Midlife Do Over

Nothing happened.

“Offer stands,” I told her, not bothering to conceal my amusement.

“Fine. You push and I’ll pull.” Pippa waved at me, as if I took orders from her.

Not anymore, babe. “I don’t think so, sweetheart. You push and I’ll pull. I’ve got more muscles and about five inches on you, Squirt.” I punctuated the words with a bicep flex and a wink.

Her face turned a deep shade of red at the nickname I’d given her way back before I noticed her lips and her curves, before I knew that her strawberry lips tasted like bubble gum. “Whatever. Let’s just get this over with so you can go away.”

“Wow, you’re welcome.” Pippa stared at me with a blank expression. “Thank you is customary when someone helps you out.”

“Only when that help was requested. You’re trespassing, I could have shot you. Could have smashed your head with that shovel over there, and walked away without repercussions. I didn’t, so let’s consider that a win for you.”

Ouch. Still mad, I guess. “Push on three,” I told her instead of engaging her in an argument destined to become a fight.

The silence was tense as we moved the chair down the deck steps and to the concrete slab covered with a rainbow sun umbrella. Ten minutes later and a few beads of sweat, and we were done.

“Thanks,” Pippa muttered reluctantly in her haughtiest voice before she folded her arms expectantly, and waited for my retreat. “Goodbye.”

I hated that word. It was so final, the way she said that word. The same way she’d whispered it to me, with tears in her eyes, more than twenty years ago. “Pippa.” Too much time had passed, too many years of silence and avoidance. It was time to fix things between us.

“Goodbye, Ryan.”

“Pippa, come on. We’re going to be neighbors for at least the next few months, depending on your plans.”

“My plans are none of your business. You made sure of that.”

As if I could forget. “But we’re neighbors.”

She shook her head and flicked those sexy waves off her shoulders. “No. We are just two people who live next door to one another. There’s no reason we need to talk or engage at all. We’re strangers now, and I think we should just keep it that way.”

“I disagree.”

Pippa folded her arms, a defensive gesture if I ever saw one, and raised her chin high in the air. “Good thing it isn’t up to you, then.” The look of steely determination in her deep blue eyes sucked me in even as everything about her screamed that she wanted me anywhere but in her backyard. In her life. “Just leave, Ryan. You did it once without a backwards glance, should be easier this time since we’re nothing to each other.”

Nothing. In her eyes we were nothing more than two people who used to know each other, who used to mean something to one another. We were less than strangers. We were, in her words, nothing. “That’s a damn lie and you know it.” I made the biggest mistake of my life with this woman, and two decades later, she still couldn’t forgive me.

“I know what happened and what didn’t. You can rewrite history if you want, so assuage your own guilt, but I want no part of it. Now, get the hell off my property.”

I nodded and let a slow grin spread across my face. “I’ll go, Pippa. For now, I’ll go. But I’m gonna be around for a good long while, and I plan to make things right, whether you like it or not.”

“There is no way you can make things right, Ryan. So just go back to your house and your life, and do what you’ve done for the past twenty years. Pretend I don’t exist.” With an annoyed grunt and a roll of her eyes, Pippa stormed off inside the house and slammed the door hard enough to rattle the windows.

Message received.

But now I had another distraction.

Plotting ways to get Pippa to forgive me.

Chapter 6

Pippa

“At first I thought I was hallucinating, maybe having one of those walking nightmares, or just imagining things. I figured that being back here was messing with my head.

But nope, it was him. Ryan Gregory right there in my yard. My new neighbor.” My dumb damn luck. And it wasn’t just Ryan Gregory, forty year old aging rocker. No, that would have been easier than Ryan I-haven’t-aged-in-twenty-years Gregory with his sparkling hazel eyes that shone green and gold in the sunshine, and his fitted jeans hanging low on his waist. T-shirt clinging to all the right places. “Not a damn beer belly in sight.”

Valona let out a loud belly laugh and shook her head. “He does live here, which you’d know if you ever came home for more than a few days at a time.”