Page 66 of The Locksmith's Promise

He rested his elbows on his knees and hung his head in his hands. “I was a mess, Mags. My opinion of myself was at an all-time low and sinking every day.”

Lifting glossy eyes to meet mine, he confessed, “I honestly thought you were better off without me. I was drinking, getting into fights every night. When I lost my cell phone, I took it as a sign to cut myself out of your life.”

“How could you think that?” I whispered. “After all we’d been through, especially with your dad, how could you think that?”

Quietly, he admitted, “Because I became just like him.”

I shook my head vehemently. “You could never be like him.”

“Maggie,” he interrupted, his voice pained. “I went to your house to look for you, but you were gone. Your dad came out and told me to make something of myself and come back for you. It gave me a goal, something to focus on to get you back. I went back home to grab the money I’d saved, intending to do just that.”

He held my gaze, daring me to listen. “I walked in the door, and he laughed at me. I didn’t understand how he knew, but the bastard laughed.”

I shuddered because I heard that laugh, still, in my worst nightmares.

He ran a shaking hand through his hair and admitted, “I held a paring knife to his throat until he bled.”

I gasped, my eyes flaring wide as I searched his face for truth. I couldn’t picture the Baxter I knew doing such a thing.

He nodded when I stared back at him in disbelief. “He nearly ruined your entire life.”

“He touched his throat, saw the blood on his finger, and laughed harder. He wanted me to do it, Maggie. He wanted me to put him out of his misery and send myself to hell on earth. You don’t know how close I came. I’ve never felt that level of rage. Not before, and never since. It took a long time, and a lot of therapy, to come back from that.”

“That’s why you had to leave,” I murmured.

“He pressed charges. Somehow, Sergeant Elliott got him to back off. So long as I left town and never came back.”

My chest ached, my heart a swollen, pulsing mass beating for him.

God, it had always beat for him.

“Did you ever wonder about me?” I asked softly.

His expression softened. “Only every day. I called Miller all the time and asked about you. He promised he’d call me if you ever came back home.”

“Did he?”

He smiled.

And this time, it shone in his eyes.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

16

Long Past Time

Maggie

I’m here, aren’t I?

God, I’d missed that light in his eyes.

Bit by bit, the sun sank low in the sky while we talked, bathing the room in gold. As it slipped over the horizon, I reached out to turn on the lamp beside me and really looked at him for the first time since we’d sat down.

Physically, Baxter had changed.

Older and thicker, he had the substantial body of a man now rather than the long, lean muscles of his twenties or the lanky, overgrown limbs of his teens when I first fell for him.

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