No Ordinary Home

Come on, man, get real. She didn’t play the trick. She was a kid. She went where her mother told her to go when she told her to.

Yeah, I know, but she never called. She never wrote.

He’d been crazy about her, but in her mind, he’d been what? A footnote? A blip on the radar of her existence? Just a boy who’d kept her distracted in the hospital with card games and cartoon drawings...and that was it? Was that all he’d been to her, while it had taken him too freaking long to get over her?

Yeah, he was still mad, even though he knew it was that twelve-year-old kid’s unreasonable feelings that lingered. This wasn’t the rational response of a grown man. He raised his hand to knock. He wanted to see Melody anyway, just to see if she was as perfect as in his memories.

How much had she changed? How much had he? Would she like what she saw? Did it matter? God, he’d been such a hopeless kid with a childish crush. He was a thirty-two-year-old man now, not a boy given to flights of fancy.

He’d had plenty of girlfriends. No need to be nervous.

His knock echoed loudly in the empty hallway.

He’d measured all other women against his childish memories. Not fair to the women he’d dated. Not fair at all.

What if he’d imagined the crush she’d had on him all of those years ago?

Didn’t matter. She was in trouble. She needed him. He was here.

He ran his fingers over his hair, bringing it under control. He should have gotten that homeless chick to trim it.

Footsteps approached the door from the other side. He swallowed.

The door opened...and there she was.

Melody.

Words backed up in his throat. He was a smart guy. He could string sentences together. Normally. Not now. Not a single word came to him other than her name.

“Melody.” His voice broke. He cleared his throat.

She’d grown up, not much in height, but in maturity. So pretty.

Her smoky-gray eyes widened, misted, softened. “Finn,” she whispered.

If she hadn’t invited him here, if he’d met her on the street, he would have known her, would have recognized her striking face, and her full lips—the kind of lips a lot of women spent good money to get. He knew women’s lips. These were real.

When his gran had been bedridden after a stroke, he’d painted comics on her bedroom wall to entertain her. Melody had been the heroine in those stories.

No wonder.

She could get any man’s pulse racing.

They stared at each other, frozen in a bubble of both memory and anticipation. Tears formed in her soft eyes but her mutinous chin jutted forward. She’d always been a fighter, but what was she fighting now?

Her lips trembled and she pressed them together, defiance so clear on her face that Finn knew she’d fought this battle many times before.

He couldn’t stand to watch her like this—defiant, yes, but also vulnerable, as though he might find her lacking in some way. What did she have to feel vulnerable about? Had she guessed he was still angry, even after all this time?

Gently, as though she were a wild and balky horse he had to calm, he wrapped his arms around her. The moment seemed to call for it.

A sigh slipped out of her and she melted against him, holding him close with her arms hard across his back. He sighed. He still meant something to her.

He nuzzled his chin against her soft dark hair, so damned glad it had grown back in after the fire. The damage hadn’t been as great as he’d feared.

When she eased out of his embrace, he asked, “Can I come in or are you going to make me stand on this doorstep all day?”

A shaky laugh burst out of her. He remembered that laugh. “Yes, of course. Come in.”

He stepped into a sparsely furnished but comfortable apartment. Nothing was cheap. Whatever she’d done with her life had been good. She wasn’t in need.

His pulse beat in his ears. She was safe. All of those years of worry for nothing.

After the way she’d left town, he’d always worried. Before rational thought could stop his unruly tongue, he blurted what he’d been sure he could control. “Where the hell did you go?”

She’d come into his life in dramatic fashion and six weeks later had left just as dramatically.

He’d missed her, had ached for her, the lost friend who had never once, not once, bothered to stay in touch with him so he would know where she was, so he would know she’d cared as much about him as he had about her.

She’d never called to let him know she was safe.

How dare she disappear for so many years and then contact him ten years later, out of the blue, with letters. Great letters, yeah, but not her, and not to say I’m coming back, but only to chat. To touch bases. To give him piddly, stingy bits of her life, but not the whole thing.

She didn’t answer. He gripped her shoulders and all of those years of worry spewed out of him. “Melody Chase, where the hell did you go?”

* * *

MELODY STARED AT the boy she’d dreamed about so many times over the years. He wasn’t a boy any longer. He’d grown handsome like his father, not as tall, but lean and strong, his arms ropey and muscular. His vet work must include more than just domestic animals. But then, Ordinary, Montana, was a ranching community. He had to be a farm vet, too.

The women of Ordinary must crawl all over him, a modern-day James Dean with darker hair, but the same sexual intensity.

Thick hair curled in a wave back from a broad forehead. His black eyelashes were longer than hers, for Pete’s sake, and framed silver-gray eyes.

Where her eyes were a soft smoky-gray, his were keen and sharp, with cleverness snapping like bed sheets hung out to dry in a brisk wind.

He’d grown more beautiful with age, while she’d become more bizarre.

Life wasn’t fair.

But then, hadn’t that been the story of her life?

Open-heart surgery when she was a kid and getting burned in a car accident at eleven, then spending years on the run, left a woman feeling somehow diminished, less than others, especially good-looking men.

He had a right to be angry. She had been taken away from Ordinary suddenly and hadn’t contacted him for ten years.

“My mom wouldn’t let me get in touch with you.” But Melody knew she should have defied her and found some way to let him know she was safe.

Finn frowned. “Why not?”