Date Next Door

“I think you said all you needed to say last time you were here.”

He shook his head again. “That wasn’t all by a long shot. I left a few things out.”

“Such as—?

“Such as the fact that I love you. That I’ve loved you for quite some time.”

Nic flinched. She tried to hide the reaction by turning away. “Please don’t.”

“Not saying it won’t make it go away, Nic. I love you. I fell in love with you even when I was convinced that I was all wrong for you.”

“Don’t you have that the wrong way around?” she couldn’t help asking with a tinge of bitterness. “Don’t you mean that I’m all wrong for you?”

“No,” he answered firmly. “That isn’t what I mean at all. I knew I would be damned lucky if you would have me. I just didn’t think I had what it took to hold you.”

She turned back to frown at him. “I don’t know what you mean.”

He raised a hand, palm upward, as if trying to grasp the right words from the air. “You date rodeo cowboys. You hang out with cops. People who don’t think twice about risking their lives in the line of duty. Your best friend is probably a certifiable psychic, despite her denials.”

“And you hang out with doctors and lawyers and professors and you date psychologists and beauty queens,” she shot back. “We’re from different circles. Isn’t that what you were trying to tell me before?”

He shook his head, looking frustrated. “You seem to believe I think of you as somehow inferior to the other people I know. You couldn’t be more wrong. I just couldn’t see you being interested in someone so completely ordinary for long. So damned cowardly.”

Though he’d shaken her, she clung to her skepticism. “I know why you wanted me to quit the force. To go back to college. You wanted me to be more like you. Like…”

She found she couldn’t say Heather’s name just then. But she knew he was aware of exactly who he meant.

“That’s exactly why I wanted you to quit. Oh, not to make you more like me—or anyone else,” he added. “But because of my own cowardice. I was afraid for you, Nic. Afraid of losing you. I’d lost someone once. I didn’t think I had the strength to go through it again.”

“Joel—”

He shook his head with a wry smile. “As far as I was concerned, that very fear made me all wrong for you. I doubt that the other guys you’ve dated spent all their time worrying about you.”

“Anyone who gets involved with a cop spends a great deal of time worrying,” she replied. “It’s part of the job and it’s the reason a lot of their relationships don’t work out. I don’t think of you as a coward because you were worried, but I can’t change who I am.”

“I’ve come to realize during the past few weeks that I don’t want you to change. Why would I? I fell in love with you exactly as you are.”

He had said it again. And it scared her just as much to hear it this time. He thought he was a coward? He had no idea how hard she was shaking inside now, so afraid that she was misunderstanding what he seemed to be telling her. “Everyone thinks I’m wrong for you. Your family. Your friends. They think you should find someone more like Heather.”

She’d found the strength to say the name this time. She’d had to, since she still felt as though the memory of Joel’s late wife was standing between them.

“My family and friends don’t know you well enough to know whether we’re right for each other or not. They’ll learn to love you once I tell them how much you mean to me. All they really want is for me to be happy, Nic. That doesn’t mean they know best how to accomplish that.”

“And you think you do know?”

“Yes.” He smiled at her then, though his eyes were very serious. “Being with you will make me happy.”

She swallowed hard. “It didn’t before,” she reminded him miserably.

“That was my fault, not yours. You’re right, I was trying too hard to ease my fears by trying to control circumstances that were out of my hands. But I’ve done a lot of thinking while we’ve been apart. And I’ve realized we aren’t so very different after all.”

She frowned. “We aren’t?”

“No. Your job involves saving lives. So does mine. Maybe no one’s shooting at me while I work, but—you know what?—it takes a hell of a lot of courage to be a physician. Parents literally put the lives of their precious children in my hands, and I accept that responsibility even though I live in dread of making a mistake or missing something that could have dire consequences for my patients.”

“Of course it takes courage. I’ve told you dozens of times that I don’t know how you do it.”

“I do it because I love my work. It defines who I am. I wouldn’t let anyone talk me into doing anything else. I think you understand that better than anyone else I know.”