LITMIR.BIZ

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went out again onto the now-serene and all but deserted lake. To watch the sunset, Sam said, but Cory had known her real reason for wanting to get out of the house was to give her mom and dad some privacy. They’d been having a rough time of it since Tris’s return from the dead, Cory knew. It was Jess’s concern about her husband that had led her to call Cory, to ask for help from the one person she felt might understand what Tris was going through.

      How well he remembered that night, too, and what a strange contradiction there seemed to be between the peace and quiet of tranquil water reflecting sunset clouds…the first and brightest star of evening…and the sense inside himself that something profound had happened to him this day. That being here with this woman, a milestone had been passed in his life, one equal in import and magnitude to his parents’ death and his sojourn in Iraq, one that would change the direction of his life irrevocably.

      “Look,” Sam says, “there’s the Wishing Star.”

      She tells me, then, how she wished on that star when she was a little girl, and she tells me the poem and we recite it together: “Starlight, star bright, first star I’ve seen tonight…”

      “What did you wish for?” I ask her, smiling, thinking how very young she is.

      “Uh-uh. You’re not supposed to tell. Otherwise, it won’t come true.” And she smiles and tilts her face up to mine.

      It was then, in that moment, that he’d forgotten any thoughts he’d ever had about how young she was. He’d remembered instead her strength and her courage. He’d remembered her intelligence and sensitivity, her stubbornness and arrogance and husky, sexy laughter. And he’d lowered his head and kissed her.

      Oh, how he remembered that kiss.

      What do I expect—something sweet and innocent and virginal, maybe? Instead…I find myself lost. Lost in a sensual jungle…lush, humid, beautiful, exhilarating…terrifying. I’m afraid I may never escape; I don’t want to, really. But at the same time I’m afraid, as inside me I feel battlements I’ve spent a lifetime erecting begin to shiver and quake.

      It takes all my wits and will, but I fight my way free, and I’m thinking, How am I ever going to hold out against this?

      And I think, Tristan, my friend, I’m sorry—forgive me—but I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love with your daughter….

      He had held out for a lot longer than he’d believed possible, though he hadn’t been able to make Sam understand why, even with her long, silky body warm and soft against his, her strong fingers tracing paths on his skin for her eager mouth to follow, when all her woman’s instincts and the evidence of her senses told her how much he wanted her, he could still refuse to take her to bed.

      Sam hadn’t understood, that night on the lake…a night and a kiss so beautiful, so full of sweetness and hope and promise it had made his soul ache. It was only the first of God-knew-how-many times he’d disappointed her.

      Chapter 3

      “Okay, I just wanna know one thing.” Tony wiped beer from his lips with the back of his hand and leaned back in his chair. “If you still had a thing for this Sam chick, why in the hell did you marry Karen?”

      Cory watched the waiter in his white tunic and black slacks weave his way between tables on his way back to the bar. “Boy, you don’t mess around, do you?” he said mildly. “Straight for the throat.”

      “Whatever works,” Tony said, burping agreeably.

      Cory picked up his beer glass and sipped, then reconsidered and took a couple of hefty gulps. Talking about personal stuff—his personal stuff—never had come easy for him; he figured priming the pump a little couldn’t hurt.

      He coughed, frowned and said, “It’s not that simple.”

      “Never is.” Tony nodded at him in a so-go-on kind of way. “Quit stalling.”

      Instead of replying, Cory shifted around in his chair, ran a hand through his hair and swore under his breath.

      “Okay,” Tony said, sitting forward and planting his forearms on the table, “I’ll get you started. You met this…”

      “Samantha.”

      “Yeah. You met Samantha right after you came back from Iraq, right? And it was love at first sight. Dyn-o-mite. So that’d make it…” he counted on his fingers “…six—no, seven—years later you married Karen. I have to assume you dated the lady some before you popped the question. So, what were you doing during the previous six years? Were you and Samantha together all that time?”

      “We dated,” Cory hedged, scrubbing a hand over his eyes. “Off and on…”

      “Dated…as in, dinner and a movie? Or dated…as in, you give her a drawer in your apartment and she keeps your aftershave on her sink?” Cory glared at him. “Hey, you were sleeping with her, right?” Tony waggled a finger back and forth like a tiny windshield wiper. “Look, man, the kind of sexual tension I been pickin’ up here, that doesn’t come from nothin’. So gimme a break, okay?”

      There was a pause while Cory drank more beer, then pursed his lips, steeling himself. “There were long periods when we didn’t see each other,” he said at last, in a voice Tony had to lean closer to hear. “She was in school in Georgia, I was working out of New York, on assignment a lot of the time. When we did manage to get together, it was like we’d never been apart. Couldn’t keep our hands off each other. It was…” he waved a helpless hand “…like touching a match to fireworks. Like dropping a torch in dry tinder. Like that. We couldn’t seem to help ourselves.”

      Tony stared at him for a moment—probably in shock, Cory thought, to hear him give up so much personal stuff at once, and so easily. Then belatedly he nodded, as if in sympathy. Cory glanced at him, shifted in his seat and forced himself to go on.

      “Then, the time together would end, she’d go back to Georgia, I’d go back to New York, we’d resume our lives. She had hers, I had mine. Not,” he said wryly, “that I didn’t spend a lot of my time thinking about her when I wasn’t with her. I’d like to think she spent some time thinking about me.” He paused for an absentminded sip of beer. “I never asked her whether or not she dated anyone else when we were apart. I have to assume she did.”

      “Tough way to run a relationship,” Tony offered, shaking his head in sympathy.

      Cory nodded, then shrugged. “We both had other things on our minds, I guess. For me, I think it was a case of…I was just biding my time, keeping busy, traveling a lot, waiting for her to finish school. In the back of my mind was always the thought that once she graduated, we’d find a way to work things so we could have a more…I don’t know, steady relationship.” Once again the wry grin stretched the unwilling muscles in his face. “As it turned out, she had other ideas.”

      Tony was nodding, hunched over his beer, apparently staring at the front of Cory’s shirt. “Things to see…places to go…people to…uh.”

      “Something like that.” Cory lifted his beer glass, discovered it was empty and signaled the waiter with it instead. “Her big thing was, she had her heart set on being a pilot, like her dad. Her mom wasn’t going to hear of her joining the military, so off she went to flight school. Didn’t take her long to get her private pilot’s license, and again I thought…okay, maybe now. But after that…” He frowned, distracted by the waiter’s approach. When their order for two more of the same had been taken and the waiter had gone away again, he resumed. “After flight school, she pretty much disappeared for a while.”

      “Wait a minute. Disappeared? As in…went missing? That’s kind of freaky.”

      “As in, dropped out of sight. Out of my life. Oh, I’d get phone calls from her. Sometimes she’d e-mail me. Always full of how much she…how much she missed me. But also how much she loved what she was doing, how exciting it all was, and that it was what she’d always wanted to do. And if I happened

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