was so. Betrayal stabbed, an echo of the cut to her finger. “Honestly.”

      Silence crouched between them as the past came winging back, knocking down grudges held for too long. She’d sat with this man so many times. Knew what it meant when he stroked his chin, when he rotated his ankles, cracking them in the silence. Relief tinged her uncertainty.

      He’d not abandoned her.

      Darby folded his arms across his chest and stretched his legs. “I didn’t realize you thought I’d abandoned you. All these years I believed you hated me because I had hurt you. It sounded pretty damn convincing when you told me you never wanted to see me again, and it felt pretty damn final when you chose something other than us.”

      “What?” Renny shook her head. “I don’t—”

      “You do remember the last time you spoke to me?”

      Closing her eyes, Renny wished she didn’t remember her cold words, the pain that spurred her to tell him to leave her the hell alone. Forever.

      “I called the hospital every chance I got, and finally, your mother let me talk to you. You said those words.”

      She wanted to tell him she’d never meant it, but that would be another lie, and it seemed fairly obvious there were far too many lies to deal with at present. “I was hurt and angry. Two months had gone by without word from you.”

      He arched an eyebrow and it made him even more handsome.

      She leaned forward onto her knees. “Okay, I know. You sent letters, but I never received even one of them. The only certainty I knew was the four gray striped walls of my hospital room and the unceasing pain in my leg

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