Who Do You Trust? Read Free Page B

happens—like under a microscope, beneath the surface where you can’t see it…”
    Stop babbling, Lissa.
    He smiled at her in tender reassurance, as if sensing her internal monologue. “Some things have changed if Lissa Miller doesn’t give a friend a hug.”
    “It’s Carroll now, remember?” she whispered, knowing he didn’t need the reminder but needing to give it. Needing to recall the reasons why she shouldn’t touch him, start up the old merry-go-round of anguished yearnings and unrequited love.
    “You’ll always be Lissa Miller to me.” With a small, tilted smile and darkened eyes, he opened his arms to her. “Come here.”
    Aching, terrified—unable to resist, or deny him—she walked into his arms.
    He held her close, just as he did years ago, in the days of their innocence, resting his chin on her hair. “It’s been so long since I held you. Too long. I never stopped missing you, Lissa.”
    She held him close against her, filled with warmth and beauty and long-forbidden desire, just from his holding her. Loving it and hating it. Needing to push him away, yet never wanting to let go. Wanting more. Always wanting more when it came to Mitch. Loving him too much, wanting him too much, knowing it had never been that way for him. Dreams and fantasies of pushing her hands beneath his shirt, finding that glorious summer-heated maleness beneath— “You could have come to visit,” she whispered.
    “You know why I didn’t.”
    The scene at her wedding.
    She suppressed a shudder. Tim Carroll, her brand-new husband, in the grip of the sudden and shocking aggression that comes from being roaring drunk for the first time. Throwing Mitch, his best man and longtime closest friend, out of the reception hall and out of their lives. Okay, so Mitch had been a little drunk, too. More than a little. So he’d watched her every move that night, in a tense, brooding stance that made her shiver…but not with fear. And so what if he’d chosen to speak about the beautiful bride instead of the bridesmaids, and how much he loved her? It was no secret how close Mitch was to the girl next door who’d married his best friend. It was anyone’s guess why Tim suddenly got to his feet in the of the speech and threw Mitch out.
    Everyone knew Mitch’s story: the bounced foster kid taken in by a dour, old, widowed farmer, who only tolerated him for manual labor. Mitch never had any family of his own, no one to love him or care for him until he’d come to Breckerville. Which was why Tim’s act, in the middle of his own wedding, in front of all their friends, seemed so cruel and inexplicable. The mystery of Mitch McCluskey’s dramatic and permanent exit from town was still an occasional topic for speculation and gossip.
    As was Tim’s less flamboyant exit from town. Less visual, but no less dramatic.
    Lissa wished she didn’t know the reason for Tim’s lashing out at his best friend. And she’d never tell Mitch—not about the wedding nor about why Tim left her. How could she tell him that Tim, her husband— No, it was impossible.
    Just as anything but friendship between them was impossible, now and forever. If she’d ever worked up the courage to tell him how she’d felt before she married Tim…but marriage to Tim had changed everything—her innocence, her belief in love…her belief in herself. It was all gone.
    “How are the boys?” Mitch asked now, as if he knew she wanted the subject changed.
    She relaxed against him, then pulled away. Don’t think. Don’t feel. “They’re wonderful. They turned nine a month ago.”
    “I wish I’d been here.” He tipped her chin up, searching her face with a tender gaze. “Thank you for taking them in after the police notified me they’d finally found them. They didn’t go into the foster system, thanks to you. You don’t know what it means to me.” He bit down a smile, taking her face in his hands. “Dumb remark. You know better than anyone what it means to me.”