Day Of Atonement. Alex Archer

only been thirteen the last time she’d seen him. He’d been marrying her older sister at the time. He’d looked so tall and heroic to her young eyes. He’d adored Barbie and had from the moment he’d met her three years earlier in high school.

      Justice and Barbie had gotten married right after graduation. Two years later they’d gotten divorced.

      “Why are you here?” Justice demanded. “Haven’t you Hart women messed up my life enough already? Have you come to gloat or something? To kick a guy when he’s down, is that it?”

      Kelly set the heavy box on a nearby table before turning to face him. “I came here to help.”

      “I don’t need your help.”

      Outside, skeletal veins of lightning flashed and flowed like rivers of light while thunder boomed, rattling the floor-to-ceiling windows in the beach house. Impressive. But the storm didn’t hold a candle to the fire in Justice’s eyes.

      There was something more to his anger, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something else reflected in his gaze. Was it bitterness or despair? It was there and gone as fast as a flash of lightning. Maybe she’d imagined that flare of emotion, but there was no way she was ignoring it. “I’m a physical therapist, Justice. I can help you.”

      “I don’t need your help,” he repeated, his voice gritty, a muscle in his jaw clenching. “I don’t need it and I don’t want it.”

      “I know that’s what you think right now, but you’ll change your mind.”

      “That’s what your sister, Barbie, thought. That she’d change my mind about being a Marine. That she’d change my mind about playing Ken to her Barbie-doll life. It ain’t gonna happen,” Justice drawled.

      Score one for the Marine. Kelly was stung by the comparison to her sister. She and Barbie had little in common. Her older sister liked being surrounded by adoring men and needed love and plenty of male attention to feel fulfilled. Barbie wasn’t a bad person, she just had different priorities from Kelly’s.

      At the moment, Kelly’s priority was dealing with Justice.

      She busied herself opening the box. “I brought food. I wasn’t sure how many provisions you had here, so I thought it was better to be safe than sorry.”

      “If you really thought that, then you’d never have come here in the first place.”

      “You’ve got me there,” Kelly admitted with a grin. “So I don’t always play it safe, I admit it. Ah, I see the kitchen.” She made a beeline for it, bringing the box of food with her and leaving Justice to follow her.

      She surreptitiously noted his awkward movement. He was still limping, but his mother had told Kelly that the doctors said that was due to the serious bruising and cuts on his leg. He also suffered a slight concussion. But it was his right arm and shoulder that were the real problem.

      “What do you think you’re doing?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the increasing thunder, in addition to the banging of pots and pans as she searched for what she wanted.

      “Making dinner,” Kelly replied. “I don’t know about you, but I haven’t eaten since I had a burger along the interstate down from Nashville.”

      Justice was tempted to ask her what she was doing in Nashville, but he refused to give her the satisfaction of showing any curiosity about her.

      His ex-wife’s little sister had certainly grown up. She was wearing baggy cargo pants with flowers on the knees and a lime-green cropped T-shirt that showed the pale skin along the small of her back as she bent over to return the pile of pots to the cabinet. Her wavy, light-brown hair was gathered into a single braid held in place by some sort of flower twisty-thing. She wasn’t wearing any jewelry aside from a sensible watch and silly dangle earrings shaped like question marks.

      Justice certainly had plenty of questions. “How did you know where I was?”

      “Your mother told me,” Kelly replied. “She’s worried about you.”

      “Why would my mother tell my ex-wife’s sister she was worried about me?”

      “Ask her.”

      “I’m asking you.”

      “And I prefer that you ask her. You should call her, anyway, to let her know you’re okay.”

      “She has no cause to be worried about me,” he said gruffly.

      “Right,” she noted with a wry smile in his direction. “I can’t imagine why she was the teeniest bit concerned that her oldest son took off from the hospital against doctor’s orders to hide out on a practically deserted coastal island.”

      “I am not hiding out,” he said in a gritty voice. “A Marine does not hide out.”

      “Hey, fella, I’ll have you know that you’re not the first Marine I’ve treated,” she informed him before setting a saucepan on the stove and pouring in a batch of homemade soup from a plastic container she’d brought with her. “I know all about the Marine’s set of values. Honor, courage, commitment. Not stupidity, however. I saw no reference to stupidity.”

      Justice couldn’t believe the way she’d barged into his domain and made herself at home. He was a member of the Marine Corps’ elite Force Recon, the best of the best. He could take out an enemy sniper before they knew what hit them.

      Or he used to be able to do that. The docs had warned him that those days were gone now.

      Justice couldn’t believe it—years of living on the edge, of making danger his friend, and he got hurt not on a mission but by driving in the States on a normal sunny day.

      And now they hailed him as a hero. If they only knew….

      The inner torment streaked through him, overshadowing the physical pain he’d been living with since the accident. Gritting his teeth, he battened down his emotions and blocked out the raw fear and guilty doubts that plagued him.

      Lightning flashed overhead and thunder crashed a second later. Kelly didn’t even flinch as she added salt to the soup.

      Her calmness irritated him even further.

      His life was in a mess, and she was cooking soup.

      Yeah, she might have grown up, but she was still as much a nuisance as ever. And he wasn’t about to let her into his life. No matter how good that darn soup was starting to smell.

      First thing in the morning he would send her packing. But first he’d eat. He needed food to regain his strength, and there was no contest that what she was cooking had to be better than the stuff he’d been eating lately.

      But she wasn’t staying. No way. He’d have her off-island on tomorrow’s every-other-day ferry to the mainland.

      “So what’s the deal with you and my mother?” he demanded, carefully lowering himself into a straight-backed kitchen chair.

      Kelly looked guilty. His eyes narrowed. Something was up here.

      Kelly tried sidestepping the issue once again by repeating her earlier mantra. “Maybe you should ask her.”

      “I’m asking you,” he said, grimacing as he removed the sling in order to use his right hand. He couldn’t afford to keep babying it. This was his shooting arm. He had to regain his mobility ASAP. Regardless of what the doctors said.

      She placed a huge bowl of soup in front of him along with a few thick slices of what looked like homemade bread. “And I’m saying you should ask your mother. You have a cell phone with you, right? So you can call her and let her know you’re all right.”

      “Why this sudden concern?”

      “It’s not sudden,” she denied, putting her own bowl of soup on the table across from him.

      “So you’ve been pining for