Full Surrender

He’d been climbing the walls and being at home didn’t help. At least on duty, he was busy every second of the day.

“The State Department asked me not to give interviews at first. They really wanted to control the flow of information until they investigated some leads.” Taking her seat beside him again, she reached for the bottled water kept in a minirefrigerator beneath the coffee table. “Would you like one?”

Nodding, he accepted a drink now that the turbulence seemed to have passed. They would be starting their descent into a private airfield outside Chatham soon.

“It makes sense, but at the time...” He shook his head. “I was edgy. Tense. Pissed off in general. Anyway, Kyle was on a mission to make me look on the bright side, which was a truly bad plan. At one point when I snapped at him, he said something about me wearing my heart on my sleeve—”

The precise words escaped him now. Basically, he was mad at himself and he took it out on Kyle for pointing out the obvious.

“It sounded to me like he forgave you a long time ago,” Stephanie said between sips. “I mean, the way he talked about it on the phone made it sound like the broken nose was a nonissue for him.”

Danny shrugged. “Maybe. God knows, hockey players break their beaks all the time. But it’s one thing to get blindsided by a puck. Another to field a blow from your own blood.”

If it unsettled her to learn that he’d been a walking time bomb when she’d been abducted, she didn’t show it. Instead, she narrowed her gaze, a wicked gleam in her eyes.

“So what kind of dirt do you have on Axel in exchange?” She smiled and he hoped maybe he was in the clear.

He planned to focus on helping put her past behind her this week, not dredging up his.

“Are you kidding? The Finn is a gold mine for stories. When he was learning English, we taught him all the curse words first. Nearly got him kicked out of school.”

“Hmm. That story might make the rest of you look worse than him.”

“Hey, I wasn’t the one who told the math teacher that his trig lecture was the biggest bullshit ever.” He flipped on one of the TV screens broadcasting the plane’s progress with an updated arrival time and saw they’d be landing in fifteen minutes.

He wasn’t sure if he would be grateful to touch down for the sake of ending an awkward conversation, or very worried that returning home would only initiate a whole bunch of other ones. No doubt his family would all want to know what was up with his renewed relationship with Stephanie.

“Sounds like you’ll have plenty to talk about.” She recapped her water bottle and set it on the table as the plane continued its descent. She hesitated for a moment, then blurted, “And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry that I didn’t make an effort to get in touch with you after I came home. I really regret missing out on your calls.”

“It’s not like we made plans to see each other again,” he said. He’d been a dumb ass. Why the hell hadn’t he locked down some kind of commitment from her before she left? “I’m sure you were overwhelmed. There were probably a lot of other people who wanted to hear from you besides me.”

She shook her head. “Not really. My mother was so ill, I spent all my time at the hospital.”

That’s right. She’d been with the compulsive mom who’d gotten so involved with the drama of the kidnapping, she’d made herself sick.

“I hate it that you escaped one nightmare and came home to another.” Danny knew he shouldn’t pass judgment on that whole debacle, but damn. Someone should have been comforting Stephanie instead of the other way around.

“Yeah.” Slowly, she nodded. Something about her expression struck him as more serious than he’d ever seen her. “Me, too. But you know what?” She slid her feet back into a pair of blue flip-flops with big yellow plastic flowers on the strap. “I feel better knowing you were mad on my behalf.”

He raised an eyebrow, unsure where she was going with that.

“I mean,” she added quickly, “don’t get me wrong, I’m sorry for your brother that he got hurt. But I had to keep the story quiet for so long that I missed seeing anyone be outraged about what happened to me. My father was scared for my mom. Mom was ill. And when my book came out to finally share what happened, the media focused on such a small facet of the experience that the rest of the ordeal got lost. So, to hear you say that you were upset about what happened to me... In a weird way it makes me feel like I wasn’t alone back then.”

She spoke quickly, as if she was used to not dwelling on that time in her life. Yet maybe shoving the past behind her so fast hadn’t been such a good idea after all. He hadn’t planned to let her see how much her captivity had made him crazy, hoping they’d be able to move forward. But what if her mother’s ordeal when Stephanie came home had robbed her of the chance to come to terms with what had happened to her? Maybe she deserved to know how freaked out he’d been.