Return To Me. Shannon McKenna

that train. Nothing could change his mind. Not even telling him she loved him.

      Ellen laughed, but the laughter had a false, soggy sound. Look at her, sniveling over girlhood memories in front of a fridge that was gaping wide open in a heat wave. Serve her right if the milk went sour.

      In all the lovers she’d had in her thirty-two years—not that there had been all that many—she’d never again told a man she loved him. Not even Brad. Though now that she thought of it, Brad hadn’t made any declarations of love to her yet, either. Until now, she hadn’t even thought of that fact in terms of an omission.

      She couldn’t imagine saying those words to Brad. The pain and vulnerability associated with them were light years from Brad Mitchell’s high-quality universe, where things made sense. Things behaved. Whatever didn’t was judged to be unworthy and promptly rejected.

      Brad valued her. He appreciated her and respected her, enough to want to be her partner for life. That was love for rational grown-ups. Love wasn’t ripping your heart out of your chest on a dark morning and being haunted by the smell of smoke ever since. That was juvenile stupidity. Or plain bad luck. Like a bout of food poisoning.

      “Excuse me, miss. I’m looking for El Kent.” The low, quiet voice came from the swinging door that led to the dining room.

      Ellen spun around with a gasp. The eggs flew into the air, and splattered on the floor. No one called her El. No one except for—

      The sight of him knocked her back. God. So tall. So big. All over. The long, skinny body she remembered was filled out with hard, lean muscle. His white T-shirt showed off broad shoulders, sinewy arms. Faded jeans clung with careless grace to the perfect lines of his narrow hips, his long legs. She looked up into the focused intensity of his dark eyes, and a rush of hot and cold shivered through her body.

      The exotic perfection of his face was harder now. Seasoned by sun and wind and time. She drank in the details: golden skin, narrow hawk nose, hollows beneath his prominent cheekbones, the sharp angle of his jaw, shaded with a few days’ growth of dark beard stubble. A silvery scar sliced through the dark slash of his left eyebrow. His gleaming hair was wet, combed straight back from his square forehead into a ponytail. Tightly leashed power hummed around him.

      The hairs on her arms lifted in response.

      His eyes flicked over her body. His teeth flashed white against his tan. “Damn. I’ll run to the store to replace those eggs for you, miss.”

      Miss? He didn’t even recognize her. Her face was starting to shake again. Seventeen years of worrying about him, and he just checked out her body, like he might scope any woman he saw on the street.

      He waited patiently for her to respond to his apology. She peeked up at his face again. One eyebrow was tilted up in a gesture so achingly familiar, it brought tears to her eyes. She clapped her hand over her trembling lips. She would not cry. She would not.

      “I’m real sorry I startled you,” he tried again. “I was wondering if you could tell me where I might find—” His voice trailed off. His smile faded. He sucked in a gulp of air. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “El?”

      Chapter 2

      The gesture tipped him off. He recognized her the instant she covered her mouth and peeked over her hand, but he had to struggle to superimpose his memories of El onto the knockout blonde in the kitchen. He remembered a skinny girl with big, startled eyes peeking up from beneath heavy bangs. A mouth too big for her bit of a face.

      This woman was nothing like that awkward girl. She’d filled out, with a fine, round ass that had immediately caught his eye as she bent into the fridge. And what she had down there was nicely balanced by what she had up top. High, full tits, bouncing and soft. A tender, lavish mouthful and then some, just how he liked them.

      Her hand dropped, and revealed her wide, soft mouth. Her dark eyebrows no longer met across the bridge of her nose. Spots of pink stained her delicate cheekbones. She’d grown into her eyes and mouth. Her hair was a wavy curtain of gold-streaked bronze that reached down to her ass. El Kent had turned beautiful. Mouth-falling-open, mind-going-blank beautiful. The images locked seamlessly together, and he wondered how he could’ve not recognized her, even for an instant. He wanted to hug her, but something buzzing in the air held him back.

      The silence deepened. The air was heavy with it. She didn’t exclaim, or look surprised, or pleased. In fact, she looked almost scared.

      “El?” He took a hesitant step forward. “Do you recognize me?”

      Her soft mouth thinned. “Of course I recognize you. You haven’t changed at all. I was just, ah, surprised that you didn’t recognize me.”

      “I didn’t remember you being so pretty.” The words came out before he could vet them and decide if they were stupid or rude.

      Based on her reaction, he concluded that they were. She grabbed a wad of paper towels from the roll on the counter, wiped up the eggs and dropped the mess into the garbage pail. She dampened another paper towel. Her hair dangled down like a veil. She was hiding.

      “What’s wrong, El?” he asked cautiously. “What did I do?”

      She knelt down, sponging off the floor tiles. “Nothing’s wrong.”

      “But you won’t look at me,” he said.

      She flung the soggy towel into the garbage. “I’m called Ellen these days. And what do you expect? You disappear for seventeen years, no letter, no phone call, not so much as a postcard to let me know you weren’t dead, and expect me to run into your arms squealing for joy?”

      So she hadn’t forgotten him. His mood shot up, in spite of her anger. “I’m, uh, sorry I didn’t write,” he offered.

      She turned her back on him. “I’m sorry you didn’t, too.” She made a show of drying some teacups.

      “My life was really crazy for a while. I was scrambling just to survive. Then I joined the Marines, and they sent me all over the map for a few years while I figured out what I wanted to do with myself—”

      “Which was?” Her voice was sharp and challenging.

      “Photojournalist,” he told her. “Freelance, at the moment. I travel all the time, mostly war zones. By the time I got things in my life more or less straightened out, I was afraid…” His voice trailed off.

      “Yes?” Her head swiveled around. “You were afraid of what?”

      “That you might have forgotten me,” he said. “I didn’t want to face that. I didn’t want to mess with my own equilibrium. I’m sorry, El.”

      She turned away without replying, and began to hang teacups on hooks on the wall. His hand on her shoulder made her jump. She dropped one, which knocked the one underneath it off its hook as well.

      They shattered loudly on the marble counter.

      Simon hissed through his teeth and lifted his hand away. “Christ. I’m sorry. Were those priceless antiques? Please say they weren’t.”

      “Great-grandmother Kent brought them with her from Scotland. They traveled around the Horn with her in eighteen ninety-four.”

      He grimaced in agony. “Shit. I hate heirlooms.”

      “They were part of her dowry.”

      “I said I was sorry,” he snapped.

      There was an uncomfortable silence. “Still leaving a path of chaos and destruction in your wake, I see,” El said.

      Anger made his defenses snap right into place. “Of course.” He echoed her careless tone. “Just like always.”

      “Some things never change,” she murmured.

      “Got that right,” he agreed dourly.

      El edged away. “So, ah, what brings you back to LaRue?”

      The