Page 73 of Sheltering Instinct

And Abraham had sacrificed everything for her. The food from his plate, the last drops of his water. When she was weak and tired, he carried her on his back as the family made their way from space to space, trying to find a safe place to rest their heads.

If Abraham had needed her, Tess could do nothing other than to help him.

If she could turn away, she wouldn't be the Tess that he loved so ardently to this day, the pain still fresh and throbbing.

As a SEAL, he knew the debt he felt to his brothers who saved his life not once but time and again over the years. What would he do for them?

Anything in his power. Absolutely anything that they asked of him.

He understood. He’d understood for a long time. And there was the boulder, sitting on his chest.

Keep it light, man, Levi counseled himself. “How’s your family? The children?”

“Adam and Mordecai! You wouldn’t recognize them. When you saw them, they were toddlers, and now they’re men. It’s astonishing. Adam is working on a master’s in urban planning, and he plays bass in a jazz band. Mordecai is my athlete. He’s finishing his bachelor’s degree in physics. He’s applying to graduate programs.”

“Smart kids.”

“Humble, generous, kind children. They are a balm when life chafes. I’m so very lucky to have them in my life.”

“And you?” he asked, resting his hands on his knees.

“Me what?”

“Did you have children?”

“That’s not the kind of relationship that Abraham and I had. When he reached America, he was very ill. I think he waited too long to call me. Sometimes I think, perhaps, if … But had he called me sooner, I would have missed out on us. And that would have been a great loss.” She didn’t look at him when she said that. After a moment of silence, she added, “I don’t think that’s what you want to know. I think, for closure’s sake, you want to understand why my letter was so short with no explanation.” She threw a glance his way, then turned to stare out the windshield. “When I got the phone call from Abraham. Shanti said that you would never forgive me. And I believed that to be true.” She sucked in a breath and held it for a long moment before she said, “I knew the pain I was feeling, and I imagined the impact of my decisions on you. I was selfishly guarding myself. If you … I don’t know that I have the right words for this. I’m going to try. I knew where my heart and where my duty stood. Adam and Mordecai needed me. To abandon them would be impossible.AndI owed you an explanation. But if I saw you, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to follow through with my vows to Abraham. I was afraid of myself and what I might do.”

“He died.”

She looked out over his shoulder with a million-mile stare. “Yes.”

“Fourteen years ago.”

Her lips barely moved. “Yes.”

“And you didn’t look me up, Tess.” Levi couldn’t keep the wound—or the recrimination—out of his words.

“How could you have forgiven me for our past? And how would you forgive me if I showed up out of the blue? What if I stepped into your life only to remind you of pain and anger? And since I knew nothing about your life, I wondered if I would step in and possibly cause conflict in a new relationship. But there was more. When we were together, you were my priority in every decision I made. But fourteen years ago, I was a twenty-something-year-old single mother of two little boys who had lost their whole world—their mother, then their country, then their father. I made vows to Abraham and vows to myself. To keep those vows, I would have had to shuffle you into my family life, and that wasn’t a place that you would recognize. Would I ask that of you?”

“You stayed away to protect me.”

“Of course.”

She stopped the truck in the middle of nothing, put it in park, and climbed out.

And Levi was glad.

He wanted this conversation. But the pickup cab was too small for his big feelings.

Tess held her arms wide and began to spin around and around until she was stumbling sideways, and Levi caught her.

She used to call that being “drunk on starlight.”

Levi brushed the curls from her eyes and let his hands fall to her hips. He was looking for a reaction to an intimate move. Was that all right? He decided it wasn’t.

Instead, he rounded to the back of the truck, lowered the tailgate, and climbed in, sitting on the nest of blankets and calling Mojo up beside him. “Come sit, Tess. Let’s have this out. Okay?”

Without answering, she clambered up to sit across from him. Folding her legs into a crisscross.

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