Actual Stop (35 page)

Allison’s eyes raked over me, and she appeared to be assessing my condition. All of her usual swagger had disappeared, and a tension and uncertainty hovering around her now filled me with dread. She gazed at me for an eternity, but finally she reached out to tentatively caress my cheek with her fingertips. My skin sparked where she touched me, and my heart threatened to beat its way out of my body. I closed my eyes and sighed.

“Ryan,” Allison whispered.

I opened my eyes, and her bare emotions frightened me. I gently covered her hand with my own.

The in-control, put-together façade she’d strolled in here with had completely cracked, and I doubted she’d recover it. With her other hand, she followed the line of the stitches on my forehead with a feather-light touch. Her eyes reflected back to me such a myriad of ever-changing emotions I scarcely had the energy to keep up.

When she finished exploring my wound, she let her hand ghost across my brow and down the other side of my face and caressed the tender spot on the other side of my jaw.

I opened my mouth to say something, anything, to break the weighty silence between us, but Allison ignored my attempt and leaned down oh-so-slowly to retrace the path her fingers had just blazed across my stitches with her lips. My eyes fluttered closed, and a small moan slipped past my lips.

Allison took her time lavishing my cut with attention before depositing small kisses on each of my eyes and the tip of my nose. My heart pounded, and my lungs seized when she barely brushed my lips as she turned my head in order to pay attention to the aching spot on my chin. I smiled when she finally finished and made her way back to my lips. She rewarded me with a long, lingering kiss that kindled sparks in every single nerve ending in my body.

When we finally broke apart, I was breathing heavily, and my head felt like I’d just jumped off one of those spinning carnival rides. But underneath everything I was so overwhelmed with love for her that it actually hurt. That love silenced the voices clamoring in the back of my head reminding me that things between us were still unsettled. And it almost carried me through my guilt and despair over the death of Lucia that violently sucker punched me at the oddest times. Like now.

Allison rested her forehead against mine. Her breath tickled my lips, making me want to kiss her again. Her fingers wound their way around the back of my neck to tangle in my hair. I used my free left hand to cup her cheek, surprised to discover it was wet. I tried to pull back so I could look into her eyes, but she tightened her grip on me, forcing me to remain where I was.

“Don’t cry,” I murmured.

She let out a strangled half-laugh, half-sob. “Easy for you to say.”

I wiped all traces of moisture from her cheeks, then kissed the tracks her tears had made. And when fresh tears took their place, I repeated the process.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re undoing all my hard work.”

That did get a laugh. Well, sort of. A halfhearted chuckle, at any rate. “Stop trying to make me feel better. That’s my job.”

“You already have, just by showing up here.” I paused. Did I want to add the next part? Was I ready to make myself vulnerable with the admission? “I’m happy to see you.”

“Did you really think I wouldn’t come?” She drew back from me just enough to look into my eyes. Her hands were still threaded through the hair tumbling down across my neck. Her expression was dark, almost morose, and a nervous flutter tickled up and down my spinal column before landing directly on top of my diaphragm.

I shrugged and hissed at the pain in my shoulder. Damn it! Would I ever remember not to do that? “When you didn’t call…”

“You’re right. I should’ve called. I’m sorry. But you should know I have never, ever, in my entire life been as terrified as I was when I heard what happened to you.” She held my gaze as she said that, her voice low and teeming with raw emotion. She slid her hands around my face and cradled it tenderly between them, skating her thumbs across my cheeks. “I couldn’t book a flight home fast enough.”

I winced against the remorse that pummeled me at learning she’d been so upset, but then her words struck me. “
You
booked your flight home.”

Allison nodded. She’d caught her lower lip between her teeth, and her eyes told me she knew exactly what I’d just realized.

“Operations didn’t book it for you?”

“No.”

“You weren’t finished with your assignment.”

“No.”

“How did you convince them to let you leave?”

“I just said I had to go.”

“You told your boss you had to leave in the middle of an assignment?”

“Yes.”

“And did he ask for an explanation?”

“He didn’t have to. Considering I told him I needed to go home about three seconds after he finished briefing us about what’d happened to you, I think it was evident.”

Holy shit. I gaped at her as my mind spun helplessly. Her rushing here the way she had was a definite, concrete declaration about our relationship. Surely she had to realize that. How would she react when she finally comprehended what she’d done?

“Huh,” I finally came up with. Should I be pleased or concerned? Allison might be okay now, but after some time passed, she might freak the hell out. And that would land us right back where we’d started. I couldn’t go through that again.

“You know what’s funny?” she said, her dark eyes starting to twinkle and a dimple appearing on one cheek.

I shook my head, not even wanting to guess.

“Not one of the guys on that trip seemed surprised when I announced I wanted to beam myself back here to New York to be with you. Guess I wasn’t as good at hiding my feelings for you as I’d always hoped.”

I studied her, trying to determine whether she was as fine with that as she pretended to be. Again, I briefly suspected she might one day decide having the guys know we were—well, whatever we were—was a catastrophe. But before I could voice my concern, she went on.

“Maybe now’s a good time for us to have that talk.”

My insides combusted, then turned immediately to ash, and the sudden departure of heat made the cold that followed that much more pronounced. I tried to swallow and give a halfhearted nod. “Sure. I’m not going anywhere. Do you want to sit down?”

Allison shook her head. “No, thanks. I sat enough on the flight home to last a lifetime. I’ll stand.”

“Okay.”

“Do you know why I broke up with you, Ryan?”

I winced. Wow. Way to ease into this. Her words were like barbed wire. They caught on my heart and twisted, mangling tender flesh. God, the woman knew how to deliver a timely hit. I swallowed, successfully this time, and tried not to allow my pain to show on my face.

“Honestly? No. I have no idea.” And I hadn’t, because all she’d said to me had been, “Ryan, I’m really sorry. But this just isn’t working.” I’d questioned, pled, and attempted to appeal to her sense of fairness, but she’d refused to give me more than that.

If someone or something had pressed me—by, say, threatening to have a crocodile named Glocamorra maul me—I’d have guessed she’d wanted to stop seeing me because we’d been fighting so much about people finding out about us. I’d have speculated that I’d loved her more than she’d loved me and that she hadn’t wanted to deal with the depth of my emotions for her. But no one had pressed me, with crocodiles or otherwise, so I hadn’t been forced to articulate what I assumed her reasoning had been. Thank goodness. That wasn’t a conversation I’d been prepared to have—ever.

When she didn’t reply, I shrugged. “You weren’t exactly forthcoming.”

“I probably should’ve brought this up before now. I mean, I suppose it would’ve been best if I’d discussed it with you at any point during the past few years, but now I really feel like we should have talked before we…” Allison’s eyes flitted to the vicinity of my breasts. My breath caught, and I shivered as my nipples immediately hardened. “But I couldn’t stop myself from touching you long enough to think.” She smiled at me wistfully.

My heart soared, and I started tingling. I wanted to say something but decided she needed to get through this, so I remained silent.

“It was always that way with you, you know.” Allison’s voice was barely more than a whisper, and another nameless emotion glided beneath the surface of her eyes the way a shark slinks smoothly underneath the ocean.

“What way?”

“I always felt completely powerless around you. And confused and out of control. And wonderful.” And now the barest hint of a frown flowed across her face. “Did you know I used to spend most of my day sitting at my desk thinking about you?”

I shook my head. “No. I didn’t.”

“I don’t think I could quantify the amount of time I spent wondering what you were doing, who you were talking to, whether you were dazzling everyone with that gorgeous smile. I vacillated between dreading to see you, terrified anyone with eyes would take one look at me and know instantly how I felt about you, and hoping you’d storm into my office and kiss me breathless.”

Her words made me weak, and I hated to dispel the feeling, but I had to insert a very important truth. “You hated it when I came to your office.” True, I’d never kissed her in there, but toward the end of our relationship, the majority of my visits had earned me mostly dark scowls and clipped answers.

Allison shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”

“You acted like you did. You always seemed pretty annoyed to see me.” So much so, in fact, I’d stopped bothering. The look of irritation on her face when I turned up, even if I was there for a justifiable, work-related reason, had become too painful for me to handle.

Allison sighed, her expression becoming pensive. “No, I wasn’t. Well, not at you anyway.”

“Why, then?”

“I was annoyed at myself. Well, maybe a little bit at you for making me feel the things I felt, but mostly at me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you know what I love most about you, Ryan?”

I opened my mouth to make a smart-assed remark or comment on the present-tense classification of that statement but reined in the temptation. Instead, I simply shook my head. Her lightning changes in topic were giving me whiplash.

“You’re fearless.”

I snorted indelicately. “Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious. You are. It was the first thing I noticed about you.” And then she smiled. “Well, one of the first. The very first was your eyes and how when you looked at me, no matter how innocently, my heart stopped and I couldn’t think.”

That was a surprise. Allison had never waxed poetic about feelings, so all of this was news. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“But right after that, I noticed how easily you could just be you. You were completely comfortable in your own skin. You didn’t care what anyone thought. If someone said or did something you didn’t agree with, you told them. If you wanted something, you just went for it. You never let anyone else stand in your way.”

Guilt blossomed in me, and I struggled to keep it from showing. Her assessment of my character flattered me, but I thought she was founding her judgment on false pretenses. She also had no idea Ben was my father, and I was terrified her opinion of me would instantly change when she discovered the truth. The secret itself wouldn’t impact our relationship as much as the fact that I’d hidden it for this long.

“I was always a little envious of that,” Allison broke into my thoughts.

“I don’t know why,” I told her, still fighting with my inner remorse and trying to decide whether to come clean. “You seem pretty in tune with what you want. I mean, you’re on PPD. They’re tapping you to handle last-minute leads. You’re a shoo-in for a promotion when the time comes. I thought that was the plan. Isn’t that what you told me the first day we met?”

Allison sighed and looked away. “It was. Until it wasn’t.”

“I don’t understand.”

Allison’s eyes shifted back to capture mine, pain etched on her face. “I’ve always had one dream, Ryan. Ever since I was a kid and the news of the assassination attempt on President Reagan riveted everyone, I wanted to be a Secret Service agent. And then, when I got a little older, I set my sights on being the first female director. It was my all-consuming focus, and I put all my energy into working toward that goal. It defined me as a person.”

“No, that’s not what defines you.”

Allison smiled. “It is, though. Because I let it be. And I’d become so comfortable with just that image of myself that when I realized I might want something else, I was afraid. I didn’t know how to handle it or whether I even wanted to. And so I ran.”

“I don’t understand.” I felt like a broken record repeating that phrase, but I just didn’t see what she was getting at.

Allison took a deep breath, and I could see varying emotions at war in her eyes. “The day I broke up with you was the day I got the call that I was going to PPD.”

“Okay. So, you didn’t want to have a long-distance relationship, was that it? Because you could have just told me that.”

“That was only part of it, actually. And, be honest. With yourself if not with me. Tell me if I’d mentioned that you wouldn’t have come up with a hundred ways for us to work that out.”

I rolled my eyes, tamping down a grin. She had me there. “So what if I had?”

“Ryan, you drove me to distraction more often than not, and that was when I got to see you all the time. I was afraid that with you in New York and me in D.C., us having different days off and not knowing when we’d get to see one another again, we would’ve fallen apart.”

I gaped at her. “So, basically, you’re telling me you dumped me because you’d already decided how our relationship would play out, and you couldn’t be bothered to wait to see whether you were even right.” Bitterness stuck to my tongue even after I’d gotten the words out.

Guilt flickered in Allison’s eyes. “I never thought about it that way. It just seemed like the best thing for everyone at the time.”

“The best thing for you, you mean.” I’d thought those words would have an edge to them once I uttered them, but they came out sounding almost weary.

“No, I honestly thought that—”

“Don’t.” I impatiently waved my good hand. “Please. Don’t insult either of us by claiming you knew what was best for me and therefore had the right to make my decisions for me. It’s asinine and demeans us both.”