Who Do You Trust?

With one look, without even a touch, she was chained again, shackled to him with a wanting she couldn’t conquer or deny. It had nothing to do with his looks, though he was so beautiful to look at he almost blinded her. Tall and strong, with deep, fathomless chocolate eyes, dark-olive skin and careless black curls. Though Mitch knew none of his forefathers, they must have been a big, bronzed race. He was so tall he dwarfed most men, big built and tightly muscled. From the first moment she’d seen him working their neighbor’s farm seventeen years before, he’d robbed her of breath with his stormy male beauty. From the moment they’d met, he’d haunted her with the shadows of unspoken secrets in his eyes, half-shuttered windows to a turbulent soul.

Boy to girl, man to woman, nothing changed. Even now, after half a lifetime apart, he still took her breath away, still made her hunger for more. Always haunting her, even long after he was gone: invisible whispers to her soul by day, her restless warrior walking with her by night in the dark grace of sensual dreams unending and unfulfilled.

And now he was here. Achingly familiar yet so long gone. Almost within reach, yet so far away; too much and never enough. And still she ached for him.

He spoke again, his voice warm with laughter. “You can’t be that shocked to see me. You knew I’d come. Don’t you have any words of welcome for me?”

She gulped a second time and forced her frozen vocal cords to work. “Yeah—you took your sweet time getting home, McCluskey. That must’ve been some mission the Air Force gave you to keep you away twelve years.” She pushed her hat back, squinting up at him in the heat of the late-summer sun. He was smiling down at her. The affection in his eyes warmed and yet hurt her somewhere deep inside, for he was still closed off from her, by just being Mitch. Mitch, the dark, dreaming rebel, whom she’d always known would have so much more to his life than this sleepy little west-of-the-mountains backwater had to give…far more than a plain farmer’s daughter had inside her to give. But, oh, it never stopped her dreams….

She’d dreamed of seeing him again, hungered for him through the long, burning years of a loneliness born of never being alone—the internal isolation that so many people filled with the faces of strangers. She’d never been able to do it, aching for one face only; yet now that he was here at last, she wanted him to go. Go and leave her in peace, without the tumultuous upheaval in her heart and soul caused by just knowing he stood near her.

“Sorry, Liss—the brass sent me out again right after East Timor. I gave notice as soon as I could. I’m on three months’ leave at the moment until I set myself up in a business. I figured Matt and Luke would need me full-time for a while.”

Just his voice, lush like rumpled dark silk, filled her with daydreams of sensuous hot nights in satin sheets—dreams she could never fulfil in real life. Which was why she always let the kids answer the phone Sunday nights when he would call from East Timor to talk to them. And when he asked to speak to her, she’d keep it to a minimum. Just talking brought to life desires and needs she’d fought long and hard to banish.

He held out a hand to her. She allowed him to lift her to her feet, feeling somehow small and feminine in her dirty paint-marked shorts and tank top. Even through her gardening glove she could feel the heat burning inside him that he always kept guarded from her. Just one touch and she trembled. Her pulse pounded so hard she could feel her throat quiver…and for the first time in twelve years she remembered she was a woman. “I see you’ve still got your patch of earth to till, Farmer Annie.”

She grinned at him from beneath the shade of her hat, trying for normality. “Can you imagine me without it?”

“Nope. Never. Through the years, when I’ve imagined meeting you again, it was always out here. It was where we always got together—your land or Old Man Taggart’s, didn’t matter. It was our place, and it was us.” The gentle smile softened his strong, masculine face, sending warm shivers down her spine. “It’s been a long time, Lissa. Too long.”

“Twelve years.”

“You barely look any older. And the farm…” He looked around the Miller family’s side of the fence, its drenched greenness dreaming in the soft silver haze of a warm February sun. “It’s like time froze here. It’s all the same. Serene and beautiful.”

“Changes happen everywhere, Mitch.” She pulled off her dirt-encrusted gardening gloves, checking her hands to make sure they weren’t shaking. “Even in sleepy little towns like Breckerville it happens—like under a microscope, beneath the surface where you can’t see it…”

Stop babbling, Lissa.

He smiled at her in tender reassurance, as if sensing her internal monologue. “Some things have changed if Lissa Miller doesn’t give a friend a hug.”

“It’s Carroll now, remember?” she whispered, knowing he didn’t need the reminder but needing to give it. Needing to recall the reasons why she shouldn’t touch him, start up the old merry-go-round of anguished yearnings and unrequited love.

“You’ll always be Lissa Miller to me.” With a small, tilted smile and darkened eyes, he opened his arms to her. “Come here.”

Aching, terrified—unable to resist, or deny him—she walked into his arms.

He held her close, just as he did years ago, in the days of their innocence, resting his chin on her hair. “It’s been so long since I held you. Too long. I never stopped missing you, Lissa.”

She held him close against her, filled with warmth and beauty and long-forbidden desire, just from his holding her. Loving it and hating it. Needing to push him away, yet never wanting to let go. Wanting more. Always wanting more when it came to Mitch. Loving him too much, wanting him too much, knowing it had never been that way for him. Dreams and fantasies of pushing her hands beneath his shirt, finding that glorious summer-heated maleness beneath— “You could have come to visit,” she whispered.

“You know why I didn’t.”

The scene at her wedding.

She suppressed a shudder. Tim Carroll, her brand-new husband, in the grip of the sudden and shocking aggression that comes from being roaring drunk for the first time. Throwing Mitch, his best man and longtime closest friend, out of the reception hall and out of their lives. Okay, so Mitch had been a little drunk, too. More than a little. So he’d watched her every move that night, in a tense, brooding stance that made her shiver…but not with fear. And so what if he’d chosen to speak about the beautiful bride instead of the bridesmaids, and how much he loved her? It was no secret how close Mitch was to the girl next door who’d married his best friend. It was anyone’s guess why Tim suddenly got to his feet in the middle of the speech and threw Mitch out.

Everyone knew Mitch’s story: the bounced foster kid taken in by a dour, old, widowed farmer, who only tolerated him for manual labor. Mitch never had any family of his own, no one to love him or care for him until he’d come to Breckerville. Which was why Tim’s act, in the middle of his own wedding, in front of all their friends, seemed so cruel and inexplicable. The mystery of Mitch McCluskey’s dramatic and permanent exit from town was still an occasional topic for speculation and gossip.

As was Tim’s less flamboyant exit from town. Less visual, but no less dramatic.

Lissa wished she didn’t know the reason for Tim’s lashing out at his best friend. And she’d never tell Mitch—not about the wedding nor about why Tim left her. How could she tell him that Tim, her husband— No, it was impossible.

Just as anything but friendship between them was impossible, now and forever. If she’d ever worked up the courage to tell him how she’d felt before she married Tim…but marriage to Tim had changed everything—her innocence, her belief in love…her belief in herself. It was all gone.

“How are the boys?” Mitch asked now, as if he knew she wanted the subject changed.

She relaxed against him, then pulled away. Don’t think. Don’t feel. “They’re wonderful. They turned nine a month ago.”

“I wish I’d been here.” He tipped her chin up, searching her face with a tender gaze. “Thank you for taking them in after the police notified me they’d finally found them. They didn’t go into the foster system, thanks to you. You don’t know what it means to me.” He bit down a smile, taking her face in his hands. “Dumb remark. You know better than anyone what it means to me.” He leaned forward, softly brushing her mouth with his. “Thank you, my beautiful, generous-hearted Lissa, for everything you’ve done. For them. For me. Thank you. Thank you.”

She couldn’t control the quiver that ran through her at the words, at the touch. He’d called her beautiful…

And for the first time his mouth had touched hers.

Once, only once before had he come close, and, as things had always been between them, it was too little and years too late.

In the kitchen of her parents’ house. He’d given her a locket for her seventeenth birthday—a year after she’d started dating Tim, his best friend. A candy-pink enamel-and-gold heart-shaped locket, a cheap, bargain-store replica of the one Gilbert gave to Anne of Green Gables. Unable to believe he’d remembered, let alone respected her little dream, her sweet, foolish dream that she’d find her own Gilbert and receive her own locket of love. He’d used what little money he had to fulfil it. She’d thrown her arms around him and reached up to kiss his cheek. He turned his face to hers, whispering huskily, “Lissa, don’t you know I—” He’d searched her eyes for an intense moment, and she knew that all the yearning in her heart for his kiss must be clear to see, shining like a beacon in the night. Slowly he’d lowered his mouth to hers as she waited, breathless and hungry for the touch….

Then Tim’s laughing voice sounded outside the room, and they sprang apart like guilty lovers. Neither of them could bring themselves to hurt Tim, his best mate and her boyfriend.

Oh, how she’d wished, in the long, cold years after her birthday night, that she’d had that kiss before it was too late. But too late had come and gone years ago. She’d lost her innocence too young. She’d learned cynicism too well. Even if by some miracle Mitch wanted her—and why would he?—she knew exactly what she was. Not enough for any man.

With a smile she knew trembled, she backed off. “Still full of blarney, McCluskey? You must have had a touch of Irish in you.” She swept a hand over her grubby gardening attire, the battered straw hat perched atop her simple ponytail. “I’ve lived in this face and body thirty-one years. I know what I am.”

His gaze never wavered. “I can’t speak pretty words, Lissa. I only speak what I know.” Stepping forward, he tipped her face up with a finger. “You were a sweet, pretty girl when I knew you before. Now you’re a beautiful woman, with a heart as gentle and lovely as your face.”

She trembled even at his simplest touch; the tiny flare of forbidden heat came alive, warming her shivering soul, making her stupid dreamer’s heart wonder if maybe, finally—

Fool! She had to break contact. Now.

She stepped back so fast she almost fell into the aubergines. “You can’t know what I’m like now. You haven’t seen me in twelve years. Times change, people change. I’m not the girl you knew.”

Again Mitch allowed her withdrawal, his gaze following her, dark and brooding; yet his words held the simplicity of faith. “You took my boys in when they were in trouble. You went to Sydney for them, brought them home and kept them safe here when I couldn’t leave East Timor. That’s the Lissa I knew I could trust with my sons—and you came through. For them. For me. And that makes you more beautiful to me than any supermodel could be.”

“Yep. The perennial nice girl next door. That’s me,” she said blithely, hiding the strain of bitterness beneath the words. “Everyone’s best friend and little sister, who always comes to the rescue. Good old reliable Lissa.”

A short silence, as if he weighed his words. Then he spoke, his deep, rumpled voice speaking his unique brand of blunt truth. “You’ve always been a ‘nice girl,’ you did live next door, and yes, I’ve relied on you—but from the moment we met, I’ve never thought of you as my sister, Lissa. Not once. Not ever.”

She couldn’t breathe. Her gaze felt pinned by his, trapped by the power of words she’d never dreamed of hearing from Mitch McCluskey, the beautiful, dark-hearted rebel who was always going to fly away from this hick town. “How…how did you think of me?” Then she swung toward the house, her face burning. “No. Don’t answer that. Would you like coffee? The boys will be home from school in about twenty minutes, and Jenny—”

“Are you frightened of me?”

The question halted her midstride. Slowly she turned back to him, trembling, needing, ashamed. She didn’t want to say it, but she’d never lied to Mitch; she’d only kept secrets.

She met his gaze, hers filled with unflinching honesty. “Terrified,” she said softly.

His hands, reaching out to her arms, dropped. “I hoped it was only him who’d wanted me to go that day. I’d hoped you at least still trusted me.”

“I do!” she cried. “I do, Mitch…but I—” She floundered, biting her lip. Haunted by past pain, hemmed in by secrets, by the fear and self-hate that walked beside and inside her, night and day. “It’s just that I— Oh, I can’t explain…but it’s not you,” she finished lamely.

“I see.” His face twisted. “That’s why you keep moving away from me like I’m a monster.”

The pain in his eyes found an echo in her soul. Mitch, oh, Mitch, I wish it didn’t have to be like this!

She owed him the truth. She knew what his life had been before they met, how few people he cared for or trusted since living through the foster system. But he trusted her.

“I learned a long time ago not to believe in everything Tim said or did,” she said, giving him what truth she could. “I never wanted him to say those things to you. I didn’t want you to go out of our lives like that. I’m glad you’re here now. The boys have missed you so much.”

“Thanks for that.” He nodded, as if thinking of something else. “What time does Tim come home from work?” His voice was slow, thoughtful.

“I—” She blinked. “What did you say?”

His brow lifted. “It’s a simple question, Lissa. What time does your husband come home from work?”

Without warning everything shifted focus. She felt dizzy, disoriented, as though she’d stepped back in time to a strange new world where only one truth made sense.

Mitch didn’t know.

Blinking to clear her mind of the unexpected turmoil, she tried to speak, but it came out a harsh croak. “Tim left me six years ago.”

Mitch staggered back, as if she’d decked him. “What?”

She shrugged, seeing no need to repeat herself.

“You’re divorced?” He watched her with an intense gaze, as if trying to make sense of a simple fact. Waiting for her to deny what he’d just heard. “You’re free?”

Lissa flinched. Oh, how she hated the word divorce. It was a word unheard of in the Miller family—until Tim walked out, left her for— “Yes.”

Obviously, he’d seen her expression. He’d been looking at her with all his brooding intensity. “Do you ever see him now?”

“Of course,” she answered, relieved at the change in subject. “He comes to see Jenny, our daughter. She’s five.”

“Did he leave you for someone else?” The question was as grim as the look in his eyes.

She dragged in a breath. At least she could answer that question honestly. “Yes.”

“He left when you were pregnant with his child.”

Unable to look at him, she nodded. If he knew the truth—

“Damn it. I’m going to kill him.”

She blurted without thinking, “How is it any different from you? It’s exactly what you did to Matt and Luke’s mother—except you didn’t even bother to marry her before you did your runner!” She clapped a hand to her mouth, horrified by the burst of anger she hadn’t even seen coming, destructive fury born of twisted jealousy. “I-I’m sorry, Mitch. It’s none of my business.”

Another short, uncomfortable silence, the words he didn’t say hanging in the air between them. “I could do with a coffee, if that’s all right.”

“O-of course.” She led the way into the old weatherboard farmhouse, shaking so bad she could barely use her hands to hang her hat and gloves on a hook on the verandah.

Mitch walked in without waiting for an invitation—but then, he knew he didn’t need one. The Miller farm had been his only real home in all his life. Her parents had become like his own, and he, their son.

For a little while. Until Tim stepped in and she’d ruined it all by giving in to a girl’s temptation to have a boyfriend—any boyfriend. Fool!

“The place has changed a bit.” He surveyed the big, open country kitchen, soft and mellow, honey and gold toned beneath the flooding sunshine of the skylight. “It was darker before.”

“When my parents retired three years ago I bought them out. I sold four hundred acres to the Brownells, keeping just the fifty around the house to grow fruit and vegetables. Mum and Dad live in a cottage by the ocean. They’re in Europe at the moment; Dad wanted to see the Formula One. Anyway, since it’s my place now, I did up the parts I didn’t like. I felt oppressed by the dark floor and bench tops.” She filled the filter with coffee.

“I like natural floorboards. I did something similar to my place in Bondi before I sold it. It was too gloomy.”

“Where do you live now?”

A second’s hesitation, then he said slowly, “I live here.”

The jug of water slipped in her hands, spilling over the bench. “Here?”

“Yes, here in Breckerville. I’m buying a place. Let me help you.” He stepped forward, grabbing a towel to dry the mess.

He’d always been like that. Always wanting to help her, always close to her. Just never close enough. Always the best friend she’d ever had, never the lover she craved.

Tears of helpless confusion filled her eyes. “I can do it.” She snatched the towel from him, hiding her face.

Again she felt his gaze on her, sensing her quiet despair. Gentle as a whispering breeze he touched her cheek, turning her face to his. “Don’t be sorry about what you said, Lissa. Don’t ever be scared to speak your mind to me.”

Unable to stop herself, she drank in the dark, rebellious face whose memory still walked the land outside her window, whose essence still haunted her dreams inside the windows of her soul. “But I am sorry,” she whispered, lowering her gaze.

Though she couldn’t see him, she could feel the warmth of his gaze on her. “Liss, you know how I feel about my father walking out on my mother when she was pregnant with me, her dumping me at the church steps because she had nowhere to go. Can you honestly see me walking out on a woman having my kids, like I didn’t care that she, or they, might have the life I had before I met you?”

Shamed, appalled by her unthinking judgment, she whispered, “Tim did.”

“No, baby,” he answered gently. “No man who knows you at all would ever think you could abandon your child, like my mother did to me. But he hurt you. You loved him, trusted him, and he hurt you. He left you when you needed him the most.”

His voice was so warm, so tender. He cared for her, and she was answering him with half-truths. But how could she tell him the truth about her marriage? “Yes. Yes, he did.” Well, that much was truth. Tim had left her, the only time she’d needed him.

“Where does he live now?”

Hearing the note of grim promise, she felt seventeen again. Mitch had always pounded Tim when he thought his friend wasn’t treating her right. “Not for my sake, Mitch,” she said with a shy, half-hidden smile. “He’s Jenny’s father.”

Quietly he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me any of this when I asked you to take the boys? My God, if I’d known you were alone, running this farm, a single mother—”

“Which is why I didn’t tell you. Matt and Luke needed a home and a family, after what happened with Kerin.” She refilled the jug and set the coffee going. “So I hear you made lieutenant in the Air Force, fly-boy McCluskey.”

“Squadron leader, actually. I would have made it my career, but the boys need me home more than the life can give.”

She glanced at him as she poured the coffee, afraid to ask the obvious question. “So what are your plans? Are you still going to work with planes?”

He leaned against the counter, watching her as if refreshing his eyes with her face—just her face. “I’m setting up a country-based courier business here. I have two planes, as well as a Maule bush plane I keep for fun, and I do aid drops for the Vincent Foundation every once in a while.”

She grinned. “Don’t tell me, I’m-Gonna-Save-the-World-Rebel McCluskey. You do all the runs for kids in crisis, and you’ve risked your neck to save a few.”

Mitch laughed at the perception of old friendship. Oh, yeah, she still knew him all right—better than any other woman ever had, or would. He could no more turn down a kid in need of help than he could live without flying—but she, so protected and innocent, would never understand his new, hidden work.

Just as well she didn’t know he’d left the Air Force for the Nighthawks almost two years ago; that his usual job description entailed flying over and into the world’s war zones to smuggle out captives and civilians unwittingly locked inside the unstated boundaries of heated battle. As for his adventure in Tumah-ra, and its potential repercussions with little Hana, if he couldn’t—no. There was no way he’d tell her; he didn’t want to shock her.

But lying to Lissa had never been an option.

He grinned and said, “Guilty as charged.”

She grinned in response, and the sweet warmth of it fired his soul, as well as more intimate places. “You haven’t changed a bit. Still the world’s softest touch for a kid in need.” She bit her lip and shoved him his coffee mug over the counter.

He didn’t touch it, barely noticed it. He knew he was staring at her, but he couldn’t stop. She’d changed from the fragile, hauntingly lovely woman-child who’d married his best mate at nineteen. She’d filled out, matured. She held herself with a quaint, unconscious dignity, standing aloof from the hedonistic angst of the world. But she still had the incredible mouth that made men thank God He made women—and she wore the same unique scent of sunshine and earth and grass and a touch of something wilder, sweeter beneath. Just like Lissa herself—a heady mixture of natural, glowing sensuality and sweet, untouchable purity. Lines touched her face, marks of the woman’s rite of passage: the strength and beauty of pain of childbirth and motherhood, the stress of unspoken sorrow and abandonment.

God, she was beyond beautiful now, but in a way that almost hurt him to look. She was a fairy-tale heroine straight from the mind of the brothers Grimm: a shackled maiden lost in the forest. A figurehead carving they put on the bow of old ships, like the Flying Dutchman. Forever sailing on, standing at the front of a boat flying unstoppably through a world and time she had no control over. Beautiful and cold, so untouchably cold. In those eyes of sweet country mist, shadows ran rampant. Shades of fear. Specters of isolation and emptiness. As they did in her heart. The ghosts of the past owned her soul.

But she was free of Tim—which was a greater miracle than any he’d hoped for—and he’d take her any way he could have her.

And he would have her. He’d fight for her with everything he had in him, every ounce of strength and skill he’d learned. He’d fight clean if he could, dirty if he had to. This time no man was coming between them.

He had to force himself to answer her teasing in the same light vein. “So I’m obsessed with saving kids? Says she who took my kids in for the past five months, no questions asked.”

She stilled, looking anywhere but at him. “Are you going to take the boys away from me?”

He stared at her, shocked by the question, by the way her sweet eyes wouldn’t meet his. Damn it, he should have known it would come to this; but be hadn’t thought it through, thinking she was Tim’s wife. “You don’t want them to go.” It wasn’t a question. “Lissa, surely you know I’d—”