His Girl Next Door: The Army Ranger's Return / New York's Finest Rebel / The Girl from Honeysuckle Farm

“Do you have any fruit?”

Jessica 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.”

CHAPTER NINE

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 to meet his son, to keep things open and honest, and help to repair his relationship with George, then she didn’t have much choice other than to go along with it.

But she was already feeling messed up in her head about what had happened. Not the physical side, but the way he’d opened up to her. She was starting to think that maybe he wanted more from her than she’d expected from him. The way he’d talked to her, the things he’d told her …

She’d told herself this thing with Ryan was meant to be casual. He was leaving soon. She was not available to the idea of anything serious, and yet it felt like they had gone from friends to something very serious, very fast.

Jess pushed her hair behind her ears and tried to shut off the voice in her brain telling her to run. No matter what happened today, she had to remember it was worth it. Ryan had made her feel incredible last night. He had made her realize that she could be wanted and loved again. Just because he was going away did not mean it wasn’t worth every moment. Because it was.

She’d been so scared of showing a man her body, of opening up again and putting her heart out there. But Ryan had helped her through something she had thought was impossible to recover from. Once she’d gotten over the initial shock of him seeing her breasts, she hadn’t thought about it again all night. After months of worrying, he’d made her thoughts vanish in less than a heartbeat.

Just thinking about him like that put a smile back on her face. Until she spotted them. And her anxiety came back like a troop of butterflies playing in her stomach.

Ryan raised a hand to wave. They were walking along by the pond. She could see his son smiling, then watched as his face fell when he saw her. She wanted to run. But it was too late to back out now.

Instead she sucked up her courage and bent to let Hercules off the lead. The least she could do was let the dog have fun, chase some ducks while she tried not to find a hole to crawl and hide in.

“Jess!” Ryan called out and she mustered up a big smile again. Forced it on her face.

She waved back and watched as Hercules bounded up to them, before taking off to do laps back and forth along the water’s edge.

“Hi, guys.”

Ryan walked toward her and kissed her on the cheek. She tried to enjoy it, to experience that magical breathlessness she usually felt when his lips touched her. But instead all she saw was the flush of George’s cheeks as he looked the other way.

“I was telling George what happened with your dog the last time we were here,” Ryan said.

The boy nodded, face still stained a patchy red.

Jess shook herself out of the slump she was in. She was the adult here, the least she could do was make it as easy on George as she could.

“Little Herc means the world to me,” she said, taking a step away from Ryan, needing the breathing space as his boy watched them. “I can’t believe I was so caught up in getting to know your dad that I almost lost him.”

“Why did you start writing to my dad?” The boy’s face flushed a deep red just asking her.

“Well …” She paused and looked at Ryan. He nodded at her to continue. “I wanted to show that I cared about what our soldiers were doing for us, for our country. I heard about a pen-pal program that was being run with the army, and somehow I ended up writing to your father, out of all the soldiers serving overseas.”

Ryan moved closer to his son, hand on his shoulder. “When I told you that Jess made a huge effort to write to me, I meant that she wrote to me all the time. Every week. She helped me to see why I needed to come back home.”

George took a few steps back then turned to face the water again. “What did she tell you?”

Jessica didn’t know what to say. She was uncomfortable being made to feel like she was somehow a surrogate mother for the day. It wasn’t a role she wanted to fill. She wasn’t ready to face that kind of commitment.

“She guided me through dealing with my problems, we talked about everything and it gave me the strength to face what I’d left behind,” Ryan explained.

“Did you talk about Mom?” George asked.

Jessica wanted to back away but she couldn’t. She just stood there, feeling like an intruder.

“Yeah, about you and your mom.”

George turned away, like he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It hadn’t gone down that badly, but it hadn’t exactly been great, either.

“Lunch?” She made the suggestion as the air became stale between them all.

Ryan looked at her gratefully. “Yeah, good idea.”

She sat beneath a nearby tree on the grass and Ryan did the same. George didn’t move.

Jess didn’t want to be here any more than she guessed the boy did. It felt like she was intruding on something she had no right to be a part of.

“I hope you like sushi.”

She nodded. At least lunch was going to be good. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Ryan gave her a relieved look, reaching out to squeeze her hand before calling to his son. “You joining us, George?”

He slowly turned toward them, his eyes telling his entire life story. They looked sad, haunted almost, and Jess fought the sudden tug deep inside her that made her want to hold him, to comfort this boy who was so confused.

He just shrugged, but she knew he probably wanted to cry. To yell at her and ask his dad why he had to meet her at all.

“Hey, George, why don’t you go get Hercules for me?” she suggested.

There was a small light in his eyes as she gave him the Get Out of Jail Free card.

“Either throw sticks into the water for him, or just get hold of him and bring him back,” she told him.

George went off straight away and Ryan reached for her knee, his hand closing over it. “Thanks for that.”

She took a deep breath. “I don’t know if meeting George today was the best idea.”

Ryan grimaced. “I know, but I did have a big talk with him before we came. Explained why I wanted him to meet you.” He paused. “Sometimes the hardest thing is the best thing to do, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time, right?”

“I think him having to deal with me when you guys are only just starting to sort things out is too much.” But part of her felt dishonest—because maybe, just maybe, it was just too much for her and yet exactly the right thing for George.

Ryan shook his head, jaw suddenly clenched a bit tighter, making him look more determined. His hand hovered then came to rest on her cheek.

Jess sighed at his touch.

“You mean something to me, Jess, and I don’t want to keep things from him.”

She turned her face to kiss his palm, wishing things could be more simple between them. That he wasn’t going away, and that she didn’t have to keep huge secrets from him.

“Ryan, you’re going away soon.” Jessica paused. “There’s no need to cause complications when they don’t even need to exist.”

Now it was Ryan shaking his head. “I should have told you that I’m not leaving for good, Jess. If I didn’t think we had a chance, that this didn’t mean something, I wouldn’t have let things go this far between us.”

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