Read Online Operation Reunion by Justine Davis - Free Book Online Page B

because I don’t want to. My choice. Just like you did, making the football team, getting everybody fired up about how good you are, then walking away because it was your choice not to play their game.”
    “And that had its down side, if you recall.” He’d proved his point, but he hadn’t realized some would take it as dissing the whole school by not wanting to play for the team that represented them.
    “But they respected you,” Kayla had said. “That’s all I want.”
    He didn’t remember now what he’d finally said to ease her nerves. But he’d made her smile, reassured, so it had worked. And he spent the remainder of his own evening reminding himself she was still his young, very smart, annoyingly honest and perceptive sounding board. And he was still the boy next door to her, her sounding board in turn, sometimes her protector, but always her listener.
    “Dane?”
    He snapped out of his reverie.
    “I remember that night,” he said, unable to help or care that his voice was a little husky. “Two years seemed so little separation and yet so long.”
    “I didn’t ask you to wait until I was eighteen.”
    “Anything else seemed a little too...predatory to me.”
    For a moment she just looked at him, and then she smiled, that slow, dawning Kayla smile that always reminded him that there was warmth in the world, no matter how cold it might seem at any given moment.
    “You were—and are—a gallant man, Dane Burdette.”
    Her use of the old-fashioned term made him smile in turn, even though he hadn’t felt in the least gallant at the time. Only his vow to wait until she was eighteen had made his new-found appreciation of her as a woman acceptable. Where his eighteen-year-old self had found the will to wait he wasn’t sure, although he was ruefully aware that the stigma of dating a high school girl when you’d graduated had played a bigger part than he’d like to admit. With Kayla’s support he had flouted the expected norms with some success, but he had found himself unable to get past that bit of peer pressure. And he’d harbored the notion that maybe, if he put her off-limits, he’d just get over her in that two years.
    He hadn’t.
    And then three months after that dance her parents were dead, changing both their lives forever, and self-control was no longer an issue. He would no more risk further damage to her already shattered soul than he would cut off his own arm. He’d shoved his newly awakened awareness of her into a cage and locked it, setting out to be what she needed and only what she needed—a strong shoulder, a comforting ear and a safe place to be.
    He’d succeeded, he thought.
    He’d just never expected to be in essentially the same place ten years later.

Chapter 8
    K ayla woke up screaming. And alone.
    The nightmares had, thankfully, become rare. But when they came, they were as vivid and terrifying as ever. And real, all of it—walking into the dark den, hearing the odd squish of the carpet, reaching for the light switch, then wishing she hadn’t as the scene flashed into being before her stunned eyes.
    Normally Dane was there to hold her, easing her out of the remembered horror gently, not pushing her, not giving her meaningless platitudes, not telling her it would be all right when it never could be, but simply holding her, his strength and understanding flowing to her as if there were a direct connection between them.
    But Dane was not here.
    He had left early last evening, refusing to settle right back into the routine they had developed over the years. She supposed she should feel hurt, but she was more scared than anything. This further evidence that things weren’t the same had rattled her. He was back, and yet he wasn’t. It pounded home to her anew that their relationship had been damaged.
    Shaking, she reached for her phone. She knew it was late, after midnight, but she couldn’t help it—she had to hear his voice. If he was angry that she’d woken him up, so