Finally a Bride by LISA CHILDS Page A

truck,” she said. A rumble of distant thunder reinforced her reprimand. “I was worried about you.”
    “I needed to walk.” He eased away from the door—and her—and limped toward the kitchen. “My physical therapist tells me I don’t walk enough.”
    “I was worried that you’d get caught in a storm.” And so she’d searched for him, driving his truck with a cap pulled low over her face so that no one would recognize her. But with dark clouds threatening, not many people had been out walking the sidewalks of Cloverville. Only Eric.
    “You don’t need to worry about me.” He waved off her concern as he jerked open the door to his copper-toned refrigerator.
    “But I do.” She had gotten used to worrying about him. Even after his return from the Marines, she hadn’t been able to break the habit.
    “You’re wasting your time,” he remarked as he poured himself a glass of iced tea. Then he turned toward Molly, lifting the pitcher in a silent question.
    She shook her head. “I don’t want anything to drink. But I can’t deny that I might have wasted my time.”
    “Of course you have. There’s no reason to worry about me,” he insisted. “I’m fine.”
    “I’m not talking about you.” Because she wasn’t likely to stop worrying about him yet. “I think I might have wasted my time in medical school.” And those years in premed classes at college when she would have rather taken liberal-arts courses. So many years wasted, if she changed her mind. How could she give up now, after promising her dad, after working so hard?
    How could she throw away so many years of her life?
    “Molly…”
    “You knew that, too, that I wasn’t cut out for medical school. Just like you knew I was jumping into marriage with Josh. Why didn’t you say something before you left?” She had cared enough then to try and stop him from entering the Marines. Why hadn’t he cared enough about her to stop her from wasting her life?
    “You know why,” he said as he opened the sliders and stepped onto the deck. He stared out over the lake.
    Even though she knew he didn’t want to talk to her, she followed him. “Are you mad at me?” she asked, grasping his arm in her hands. The hair on his forearms tickled her palms.
    He turned back toward her and sighed. “No.”
    “But I was kind of a bitch at the cemetery,” she admitted, her voice rasping with regret. “I had no right to lash out at you just because I’m confused.”
    “You weren’t bitchy, you were being stubborn. In other words—you were being you.” He sighed. “When you get something in your head, you don’t listen.”
    “So that’s why you’ve never told me all the mistakes I’ve been making?”
    “I told you once,” he reminded her. “Just once…”
    Molly’s face heated as she remembered when—in his bedroom eight years before. She dropped his arm and knotted her hands together. “I—I—uh…” She swallowed her nerves. “I know I brought it up at the cemetery. But we need to go back to forgetting that night ever happened.”
    Eric turned toward the lake again and sighed. “If only I could.”
    “I ruined our friendship, didn’t I? That night…Just like I always thought it would.”
    He lifted brows above eyes as dark a gray as the overhead clouds. “It?”
    Her pulse quickened to a crazy rhythm. “We’re not talking about it,” she insisted.
    “But we’re both thinking about it now.”
    “I should go. I made another mistake coming here.” She turned toward the patio doors, but when she reached for the handle, a strong hand closed over hers.
    “You didn’t ruin anything that night, Molly.”
    A smile twitched at her lips. “Liar.”
    Eric uttered a deep, throaty chuckle. “I’m not lying. That happened a long time ago, and we’re still friends.”
    “That’s why I should leave now.” She sighed. “Because just give me a chance, and I will screw things up. I’ve made a pretty big mess of my life lately. So I