Borrowed Bride by Patricia Coughlin Page B

mind my saying so, it seems rather sudden. Where has this loving interest in Toby been hiding for the past two years?”
    â€œTouché.” His grim smile was pulled tight. “I guess I deserved that. I’m sure my interest must seem rather sudden to you.”
    â€œMeaning it’s not?” she asked.
    â€œMeaning it’s not,” he replied, once again averting his gaze from the undisguised skepticism in hers. His voice was pitched low, a little halting. “Believe it or not, there hasn’t been a day in the past two years that I haven’t thought about Toby, and about you, and about all I took from both of you.”
    â€œLook, Connor, you didn’t—”
    He lifted his hand. “Stop, all right? I know exactly how you feel about what happened to Joel and about my part in it. So don’t think you have to make nice or say things you don’t believe to soothe my feelings just because you’re stuck here with me.”
    â€œBelieve me, soothing your feelings is not anywhere on my list of priorities,” she assured him with a look of disdain. “Not even close. Honesty is, however. I was simply going to say that deep down I understand that you weren’t responsible for what happened to Joel. I know that you never would have intentionally hurt him. I guess I’ve always known that. I just needed someone to blame, and you were the obvious choice.”
    His smile was hard and fleeting. “Nice to know you consider me good for something at least.” He shrugged. “Anyway the fact remains that I thought about you and Toby a lot while I was away. I used to see little kids around his age and I’d wonder what he was like, if he was anything like Joel was as a kid, and what kind of things he liked to do. I thought about you, too, Gaby. I wondered how you were doing.” He glanced at her briefly and shrugged.
    â€œOf course, I knew that you were all set financially. Adam the whiz kid was seeing to that,” he continued, his tone suddenly brittle. “But I wondered how you were making out with all the rest of it. And I wished...I wished there was something I could do to try and make up for all you lost on my account.”
    â€œYou sure had a strange way of showing it,” she countered, unable to completely conquer the resentment that had been buried inside for so long.
    â€œI tried,” he reminded her. “Right after Joel was...right after the funeral service. I came by the house to tell you that if there was anything you needed, anything at all that I could do to help, I was there for you and for Toby. You told me—”
    â€œTo go to hell,” Gaby finished for him, her small smile rueful.
    â€œYeah, that’s about the way I remember it.”
    â€œThat was inexcusably rude of me. Not that it’s any justification, but I was sort of out of it at the time.”
    â€œI know. No excuse necessary. Besides, you only said what a lot of people, myself included, were thinking.”
    She eyed him bewilderedly.
    â€œI mean that hell was the right place for me,” he explained. “So I did my best to accommodate everyone.”
    â€œBy running off to Mexico?”
    A weary smiled edged his mouth. “Believe me, most days it felt like hell. When I first got there, I signed on with a road-building crew that was blasting its way through a mountain of solid granite. Combine all that flying rock with a daily temperature of one hundred ten in the shade, and you come as close to hell as I ever want to get.”
    â€œOne hundred ten in the shade,” she echoed, shuddering. “That explains your great tan. But after what happened at the Black Wolf, why on earth would you want to work with...?”
    When she hesitated, recalling their truce that was only minutes old, he finished the thought for her.
    â€œWhy would I choose to work with explosives?”
    Gaby nodded.
    He shrugged. “It’s what I