the hell out of here!” Tig ordered, after silence had held the room in its grip for half a minute.
Eli roared with laughter. “Damn, man, if you didn’t want to talk about it, you could’ve said so!”
“It’s not a joke,” Linus insisted, though he fully understood his friends’ disbelief.
“She’s the DA.” Tig apparently felt the need to reiterate that fact.
Linus only smiled. “She wasn’t always.”
“How is this possible?” Eli wanted to know. “We’ve been friends since the crib.”
Linus laughed heartily then. “Does that mean we have to know everything about each other?”
Eli shrugged. “I’d say everything else pales in comparison once you know someone crapped their pants up through first grade.”
Laughter exploded between the old friends.
“Lies!” Linus roared. “That only happened when they served that green pudding for lunch.”
“I gotta agree with E, man.” Tig’s tone brought a touch of seriousness back to the conversation. “Soph and Paula are best friends. She’d have mentioned it.”
Linus grew more serious then too. “Guess she’s done as good a job keeping it from her friends as I have from mine.”
Eli leaned over to set his bottle on an end table. “What happened?” he asked.
“Lost my temper.” Linus knew it wouldn’t take much more than those words to give his friends a good idea of how things had derailed. Questions remained, however.
“Did you hit her?” The gold flecks in Tig’s dark eyes glinted with unspoken disapproval.
“No.” Self-disgust had sent the faint amber hue of Linus’s gaze diluting to its molten chocolate state. “But I didn’t much care where the furniture landed when I threw it. She wasn’t touched, but she could’ve been.” Linus reclaimed his seat on the recliner. “Touched or not, she got hurt just the same. I said things...called her names.”
“What names?”
“The bad kind.” Linus sent Eli a humorless smirk. “She’s got every right to hate me, and she’s made it clear that she does over the few times we’ve seen each other lately.”
“In Cortina?” Eli shifted a meaningful look at Tig while referring to the recent trip they had taken to Rook Lourdess’s home.
“Hmph, yeah.” Linus shook his head in spite of himself. “Then there was Mexico.”
Tig winced. “So I guess all the love and adoration that’s been goin’ around has been hell on you.”
“You’ve got no idea, T.” Linus managed a weary grin. “She should have been my wife by now. The night I lost it, I was gonna propose.”
“Jesus, Line...” A measure of Eli’s own temper surfaced then. “It was that serious and you never told us?”
“Nothin’ personal, E.” Linus shrugged weakly. “It was just so good for so long between us and I didn’t want to do anything to set them off.”
“Them?”
“My demons,” Linus said in reply to Tig’s query. “They’d been quiet for so long before that night. I thought maybe...maybe they were gone. That somehow I’d defeated them. It took that night to see there was no defeat, no triumph ’til I turned and faced them.”
“Looks like you have.” Tig spread his hands in an encompassing gesture. “We haven’t been witness to any furniture-throwing outbreaks lately.”
“Paula hasn’t been in my life lately, T. Sometimes I think all my so-called progress is a joke. It won’t be real until I turn and face her—apologize for what I did.”
“So what happened that night?” Eli queried, his expression a tad guarded. “To make you do what you did?”
“That’s not the point.” Linus’s features visibly sharpened as well. “The point is I did it and I need her to give me the chance to tell her how sorry I am.”
The looks exchanged between Eli and Tig were laced with uncertainty again.
“An apology for what you did might go over better if you tell her why you did it,” Tig noted.
Linus’s features remained set. “Why doesn’t matter.”
“It might to her,” Tig challenged.
Linus leaned forward then and held his head in his hands. Silently, he agreed.
* * *
“But that’s for later. First, I want to hear about this young man.”
Paula sent strongly worded mental orders to her brain to pick her jaw up off the ground. She watched Miranda Bormann with a mix of humor and disbelief.
“You can’t just lay something like this on me and expect us to go back to talking about my love life,” she said.
“Ah, so you are in love with him?”
“Professor B—”
“Humor an old woman, love.”
“Okay. Where is she?” Paula countered.
Miranda Bormann’s gaze sparkled slyly. “Nice try, but flattery won’t help. I want to know about your young man. Let’s start with when you met him.”
“Alright.” Paula anticipated the woman’s surprise at what she would say next. “A few weeks before I got my law degree.”
Miranda Bormann was indeed stunned. “You met him then, but I’ve never seen you with a diamond on a certain finger. What gives?”
“Remember that drama I spoke of? There was a ton of it.”
Bormann blinked. “Still?”
The inquiry had Paula wincing. “It kind of carried over—it was hard to run from.”
“Such are the ways things tend to be when it comes to drama with the one we love, and don’t try telling me you’re not in love with him. If you could see your face, you’d know that’s what’s written all over it.”
“I can’t let myself get snagged back into it, Professor B.” Paula drew a hand through her loose curls. “I’ve come too far. I’m not the little idiot he knew.”
“But he’s still on your mind?”
“We’ve got mutual friends. We bump into each other sometimes since they’ve gotten back together.” Paula tapped her fingers against the glossy countertop. “It keeps bringing all the other stuff back.”
“And you can’t ignore it?”
“Oh, I could.” Paula swore and pushed away from the island to pace the kitchen. “But he wants to—to talk about it. To explain what went wrong.”
“And you don’t want to know.”
“I want to know, but I—” Paula bowed her head, pressing her lips together as though she were trying to tell herself to get it together. “If he tells me what happened, I—I’m afraid I’ll...”
“Fall deeper for him than you already have.”
Paula looked directly at her mentor. “I can’t let that happen.”
“But, honey, why? Especially when it seems you both still have feelings for each other.”
“Linus Brooks is a part of my past.” Paula looked a mite flustered. “It’s best he stays there.”
“Linus Brooks.” Something sharpened in Miranda Bormann’s expression.
“I’ve