Page 10 of Hold on Tight

Mike can’t. Not that. Not anything.

I’m alive. He’s dead.

For weeks, he’d let that dark thought make decisions for him. He’d turned away from anything that could remind him.

But now? It felt as if someone had shone a thin beam of light into a dark mine shaft. It wasn’t enough to navigate by, but it shoved the darkness back to the corners.

“I’ll watch him Monday. If you want.”

Mira shook her head. “I can’t do that. I don’tknowyou.”

“In the biblical sense—” His body roused again at the memory.

“Haven’t we already been over this? You’re the one who denied that we knew each other in the biblical sense. The point is, I can’t leave my son with a guy I don’t know anything about.”

He didn’t like it that her words erased all the intimacy of those few, luminous weeks, but he couldn’t blame her, especially because of the way he’d ended things. What she meant, he was pretty sure, was that she couldn’t leave her son with a grumpy asshole with a gimpy leg, but he didn’t say that. He just said, “Right.”

“I mean, I don’t even know if you’re married. Have other kids.”

He shook his head. “Just me,” he said. “What about you? Is there a man in the picture?”

That wasn’t what he really wanted to ask. What he really wanted to ask was,Have you ever had real sex that was as good as the not-sex we had? Because I haven’t.

What he really wanted to ask was,Who’s the lucky bastard who gets to put his hands all over you?

But he didn’t ask those things, and his brain fed back, swift as an echo,Someone who deserves her.

She was shaking her head. “I had a boyfriend in Florida, but it’s over. Look. What if we meet at a park and you could toss a ball around with him?”

“I’m not much for catch these days. Still working out all the balance issues.” He gestured at his artificial leg.

She reddened. “Sorry.”

“You know what? It was a dumb idea. Sorry I suggested it. Can we forget this whole thing happened?”

Her mouth tightened, the skin around it whitening. “This ‘whole thing’?”

She’d been about to say more, but then she’d looked down at Sam, who was watching them both intently. “Look. You do whatever you need to do. Forget it happened, remember it happened, whatever. You have my number. If you want to get in touch, call me. Otherwise, good luck with the physical therapy, okay?”

She grabbed Sam’s hand and practically hauled him out of the physical therapist’s office. As they passed through the glass front door, he heard Sam ask, “Who was that guy?”

Her response was muffled, but he was pretty sure it was, “Some jerk.”

Chapter 4

She tossed and turned and consulted the clock nearly hourly. At seven a.m., she let herself give up on sleep and get lost in memory.

Jake.

After Sam had come, she’d—yes—selfishly longed for someone who would take turns rocking him after her parents had conked out, who could cry with her nights when the baby wouldn’t sleep. Someone who would be with her and Sam against the world.

And maybe Jake wouldn’t have wanted to be that man. She didn’t know. But she’dusedhim to fill the role in her head. She’d plugged him into the fantasies, made him her knight in shining armor.

She’d wanted Jake so badly that when Sam was three months old and she had enough energy to do something other than nurse him and sleep, she’d defied her friends’ advice and her parents’ wishes. She’d called his cell phone again, but a recording said it was out of service. So she launched a secret search for him. Because she felt he had a right to know that Sam existed, even if her parents didn’t think so. Because at barely nineteen, she believed that the truth came first and everything followed neatly from it. And, after all, how hard could it possibly be to track down a soldier, even one with a common name like Jake Taylor? How many of them could there be?

Quite a few, it turned out. Google was monumentally unhelpful, and if her particular Jake Taylor had a Facebook account, she couldn’t find it.

She’d started from the assumption that since she’d met him in a Seattle bowling alley, he had to be stationed somewhere in the area. She cursed herself for never asking. They had talked about the most intense, most intimate things, but apparently not the things that mattered.

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