Read Online Angel's Peak by Robyn Carr - Free Book Online

you? You didn’t trust me any more than that?” he asked.
    She shrugged. “Why would I? We spent nights together, Sean—we kept our own places and you never suggested living together! You liked things loose and uncomplicated. You thought your buddies who got married ‘bit the dust.’ You thought the ones who had kids were trapped. I wanted something solid, and back then I wanted it to be you, but if it wasn’t going to be you, I had to have the courage to move on. Right? Isn’t that reasonable?”
    Rather than answering the question, he said, “Maybe I’m not that guy anymore.”
    “Oh?” she asked with a cynical tone. “And what guy are you?”
    “Things changed, Franci. Starting with not having you in my life. I thought I’d just keep having fun, but fun wasn’t fun without you. I thought the Riordan men didn’t settle down, until I watched the last one I ever expected bite the dust…”
    “There it is again—he bit the dust.”
    “If you’d seen him fight it, you’d have been impressed. Bottom line, I was trying like hell to make it work without you because I thought I had no choice. And when I saw you at that restaurant in Arcata, I knew I wasn’t going another day without trying to see if…I just want to see if we can work this out. If we can’t, if you’re in a different place, I’m not a fool—I don’t want a woman who doesn’t want me. But…”
    “Just like I didn’t want a man who didn’t want me,” she reminded him, lifting her chin proudly. Then, as an afterthought, she added, “Enough. Didn’t want me enough.”
    “Touché. You can have that one. I made a mistake. But so did you. I was an idiot. You were in a big goddamn hurry.”
    Well, he was right about that, she thought. She had been on the nest. She leaned toward him and shook her head. “I had no possible way of knowing if you would ever change. I couldn’t wait around for that. My biological clock was ticking.” Boy, had it been ticking!
    Again, rather than responding, he asked, “Are you with someone now?”
    She froze. In fact, she was. It had been a long time coming, too. But Sean’s reappearance had caused her to barely give the guy a thought. It occurred to her to tell Sean she had a guy, just to back him off a bit. The temptation was equally strong to tell him there was no one, which might encourage him all the more. In the end, she said, “I’ve been dating…trying to be social rather than a recluse. You? Are you with someone now?”
    He shook his head. “Let’s try again,” he said in a soft, pleading voice. As if it had all been a minor misunderstanding.
    “Not so fast,” Franci said. “I don’t know if I want to try again. We have issues. Unless you’ve changed a lot, we don’t want the same things out of a relationship, out of life. It’s too late for couples’ counseling. I’m willing to think about us being friends, but we have to take even something like that very slowly. The world didn’t just stand still after we parted ways, Sean. I went on living.”
    “Of course you did, Franci,” he said, reaching for her hand. He held it on the tabletop. “We both tried to get on with things, and both ended up back here.”
    “I’m sure we’re not talking about the same things,” she said. “I’m sure your dating was a lot different than mine,” she said, meaning he’d slept with a lot of women. He’d been a real playboy when she met him and she had been a little surprised when he became exclusively hers. Sean going back to his old ways of making the rounds was more what she had expected of him.
    “I dated,” he admitted. “Not anything very…Nothing worked out.”
    She lifted her chin. “And I became very independent. I hadn’t heard from you in years. I didn’t see this coming.”
    “It’s coming,” he said, in a low voice laced with meaning. “Let me take you out to dinner tonight.”
    “No,” she said. “I’m busy.”
    “Tomorrow night, then.”
    “I’m going