Rescue My Heart Read online

  How had they gotten here?

  Reaching out, Adam tugged off her reflective sunglasses. She really wanted to do the same to him, but she held back because this felt easier, not having to look into his see-all gaze. She blinked a few times in the harsh day’s glare, realizing it was no longer raining. It was too cold to rain.

  Adam waited patiently.

  So did Milo, head cocked as if he was intently following this conversation. Well, probably intently was too strong a word since he appeared to be smiling.

  “No. Derek didn’t leave me,” she finally said, just as a few snowflakes began to drift down. Lazy. Slow. Fluttering through the air like forgotten hopes and dreams. “I left him.”

  “The marriage was no good?”

  “The marriage was no good.” She pushed her quickly frizzing hair back from her face. “But the divorce was great.” She reached up to try and contain her hair. No luck.

  Adam pulled off his hat and slipped it onto her head, tucking a tendril of wayward hair behind her ear. His fingers lingered, stroking gently over her temple, along her jaw. “He hurt you, Holly?”

  A rich question, especially coming from him.

  And now she had a bigger problem—she was melting at his touch. Much too attracted to him, she leaned back, out of the danger zone.

  Actually, she’d have to be on the other side of the planet to leave the danger zone that was Adam Connelly, but she was good at making do. “Not in the way you think.”

  His eyes never left hers. “What happened?”

  Oh no. Not going there. Not with him. “You know, if you’re feeling so Chatty Cathy,” she said, “let’s talk about you. You never answered my question last night—why did you come back to Sunshine?”

  “I live here,” he said simply. “My brothers are here. My friends and business—”

  “Are all here. Yeah, yeah,” she finished for him, doing her best to keep the hurt out of her voice. “But you said you weren’t going to come back ever.”

  “No, actually. I said I wasn’t coming back to us.”

  A direct hit, and she did her best not to fall out of the Ranger because that would have been embarrassing. As if she weren’t embarrassed enough. “I see,” she managed evenly. “Big difference there, I suppose.”

  He grimaced. “Holly—”

  “Can you just get us there, please?” She turned away from him, arms over her chest. She felt the weight of his stare, but then he finally put the ATV in gear and drove straight into the woods.

  Adam drove through the woods with single-minded purpose so he wouldn’t think about the woman next to him. She was making a big production out of staring into the quickly thickening forest around them, looking completely engrossed in the gorgeous ambiance. But she was radiating confusion and hurt.

  His fault, of course. “Holly.”

  She pretended not to hear him. She was still wearing his hat, and she looked adorable. Adorably hot…

  Not going there, Connelly.

  Shaking his head, he drove on, clearing his thoughts. He’d been taught how to do this in counseling for the times when his brain got caught in a nightmare loop, replaying shit he didn’t want to replay but couldn’t stop. The technique was to start low, in the toes. He wriggled them. Then moved his thoughts to the arch of his foot. Then his heel. He went on to purposely and carefully categorize his entire body and, in doing so, prevented his brain from hijacking his thoughts.

  He was at his own dick when he caught sight of Holly’s expression. Pale. Solemn.

  Unhappy.

  It was worry, he assured himself. Worry for Donald.

  And it was also because he was an asshole.

  He argued with himself for a minute, then stopped the Ranger. “Holly.”

  She was still pretending he didn’t exist, and doing a fine job of it, too, so he cupped her jaw and turned her to face him.

  Her eyes flashed at that. Yeah, she was pissed off, too, and suddenly, the interior of the Ranger felt a little tight. Especially since Milo was leaning forward, blowing doggy breath on them, waiting for Adam’s next move.

  “Down,” Adam said.

  Milo’s ears sagged, but he lay down.

  “Holly, look at me.”

  She lifted her gaze and he was immediately slammed by her beautiful blue eyes.

  “It wasn’t you,” he said, voice soft. “It was me.”

  “What?”

  “Back when I left. When I said good-bye. It wasn’t you, it was me.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you seriously giving me Classic Breakup Line Number One right now?” She leaned away from him, arms crossed, body language blaring high warnings at him. “Should I feed you your next line, or do you know it?”

  He scowled. “It wasn’t a line.”

  “Oh yes, it was. And not a very good one. Line Number Two isn’t much better. It’s ‘I wasn’t ready for a long term relationship.’”

  Adam couldn’t believe he’d been drawn into this conversation, or that he was even here. “I wasn’t ready for a long-term relationship.”

  “Oh my God.” She turned away.

  Milo, always extremely sensitive to tension, leaned forward and licked Adam’s ear.

  And then Holly’s. She sighed and hugged the dog.

  Swearing beneath his breath, Adam shoved the Ranger back into gear but didn’t hit the gas. He could feel his brain swelling. Probably an oncoming aneurism. “You were eighteen.”

  “Old enough.”

  “No,” he said, disagreeing. “And I was—”

  “A good guy,” she said so firmly he knew that she believed it to the depths of her soul.

  Something inside him reacted to that, something forgotten so long ago. “A complete fuckup,” he corrected. “Did you forget why I had to leave Sunshine?” He knew she hadn’t. His wild ways had been legendary. Hell, he’d dragged her into some of them. No one would have believed that Donald Reid’s daughter, in Sunshine for the summer, would give a thug like Adam a second look.

  But she had.

  She’d sucked him into her vortex in the best possible way. And then Adam’s wild ways caught up with him one night when he and his idiot friends had gone drag racing out on Highway 89. They’d raced a lot. But on this particular night, the weather had gone to shit. Not that they’d cared. Hell, they’d been invincible.

  Thank God, Holly hadn’t been with him. He’d been careful to keep her away from his friends. The accident, when the inevitable had happened, hadn’t involved Adam or his car. Nope, that would have been far too easy.

  The cop chasing them had slid out on the wet, slick highway, over a three-hundred-foot embankment, dying instantly.

  By the skin of his teeth, Adam had been spared legal blame by the court system. The judge had ruled the tragedy an accidental death but had firmly suggested Adam get his act together, and fast.

  On a one-track path to hell and already halfway there, Adam had been at a loss on how to do that. Then Donald—clueless as to what Adam and his precious daughter were doing with their free time in Adam’s beat-up old truck—had suggested the military.

  Adam had agreed, and everyone within a two-hundred-mile radius had breathed a sigh of relief.

  Adam could still remember facing Holly after he’d enlisted, looking into her achingly blue eyes, torn by what he felt for her and what he would become if he stayed.

  Out of some sense of obligatory self-flagellation, he’d gone about cutting everything good out of his life before he left. He’d told Holly not to wait for him, that he wouldn’t be coming back. That she needed to move on.

  And damned if, for the first time ever, she’d actually done exactly as he’d told her. When he’d found out about her marriage to Derek, he’d thought, Good, great, perfect. She’d really moved on. And while he was happy for her, he hadn’t kept in touch, not wanting to hear about it more than he already had.

  As for him, he’d gone on to see five continents, learned how to survive in just about any kind of condi