Lissa turned in his arms.
“Nick,” she said, rushing his name, rushing the words because he had never before revealed this much of the darkness that she knew haunted him, “whatever happened… Your accident… If you ever want to talk about it…”
He silenced her with a kiss.
“No,” he said, with a finality that sent a chill through the room. A muscle knotted in his jaw. Then he kissed her again. “See you for drinks on the back porch at five.”
She nodded. “Drinks” meant Cokes or ginger ale. Nick had said, casually, that he was sticking with soft drinks for a while, but she was welcome to have wine if she preferred. She’d said that ginger ale was fine. What she’d really wanted to say was that maybe sharing his secrets with her would help him.
She sighed as she watched him walk away.
Her lover was a man of secrets.
He shared all the bits and pieces of his life with her, from caring for the kittens to his plans for restoring the house, but he never mentioned his wounds or the accident that had left his leg so horrendously damaged.
He would not talk about any of it.
But he was healing. She could see that for herself.
He’d switched from the crutch to the cane; there were times he didn’t need it at all. There wasn’t the same darkness in his eyes, either, but something still haunted him.
She knew a little about injured legs. She’d even had a fracture herself when she was sixteen. Her horse had thrown her, but she’d gotten off easy with what the doctor had called a malleolus fracture, which sounded a hell of a lot more dramatic than it had actually been.
You grew up in ranching country, you saw breaks that were far worse. Splintered tibias and compound fractures, even fractures of the femur, that biggest, heaviest of the bones in the leg.
Taming horses, riding them day after day over rough terrain, was not for the fainthearted. Movies romanticized ranch life; reality was far from romantic.
Nick’s leg had been more severely damaged than she would have thought possible.
She’d seen the scars.
They were terrifying.
Brutal. She’d wanted to weep the first time, but she’d known that it had been difficult enough for him to let her see them. Instead, she’d kissed them. The purple ridge high on his thigh. The evil-looking row of what she was sure had been staples that ran the length of his calf. The jagged line that almost encircled his ankle.
Nick had flinched at the first brush of her lips. He’d tried to stop her.
“Am I hurting you?” she’d asked.
“No. No. I just—I just didn’t want you to—to see—”
She’d put her mouth to his leg again. He’d shuddered. Sighed. And, gradually, she’d felt his taut muscles relax.
Lissa shaped the last of the dough into a loaf.
She hated people who went in for amateur psychiatry, but you didn’t have to be a shrink to know that Nick was hurting in more ways than one. She wanted to help him. To ease that hurt.
To make the shadows that occasionally still darkened his eyes disappear.
Maybe she had to be satisfied knowing that she made him happy.
For now, it was enough.
* * *
Lissa and Esther had established a pattern.
Esther showed up at noon, did whatever needed touching up around the house, and joined Lissa in the kitchen around two.