His Girl Next Door: The Army Ranger's Return / New York's Finest Rebel / The Girl from Honeysuckle Farm. Trish Wylie
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moved back to the fridge again. He seemed set on them meeting, and she wasn’t going to hurt his feelings by saying no to the lunch. But she hadn’t missed the look on George’s face the other day, and something told her it might not be the right thing to do. Even if Ryan was doing his best to evade her questions right now, they had to tread carefully.
But he sure was good at changing the subject. “Go back up to bed,” Ryan told her, pausing and leaning toward her to plant a kiss on her forehead. “I’ll bring breakfast up when it’s ready.”
Ryan watched as Jessica’s fingers played across his chest as they lay side by side. Breakfast had been started and then somehow quickly forgotten about, but he wasn’t complaining.
He sighed as she snuggled in closer to him.
“What?”
Ryan propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at her. She was so beautiful it took his breath away. So innocent and giving, so kind.
He wasn’t sure if this was the right time to bring this up, but he needed to tell her. Needed to be real with her, be honest if they were going to have a chance at that future he was starting to think about.
“I’m scared, Jess.”
She tucked even closer into him and kissed his jaw. “Why? What do you have to be scared of?”
He tried not to frown. He had everything to be scared of. That was the problem.
“Because part of me wonders if I can do this being a normal person thing. I don’t know if I can forget what I’ve seen, and forget what I’ve thought and just be a human being again.”
“You’ve always been a human being, Ryan. You’ve just seen things that most of us would be too scared to confront,” she said.
“Sometimes I wonder if being in the army, serving overseas, takes the humanity from you and makes you into some sort of machine. It stops you from feeling, it makes it okay to just treat each day as a new opportunity. But in real life, you need to look back, too. You need to remember.”
“See this?” Jessica let her fingers dance along his cheek to wipe at a tear. “This makes you human.”
He smiled, just, from the corner of his mouth on one side.
She kissed his lips, softly, so he could only just feel it. He leaned forward as she pulled away.
“That makes you human, too.” She rolled over and reached inside her bedside table and pulled out a letter. “See this?”
He would recognize it anywhere. One of the letters he’d sent her. “You kept them?”
“Every one. My drawer is full of them.”
He reached for it but she pulled it away and tucked it back again.
“I don’t even know which letter that was, or why it was on the top of the pile, but those letters? Each one told me you were a man who knew how to love and how to lose. That you were a man who could help save our country, who could help his men, and now here you are at home trying to be a man and a dad and a civilian.”
“And?”
“And now I know that you can do it.”
“Why?”
She pressed her face into his chest. He had no idea why she had so much faith in him, but it gave him a strength he’d worried he didn’t have.
“Because now you’re helping me and it’s working,” she told him, her voice muffled by his skin.
He smiled and puller her closer. “You do know that whatever I’m not sure about, whatever I’m worried about, doesn’t mean I’m not absolutely sure about what’s happening between us, right?”
Jessica sighed as she lay in his arms.
Ryan nudged at her breast with his finger, circling over her skin and tracing back up to her face. It was as if he couldn’t stop touching her, and she felt the same about him.
One day he’d ask her about her scars, what had led to her cosmetic surgery, but he didn’t care. Plenty of women enhanced their breasts, and she had obviously had her reasons.
“You’re my second chance, Jessica.”
She pulled up so her head was resting on her hand, propped by the pillow. “I wasn’t aware you needed a second chance.”
He needed to tell her now. Take that step to let her in completely. “You’re my chance to make things right.”
“It wasn’t your fault your wife died, Ryan.”
He smiled, sadly. He hoped she’d understand. “No, but I didn’t love her like she deserved to be loved. She was my best friend in school, and I loved her like only a best friend can.”
He didn’t say what he really wanted to. Tell her how he felt right now. Because it seemed too soon, too fast.
Now he knew what true love really felt like.
“Did she feel the same way?”
Ryan shook his head and played with her hair, his arm resting on her shoulder. This was the part he hated to admit, even to himself. Why he felt guilt like a crawling parasite over his skin sometimes. He’d always wondered if maybe he hadn’t loved her enough to save her.
“She loved me deeply, I’d always known it. I could see it in her eyes every time she looked at me, even when she was in hospital with machines bleeping every time she so much as blinked.”
He stopped and she just watched him. Ryan wished he could tell what she was thinking. “I never lied when I told her I loved her. We got married when we were eighteen, she was already pregnant with George, and we were happy. We never argued, and I told her every day that she meant the world to me. And she did.”
“But?”
He leaned forward and kissed the tip of her nose. He wanted to ask Jessica if it made him a bad person for thinking he was so pleased to have met her. That finding her meant he could finally forgive Julia for leaving him. But he didn’t. Because part of him wasn’t ready to admit that out aloud yet. And he had a feeling that maybe Jessica wasn’t ready to hear it.
But what he was sure about was how he felt about her. The last twenty-four hours had proven to him how special she was. “There’s no but. I just want to say thank you, Jess. For everything.”
She smiled as a tear escaped from the edge of her own eye. He kissed it away as she whispered back to him.
“You’re welcome.”
Dear Ryan,
I know by now that you probably torture yourself by thinking over things you should have done, but there’s no point dwelling on the past. Especially on things you had no power to control. Before you come home, I think you need to forgive yourself, and let yourself move on.
Focus on what you have to do, stay safe and promise me that you’ll write to your son more often. Even if you don’t have much to say, just put pen to paper.
We write to one another so often now that you don’t have any excuses not to write to him. Okay? Jessica
JESSICA COULDN’T HELP the sigh that escaped her lips. She’d thought waiting for Ryan to arrive last night had been nerve-wracking. How wrong she’d been. Waiting to meet his son was far worse. The only consolation was that she wasn’t meeting his parents, too.
She walked into the park, clutching Hercules’s lead and telling herself it was worth it. They’d had a great time last night. Make that super. And if he needed her