Working from the guesthouse?”
“Zachary’s riding with Trevor Lewis-one of the governor’s stable grooms. It’s his afternoon off, but he volunteered to take Zachary riding today so I can finish taking care of the hotel arrangements for Carrie and her people.” She had felt a little wary about accepting Trevor’s offer, afraid he might consider it a quid pro quo that would require her to do him a favor, too. But he had shown no signs of expecting anything from her, even turning down her offer to pay him for his time.
“Working on my off day makes me look good in the boss’s eyes,” Trevor had said with an engaging grin. “You and the little guy are doing me a favor.”
She wasn’t sure she believed him, not completely, but she was in no position to turn down the offer of a free riding session to keep Zachary happy and occupied while she took care of the work piling up on her desk.
“You sure Zachary’s okay with this Trevor guy?” Harlan asked.
She looked up in surprise at the worried tone in his voice. “Yeah, he’s fine. Trevor’s taken him riding a few times before. He’s good with Zachary, and Zachary’s always happy to go riding.”
“You know, you could always bring him here with you if you need to. I bought a couple of horse books to keep here.” He waved at the bookshelf behind him, where two large picture books with horses on the covers lay on the top shelf. “I tried to find something I knew he didn’t have at home.”
His consideration touched her so deeply it nearly brought tears to her eyes. She blinked back the moisture, determined not to let her emotion show. As sweet as she found the gesture, she knew she couldn’t take him up on it.
“That’s really so considerate, Harlan. I appreciate your thinking of Zachary that way-”
“But?” Harlan asked, his brow furrowing as he caught the hesitation in her voice.
“But it’s not a good idea for Zachary to get…too comfortable around you.”
“Because of his Asperger’s?”
“Well, yes. That’s part of it,” she admitted. “He forms crushes on people-he can be quite ruthless about it-”
“I think I can handle a five-year-old with a crush.”
“I’m not worried about you. I’m worried about him.”
Harlan looked a little insulted. “I would never hurt your kid, Stacy. I don’t know what kind of person you think I am-”
“You wouldn’t mean to hurt him. But if he gets too attached to you, too used to having you around, it’ll be hard for him to adjust when you’re gone again.”
“I see.” His frown didn’t go away, but his gaze softened, and his voice held gentle sympathy when he asked, “How did he handle your husband going away?”
“Not well,” she answered flatly. “It was sudden and we didn’t have time to adjust.” She realized too late that she’d said
If Harlan picked up on the slip, he was kind enough not to comment. “Little boys need daddies. Are you sure your ex doesn’t want to see more of Zachary? Maybe he has regrets about the way he left.”
“He has a new son,” she said bluntly. “A perfect little boy with his perfect new wife. He’s just not really interested in revisiting the past now.”
Harlan’s mouth tightened to a line. “And he’s in politics? Does he really think something like that isn’t going to come back to bite him?”
“Oh, he pays his child support on time. He sends Zachary presents on his birthday and Christmas.” The bitterness welling up in Stacy’s throat tasted like bile. “I really don’t want to talk about this.”
“My wife cheated on me,” Harlan said.
She looked up, not sure she’d heard him correctly. But the humiliation in his eyes suggested she’d heard him loud and clear. “I don’t know what to say,” she admitted.
“Not much to say, really.” He sighed. “I never had a lot of money, growing up. My parents did the best they could, worked hard, but they barely had high school educations and there wasn’t much either of them could to do to bring in a lot of cash. I never went without, but I had to make do a lot.”
She nodded, understanding. There had been years like that for her, as well, until her mother finally earned tenure at the college where she was a professor.
“I met Alexis in the seventh grade, when my family moved to Snellville, Georgia, after my dad got a job at a trucking company there. She was the prettiest girl in school. Also one of the wealthiest. I had such a crush on her. All the way through to high school. When she agreed to go with me to the Homecoming game, it felt like winning the lottery.”
Her first romantic date with Anthony had felt the same way, she realized. Magical, but sort of unreal, as if she knew deep down that it was mostly an illusion.
“I think our relationship must have been more a symptom of her rebellious stage than anything lasting and real,” he murmured, leaning back in his chair and steepling his hands over his flat abdomen. “Hindsight and all that.”
“How long were you married?”
“Seven years. We dated through high school and into college. She broke up with me her sophomore year and dated other people, but after graduation, when I came home from college for the summer before going to boot camp to fulfill my G.I. Bill commitments, she had just broken up with her latest boyfriend-some guy her father had seemed determined she should marry. Of course, to show her father who was really in charge, Alexis asked me to a party at the country club.”
“Oh, hell no. She was prettier than ever, and I was about to head to Parris Island, then off to God knows where-on a global conflicts scale, we were somewhere between the Balkans and Iraq at that point, and I knew I had a good chance of seeing combat sooner or later. So of course I said yes. It might have been the last time I saw her. At least, that was my romantic take on things.” He shot her a wry smile. “I didn’t know it was going to lead to seven years of matrimony.”
“Anthony swept me off my feet. We got married about three months after we met, then we had a big church wedding a few months later because Anthony thought it was important to have the big write-up in the paper and the photos on his desk at work. He was always very aware of appearances.”
“Alexis, too. She came from money, and she had expectations.”
Stacy nodded. “It’s hard to fulfill people’s expectations, especially if they’re set in stone.”
“She wanted me to quit the Marines as soon as I could. But I started rising in the ranks. I’d gone in as a private, and I took to it like a pig to mud. I was good at it-especially shooting. I’d learned how to fire a rifle when I was a little kid in the Georgia woods, and the Marines needed snipers.” He flexed his right hand, his gaze dropping to the web of scars radiating from a larger scar in the middle of his palm.
“You didn’t want out.”
“I’d found a job where I could make a real difference.”
“That must have strained your marriage.”
“You think I should have left the Marine Corps.”
She shook her head. “I think you both should have probably compromised. Maybe you could have looked for a job in the Marines that wouldn’t put you overseas all the time. And she could have accepted that you were a Marine for life.”
“But I wasn’t, was I?” He clenched his hand again. “Within a year of our marriage falling apart, I was out.” He released a bitter laugh. “She should have hung on a little longer, huh?”
She couldn’t see how their marriage could have been saved, given that his wife apparently thought it was okay to sleep with other men when she didn’t get her way, but she wasn’t about to say that aloud. She wasn’t exactly in a good position to judge other people’s marriages, was she?
“I’d contracted with a construction company to build a farmhouse in Walnut Grove, south of Atlanta. I wanted her to have a big house with lots of land so we could raise kids there together.” His sad smile made Stacy’s chest ache. “I had a week’s temporary duty in Hawaii training sniper candidates, and at the last minute, they gave me an extra two days of R & R. All I wanted to do was go home and see how the house was coming. It was nearly finished-Alexis was already staying there…”
The ache in her chest spread as she realized what must certainly come next. “You wanted to surprise
