Springfield, Illinois

Kelly Hobart’s Apartment

Ryder loaded Kelly’s suitcase into the back of the SUV, laying it carefully beside his duffle bag before bending to pick up the smaller case she’d also packed. What was it with women? Why couldn’t they just take a couple of clean pairs of underwear and leave it at that? But, again, he understood that she had four public appearances on this trip. She wanted to look nice, and he had to appreciate that.

He wondered if Dane Hood would be flying in to see her while they were in Chicago. The man seemed attached to her hip these days, showing up every time he knew Ryder was going to be around. He was up there right now, whispering all the right things in her ear while touching her face like he had every right to touch her anywhere he damn well pleased. It annoyed Ryder the way some guys thought they possessed a woman like they were property rather than human beings with minds of their own.

He tossed the last of her luggage into the back of the SUV, no longer concerned with being gentle. He hated that she kept shoving her relationship with that man in his face. He didn’t want to see them together. Did she think she was making him jealous? Or was she really so over their marriage that she didn’t care what he thought?

Ryder didn’t really care what her reasoning was. He just wished she’d keep her sex life to herself.

He slammed the back of the SUV closed and walked around to the passenger side, leaning against the door as he waited for her. He pulled a cinnamon oil soaked toothpick out of his pocket and slipped it between his lips, chewing on it as he stared at the ground. They needed to be on the road soon, or they would never get to the hotel before dinner. Mastiff was paying for everything, so room service was an option, but he didn’t like getting room service. It felt too decadent for him.

The last time he’d gotten room service it had been when he and Kelly were seniors in high school. He’d called down for chocolate covered strawberries, thinking it would be intensely romantic. Instead, they’d let them sit on the tray while they . . . well, they didn’t eat them right away, and they melted all over the fancy plates.

He hadn’t seen the point in room service since then. But this hotel they were going to was nice, one of those places that was awarded stars in travel magazines that were printed and distributed all over the world. Expensive. But that was Mastiff’s way. The fancier the hotel, the easier it would be to keep the client safe within its walls. And safety was their business, he supposed.

Ryder had never been on this side of an operation, but he’d provided support to operatives who were. He’d seen these hotels from the outside, hacked into their security systems and watched over the clients and those who were threatening them. He’d seen the luxury and thanked his lucky stars he wasn’t the guy on the inside. This time he would be, and someone else would be hacking the system to watch him, probably thinking the same thing Ryder had thought on all those other occasions. Or not.

Kelly and Dane made an appearance at the front door. Finally. He watched them walk toward him, hand in hand, his eyes downcast so that they wouldn’t know how close he was really watching. His eyes moved over her face as she smiled nervously at something Dane said. She was so beautiful . . . her skin was as smooth as homemade caramel, her eyes so bright and full of life. He could read every emotion there, could see anger when she looked at him, could see confusion when she looked at Dane. He wondered if even she understood how that man made her feel. Was she really happy with a guy who made those things burn in her eyes?

But he couldn’t make her happy. Whenever he looked at her, he saw the pain and the grief he’d caused her, the hurt that had been the only thing in her eyes whenever she looked at him after the shooting, after everything that went down during the days and weeks that followed. As much as it killed him to walk away, he couldn’t stand to see that in her eyes anymore.

I’m sorry.

“I’ll be back in ten days,” she was telling Dane. “I’ll call you then.”

“Hopefully we’ll have a break in the case while you’re gone, and you won’t need your bodyguard anymore.” Dane shot a look at Ryder. “And then maybe we could go on a proper date.”

Kelly smiled, but the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “We’ll talk about it.”

Dane leaned down to kiss her, and Kelly turned her head at the last moment, forcing him to kiss her cheek rather than her lips. Ryder bit back a smile as he pushed away from the side of the SUV and opened her door.

“Ten days,” Dane said like it was some sort of promise. Kelly just nodded, climbing into the SUV quickly.

They hit the highway a few minutes later. The drive was fairly straightforward, if long and filled with little scenery other than barren corn and soy bean fields. The moment they were out of the city, Kelly reached over and turned on the radio, selecting a rock station that she knew would drive him out of his mind.

He shut it off.

“Still don’t like music?”

“I like music fine. But that’s not music.”

“Sure, it is.”

“No. George Strait is music. Waylon Jennings is music. That crap is just noise.”

She smiled, this smile touching her eyes and making them glow like stars in a clear night sky. “Some things never change.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

She reached across the space between them and stuck her hand in the pocket of his leather jacket, pulling out the small plastic container that held his cinnamon toothpicks. She slipped one out and put the container back like it was her right to take whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

“You never change. You still carry these damn things?”

“I thought you liked them. You said they tasted like those hot candies without the calories.”

“They do.”

He glanced at her as she slipped the toothpick into her mouth, sucking on it rather than chewing. He shook his head, chuckling a little as he bit down on his own toothpick’s ragged end.

“Do you remember the car trip we took right after we got married?” she suddenly asked. “The drive to Orlando?”

“I do.”

“We argued almost the whole way.”

Ryder adjusted his hands on the wheel. “You thought we should use the GPS your father bought for us, and I wanted to do it the old-fashioned way, use paper maps and drive the back roads.”

“But your way meant less time at Disney and Universal Studios.”

“But it meant more time alone together.”

The words hung heavy for a moment. Kelly lifted her brace covered wrist and rubbed it a little with her good hand, her eyes glued to the windshield, but he suspected she wasn’t looking at the road. He could almost feel the memories unraveling in her head.

“You hate my music, and I hate yours. We don’t like the same foods. Every restaurant we stopped at you picked at your food like it was poison fried up to look like something nearly appetizing.”

Ryder took the toothpick from his mouth and dropped it in the cup holder on the console.

“And you would do things like that,” she added, picking up the toothpick and tossing it out a crack in her window.

“That’s littering.”

“It’s better than staring at that nasty thing all the way to Chicago. Besides, it’s wood. It’ll decompose.”

He shook his head, but he didn’t comment.

“It’s a miracle we were together as long as we were.”

He glanced at her, at the slight frown on her pretty lips as she continued to seem lost in the past.

“Dwelling on what was is useless.”

She nodded slowly, rubbing her wrist again.

“Are you in pain? Do you need your medication?”

That pulled her attention back to the present. She looked first at her wrist, then him. “It’s not as bad as it looked. Most of the swelling is gone now.”

“That’s good.”

“I think I’m going to live.”

“Do you need anything?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got it under control.”

Silence fell between them for a while. She shifted in her seat quite a few times, almost as though she couldn’t get comfortable. And she kept rubbing that wrist like the pain was unbearable, but she refused to do anything more than that. She always was a stubborn woman.

“Are you leaving someone behind in Springfield?” she suddenly asked.

Ryder glanced over at her again. “What do you mean?”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

It seemed like an incredibly odd question coming from her. Ryder had never had a girlfriend other than her. He’d gone to a few school dances with other girls, a couple in middle school and one notable prom his junior year after they’d had a fight, and she decided to take the captain of the football team up on his offer of an escort. But they ended up together by the end of the night, as they always had. It was always Ryder and Kelly, that one couple in high school everyone knew would get married and have a long, happy life together.

At least, that’s the way it was supposed to go.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Again, odd. He chuckled a little, more out of nervousness than anything else. When he looked over at her, he could see she was dead serious in her desire to hear his answer.

“I haven’t had time to date, I guess.”

“You walked out on me and asked for a divorce, but you haven’t dated. At all?”

There’d been a few women, one-night stands when he’d had too much to drink. Trysts that left him feeling worse in the morning than the booze ever could. But she didn’t need to know that.

“I didn’t leave so that I could hook up with the first available woman who crossed my path.”

“Really? Why else would you walk out on a good marriage?”

He stiffened, his jaw tightening painfully. “Kelly, I don’t think this is the time or place—”

“What would be a better time or place?”

“You know why I left you.”

“I don’t, to be perfectly honest. We had a good marriage. We’d just bought a house, and we were planning a future. I had a good job; you had a good job. We were decorating the nursery—”

“Let’s not go there.”

“Why not?” She turned in her seat so that she was facing him as squarely as her seat belt would allow. “We can’t talk about the baby?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Sure there is. We were pregnant, Ryder. We were going to have a child. That’s something.”

“And we lost it just like we lost everything else after what happened that night.”

“You know that wasn’t your fault, right?”

He didn’t. He knew that the doctor said she shouldn’t become stressed. He knew that the doctor said her blood pressure was a little high and she should take it easy. But then the shooting happened, and they didn’t tell her he was okay. She rushed to the hospital, her swollen belly just beginning to create a big enough paunch to be visible under her blouse, convinced he’d died. And then to find him the way she had, covered in blood, on his knees praying for a boy whose name he didn’t know at that point. And then the press on their front lawn, the accusations in the paper, the death threats . . . It was his fault that she lost the baby. Who else could they blame?

“Ryder,” she said softly, “what happened to the baby was just bad luck. A genetic anomaly. You know that.”

“I don’t know that.”

“The doctors—”

“The doctors are full of shit!” He squeezed his hands against the wheel, anger burning in his chest. “It was the stress of the situation. It was everything falling apart. It was my fault!”

“They did tests. They said it would have happened even if everything had been perfectly normal in our lives. Sometimes those things just happen.”

He shook his head again. “Saying that things just happen is just a scapegoat, a way to avoid the truth or placing blame.”

“So you’re going to take all the blame on your own shoulders? What about me? Maybe I’m just not capable of carrying a baby to term. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe it was my genes that caused the baby to die.”

Her voice was trembling as she said the last. When he looked at her, Ryder saw the same grief and pain he’d run from two years ago. He hated it, hated seeing her beautiful face touched by something that he should have been able to protect her from.

“Kelly—”

“If you can blame yourself, I can blame myself. It was my body that the baby was inside of, my body that failed.”

Ryder pulled the SUV over to the side of the road, the back end sliding as he hit the brakes harder than he should have. He unsnapped his seat belt and turned to her, taking her face between his hands.

“I won’t let you talk like that. It’s not your fault.”

“How do you know that? How could you possibly—”

“Because I do.”

He smoothed his thumb over her lips, and she sighed, pressing her head into him. This urge to kiss her burned through him, this need to make her feel better, to make her smile, so strong that he brushed his lips against her forehead. And there was something so familiar about it, something so perfect about it, that he wanted to forget the past two years and just lose himself in her.

But he couldn’t do that.

He untangled himself from her, sliding back into his seat. He had the SUV back on the road before he managed to hook his seat belt, his focus razor sharp on the road, so he wouldn’t have to look at her.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

What was he supposed to say to that? He couldn’t say anything.