attempted to initiate conversation. “I’m sorry about your dad, Levi. I know it happened years ago, but I’m still sorry.”
“As you said, it was a long time ago.”
Okay, then. She’d try again. “And I read somewhere your family sold your dad’s company when he died. It must’ve been difficult losing your dad and the company.”
“Not really.”
She hoped he was referring to the loss of the company and not his father’s death. The Levi she remembered was private and reticent but he’d never been a jerk.
“Is there a point to this inane conversation? Since you walked out on me, I didn’t think you particularly cared about my life. And I, in turn, don’t care how you’ve spent the last ten years, Tanna.”
“I’m an EMT.” Seeing the quick flash of surprise in his eyes, she blurted out a question and immediately regretted letting the words fly. “You didn’t, just once, ask my brothers where I was, what I was doing?”
“You bailed on me, bailed on the life we planned, so I didn’t feel the need to keep up with yours,” Levi shot back. So that was a no then.
“Sit down, say what you want to say and then leave.”
His casual order, and his expectation that he would be instantly obeyed, annoyed her. Unless she was at work being paid to take orders, she took umbrage at being told what to do.
Tanna took her time walking to a wingback chair, crossing her legs, making herself comfortable. Levi placed his plate on the arm of his own chair and picked up his sandwich. “Talk. Make it quick.”
Tanna stared down at her hands. She’d imagined this meeting so often, had practiced what to say, but now those carefully crafted words wouldn’t come. Seeing Levi’s impatience building, she forced them across her tongue. “I didn’t leave you at the altar, but it was close.”
“You left straight after the rehearsal dinner. A scant twenty-four hours before,” Levi said, dumping his hardly touched sandwich back onto the plate and putting it on the table. Tanna forced herself to meet his eyes, a deep blue that defied description. Sometimes they were cobalt, sometimes ink. Sometimes, like now, they held more than a touch of ice.
“I should not have left without talking to you, without a goodbye. Without an explanation.”
“No argument from me.”
“Levi, from the time we got engaged, I had my doubt—”
“Did I ask you for an explanation? Do I want one? I have a one-word answer...no.”
Well, okay then. Tanna wasn’t sure what came next, so she sat quietly, wondering how quickly he’d ask her to leave. The words were on his lips; she could see them hovering there. She needed to speak before he kicked her out.
“I was wrong, and I should’ve had the courage to face you, to explain. It was easier to run, to leave you that letter.”
“Yeah, after watching you fight to recover from your injuries, watching you learn to walk again, I was surprised by your lack of bravery. And decency.”
Ouch. Tanna felt the knife in her back, felt it turn. But she couldn’t argue with his statement. How she wished she could tell him the truth. That she couldn’t talk to him face-to-face before she left because if she had, she knew he would have brushed off her fears as prewedding jitters. He would’ve dismissed her concerns, persuaded her they were doing the right thing, and she would have listened. Then she’d have been miserable. And furious with herself for not standing up to him.
“My mom canceled the wedding, called everyone and returned the presents. Christmas was pretty crap that year.” Levi’s words drove the knife in deeper and harder. “But we did make headlines, day after day, week after week. All of us—me, my parents, your brothers and my sisters—lived with the press following us everywhere, shoving cameras into our faces, demanding an explanation, a comment, something. Yeah, best Christmas ever.”
Tanna winced. She’d asked about the press attention but Carrick told her not to worry about it and she hadn’t. Because she’d been trying to find a new life, a new normal, she’d done as he suggested.
“Maybe one day you will let me explain...”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Levi told her, his expression reminding her of the Bering Sea in the dead of winter.
Tanna nodded and rubbed her damp hands on her thighs. “Well, I am sorry. I wish there was something I could do to make it up to you.”
Levi stared at her and she could see his agile mind working, spinning a hundred miles a minute. He was cooking up something and Tanna looked at the media room door, her inner oh-no radar telling her to leave, now. Whatever Levi was going to say next was going to flip her life on its head.
“Carrick said you are in town for six weeks. Is that right?”
She was due to go back to work on March 1. “Give or take,” Tanna replied, wondering where he was going with this.
Levi’s smile was full of sarcasm. “You say you want to make it up to me?”
Yeah, and she’d meant it, kind of. She’d meant it in an it’s-the-right-thing-to-say way, not in an I’ll-do-anything-to-make-it-up-to-you way.
“Uh...what do you have in mind?”
Levi picked up his coffee mug again and looked at her over the rim. “It pains me to admit this but it’s become abundantly clear I need help. I’m mobile but walking hurts like hell—”
“It should if you broke your patella.”
“The cast I can handle. It’s annoying but manageable. But I can’t hobble around because using the crutches hurts like hell. So, it would help to have a runner, a gopher. Someone at my beck and call. Someone I don’t mind ordering around—” Levi bared his teeth “—because she owes me.”
Oh, crap. She’d walked right into that one.
Damn right, she owed him.
Tanna owed him for walking out on their engagement, from running away from their wedding, leaving behind the life they’d planned. He didn’t care about the hours he’d spent by her bedside, holding her while she cried—from pain and from frustration—
Those were his choices and he lived by them.
But it had been her choice to say yes to his proposal, to agree to a Christmas wedding, to say yes when she really meant no.
The weeks and months after their nonwedding had been hell on so many different levels. He’d shrugged off the embarrassment factor and ignored the subtle comments about his young bride’s flight, the fake sympathy in the eyes of people who cared more about gossip than they did about him. He’d hated the media attention for making him, as intensely private as his father was extroverted, a public spectacle.
And he never gave the money he spent on the wedding another thought.
But Tanna damn well owed him for encouraging him to take a chance on her when he knew how risky taking chances could be.
She owed him for the sleepless nights he’d spent questioning his own judgment, for making him think asking her to marry her wasn’t a smart decision. For the months and years he’d spent second-guessing himself. For whipping the entire situation out of his control...
She.
Owed.
Him.
And yeah, he could freely admit he really wanted to sleep with her, still. Maybe more now than he ever had before. A decade had transformed her from an eager-to-please girl into a fully confident woman and he didn’t feel the need to rein in his responses,