Page 51 of Guarding Over You
16
KEEPING IT IN
The minute Blaze saw Arden’s car pull into the restaurant parking lot, his heart thumped harder than it had on his first shift in the ER during his residency.
She parked and got out, and he did the same, as he’d been waiting in his SUV for her.
The faint muscles in her thighs flexed as she walked, her stride purposeful and almost... angry, though he could see she was dialing it back. Something happened at the drop-off and he’d get to the bottom of it, even if he had to yank it out of her mouth.
Her tan shorts fit her body well, not tight, but not loose, more like perfect. Her orange T-shirt was bright and sunny, not exactly matching her mood though he could see she was trying hard for him to think otherwise.
“Hi,” he said. “Everything alright?”
Her hesitation told him he might need to get the pliers out for this conversation. “It’s good.”
No, it wasn’t good. Anything but good.
“Two,” he said to the hostess after he’d held the door for her. They took a seat in a booth, got their water glasses filled andmenus placed down, then were left alone. “Get it off your chest. You’ll feel better.”
“And ruin my first date in years? No, thank you. I’m used to keeping it in. This should be about us.”
“It can’t be about us if you’re thinking about something else. I’m a doctor, remember. I know what’s best.”
A laugh bubbled up in her chest and escaped before she could stop it. Her eyes still held the frustration in, but the tension loosened just a microscopic point. Better than nothing.
“And I’m a social worker, so I should know better too.”
She took a deep breath in, let it out, did it again, closed her eyes, seemed like she was mentally counting, then opened them up. Her brown eyes were clear now, the frustration from earlier gone.
“Damn, how did you do that?”
“Years of practice at trying to keep the peace for Gracie.”
He hated that for her. Hated that she needed to do it in the first place.
Their server came over before he could speak, they placed their orders quickly, and when he knew it was safe to talk again, said, “Do you want to tell me what happened when you dropped her off? Did you ask if he left the note?”
“I didn’t come out and ask that. I wouldn’t and start something. But during our conversation, which I’ll get to in a minute, I dropped the word ‘haunt’ and put an emphasis on it. He had no reaction, which means nothing. This is a guy who lied to me for years. I’m not sure why I thought he’d give me some tell.”
“In your gut, do you think it was him?”
Her cheeks puffed out as she released air from her lungs. “I don’t know and that bothers me the most. I want to say no, but I can’t. I want to think he wouldn’t, but I didn’t think my life would be where it is now either.”
“Do you still love him? If he hadn’t had an addiction issue and had been clean and stayed that way? Where do you think you’d be?”
“Right where I am now. Here is the thing, Blaze. I knew him in high school and I kind of thought he was a dick. But I’d gone to college, taken all these courses that filled my brain with the fact that you don’t know someone that way from the outside. You need to dive in deep to get to the root. See what makes them tick. Maybe he had something going on during that time that I was judging him on.”
Oh boy. He hoped she wasn’t doing that with him.
He didn’t think he had secrets. Nor deep-rooted issues that needed his head examined.
He had what he thought was the same amount of trauma that most people have in their life with a stressful job that he felt he managed well.
“You thought he was a project?” he asked, lifting his eyebrow. That was thelastthing he wanted.
“No. I thought I’d be fair and give him a chance. I knew and remembered what peer pressure was like back then. The more we went out, the more we talked and I realized he’d matured. That he wasn’t what I originally thought. He did like to drink and party, I said that before, but it’s not like he drank daily. Just once or twice on the weekends and never got drunk.”
“Until he did?”
