8. Luna

8

Huh. Ryder thought I reminded him of his dead girlfriend? That was weird, but not as weird as my stalker, who thought I reminded him of a dead Egyptian pharaoh. When I used to complain about all the pageants Mom entered me into, she'd told me that my life was never destined to be average, and I guess she was right.

Ryder said I could ask him anything, but I had to tread carefully. I'd seen the pain in his eyes when he spoke about Neve. Although he'd hurt me—badly—two wrongs didn't make a right, and if we were going to salvage a friendship out of this mess, I needed to act sympathetic rather than nosy, even if I was burning with curiosity. And I found that I did want to salvage a friendship. For a month in San Gallicano, Ryder had been my rock, and I appreciated having someone strong to lean on.

Ryder brought in the microwave, only to find that my old one wasn't actually broken, it just smelled really bad and the lasagne was burned onto the glass plate thingy at the bottom. So now I had two microwaves.

Two microwaves, and a table full of Chinese takeout boxes, this time delivered by a driver who didn't sing and didn't abandon them on the doorstep. Ryder went downstairs to collect the food and tip the guy while I set out plates and cutlery. Ryder could probably use chopsticks, but I couldn't, not if I wanted the food to end up in my mouth. Months had passed since we shared a meal, and in San Gallicano, we'd mostly eaten simple, home-cooked dishes. Grilled fish, rice, and vegetables jazzed up with spices. And we'd never eaten alone.

This was new territory.

I only hoped he kept his word about not touching me. He'd already shaken my trust, and if he lied one more time…whatever this thing was between us, it would be over.

Men just couldn't help themselves; that's what the man who stole my virginity had told me. If a pretty woman flirted with them, instinct took over. I hadn't even realised I was flirting, but I'd had a couple of cocktails—cocktails I'd been far too young to drink—so maybe I'd inadvertently encouraged him? Whatever, now I went out of my way to act cold toward every straight man in my orbit. Cold, or sometimes plain nasty. However I behaved, it didn't matter to the paparazzi. They wrote whatever they wanted to write. I could tell a man to jump off a cliff, and as long as I did it while wearing a short dress and a smile, rumours of a budding relationship would circulate a day later. I'd had sex precisely once in my life, but I still got called a slut.

"I hope you're hungry," Ryder said. "The portions are bigger than I thought they'd be."

"Lunch was a smoothie, so yes."

"They're not feeding you at the Nile Palace?"

"There's food, but today, I had a meet-and-greet for contest winners, and it ran late."

Mainly because the organiser forgot to mention that each winner was allowed to bring two guests, so instead of posing for ten photos, I had to pose for thirty, and everyone wanted to ask questions. If Mom had been there, she would have had a conniption and insisted on only ten photos total, but most of the people who showed up were teenage girls, and I didn't want to disappoint them.

Ryder tipped prawn crackers into a bowl, and I nibbled on one as I considered what to ask him. In the end, I kept it simple.

"Tell me about you."

"What do you want to know?"

"All the things you avoided telling me before."

"Yeah." His shoulders slumped. "I should've brought wine."

I could have told him there was a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, a house-warming gift from Julius, who should have known better. I didn't drink in private, and he was the reason. Bad things happened behind closed doors. I'd only kept the bottle because I knew from experience that it would make a good weapon in a pinch.

"If you don't want to talk about it, that's okay."

"No, you should know. You deserve to know." A pause. "I met Neve at a football game when I was sixteen and she was fifteen."

"You played football?"

He made a face. "Not for long. Coach kicked me off the team after that day."

"Do I dare to ask?"

"I was a quarterback, and Neve was on the other team's cheer squad. Their tight end cornered her after the game and held her wrists while he made a bunch of suggestions she didn't appreciate. And she just looked so fuckin' scared." Ryder's hands balled into fists as fury clouded his green eyes. "The asshole had forty pounds on me, but I told him to get his hands off my girl. He told me she was a slut who sucked every cock in Gladeland High, and I knocked out three of his teeth."

I dropped the cracker I was about to eat. "Are you serious?"

Stupid question. Of course he was serious. Ryder was always serious.

"I thought I was going to get expelled at one point, but Neve stuck with my story and said we'd been seeing each other for a couple of weeks. My dad told me I should have done things by the book and raised my concerns in a more appropriate manner, but secretly, he was proud of me for defending her, and since he was—still is—a big deal in the Navy, the principal went easy on me. A three-day suspension and no more football."

"One day for each tooth," I said, and he choked out a laugh.

"I never thought of it that way before."

"But you kept seeing Neve?"

"Much to her father's irritation. She was meant to marry into money, not a military family."

"Wait, you were engaged?"

He nodded. "Nobody knew. Well, you do now. And my therapist."

I'd wanted honesty, and now I was getting it. But judging by the tension in Ryder's body and the anguish in his eyes, the story was going to get a lot worse. I mean, I already knew the ending, and that was awful, but… I reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

"I'm so sorry."

He gave me a sad smile. "So am I. We loved each other, but the engagement was out of necessity. Married couples get military housing privileges that others don't, and we would have been living on my salary, at least to begin with."

"I thought you said she was rich?"

"No, her family was rich. They told her that if she chose me over a college boy with the right connections, they'd cut her off."

"That's messed up."

"Her whole damn family was messed up. Her father was a control freak, her mom only cared about money, and her brother…" Ryder shook his head. "He was a sick motherfucker. I thought it was strange that Neve never wanted to be alone with him, but it took six months for her to tell me why."

A chill ran through me, more of an icy tsunami, really. Ryder's voice had gone flat, and I understood why. It was the same reason I refused to be alone with Julius.

"He abused her."

"Since she was a kid. He was six years older."

"She didn't tell anyone?"

"She was too scared, and he said nobody would believe her. I tried to get her to go to the police, but she didn't want to ruin her family name, so we went to her parents instead. And the worst part…" Ryder closed his eyes for a moment. "The worst part is I think they already knew. But it was easier for them to keep quiet and turn a blind eye than to stop it from happening."

Ryder said I reminded him of Neve, but we had so much more in common than he realised.

"When I told my mom I'd been raped, she convinced me that my career was more important than justice."

Ryder looked as if he'd been punched, and he lost several shades of colour. "When you told me your mom didn't go to the police, I thought it was to spare you the ordeal of a trial, not because she decided your career took priority. She…just let it go?"

"Not exactly. She confronted the guy, and he apologised. Said he thought I wanted it." I gave a hollow laugh. "I was sixteen, and he'd been plying me with cocktails all evening. Anyhow, she promised she'd never leave me alone with him again, and she kept her word on that. I guess that's partly why I put up with her as my manager for so long—I needed the buffer."

"You still see that motherfucker?"

"I told you before, he's a big shot in the music industry. I can't avoid him." And I also didn't want to talk about him, not today. "Did Neve's parents support her?"

"Her father promised it wouldn't happen again, but he was angrier with me for stirring up shit than he was with his son. Was it worth it? I thought so at the time. Things settled down. Neve grew happier. We agreed that I'd join the Navy and get through the training so we could be together again as soon as she graduated high school. I wanted to become a SEAL, something that pissed my father off to no end because he'd always assumed I'd follow in his footsteps and command a ship. It was in my blood, he said."

"I'm glad you became a SEAL. A ship captain wouldn't have the same intimidation factor."

"I don't mean to intimidate you, moon."

"I meant to other people."

"Yeah, well, I wish I hadn't joined the Navy at all. I shouldn't have left Neve."

"Her brother didn't stay away?"

Ryder shook his head. "She told me over the phone what happened, and I came home on leave ready to break that fucker's face, but he'd gone skiing in Europe. Neve convinced me to go back to Coronado. She said she'd cope, and in a few months, we'd both be free. But…" He bit his lip, steeling himself. "But it didn't work out that way. You know what Hell Week is?"

"The finale of Miss American Radiance?"

That earned me the tiniest smile. "It's one of the toughest parts of SEAL training, and it lives up to its name. Five and a half days of endurance challenges on next to no sleep. I survived it because I had to. I'd promised Neve I would. But when I crawled back to my bed to give her the news, I found a voicemail. A goodbye."

Oh no. A tear trickled down my cheek because I knew what was coming. I knew because I'd been tempted to do the same in the aftermath of Julius. Who would even have missed me?

"She'd found out she was pregnant, and she couldn't…she just couldn't cope. Her mother took sleeping pills, and Neve knew where to find them."

I couldn't stay in my seat any longer. Yes, I'd told Ryder not to touch me, but he hadn't said I couldn't touch him. I hugged him tight and held on as he rested his head on my shoulder, even when I felt the dampness seeping through the fabric of my top.

"I'm so sorry."

"I couldn't get there in time. I called the cops, I called her family, but she was already gone."

In San Gallicano, I'd confessed to Ryder that a man had forced himself on me, and that I'd kept it a secret from everyone except my mom. Then yesterday, I'd left him a garbled, nonsensical voicemail, and when he tried to call me, I was asleep. And afterward, when I'd seen the missed calls, I'd put off getting back to him because I had no idea what to say. Now I understood. I understood why he'd sent a colleague to check on me, why he'd jumped on an airplane when I was less than forthcoming with information.

I hugged him tighter.

"Ryder, I'm not her. I'm not suicidal, I swear. What happened to me, it was a long time ago, and although I've had a difficult time this year, I'm actually in a better place."

And a lot of that was thanks to him. He'd believed in me. He'd treated me like a human person when others treated me as a cash machine or a commodity.

"I'm so fucking relieved about that. Moon, I can't lose you. I want you to have the life Neve never did, and yeah, I'm aware of how screwed up that sounds."

It was screwed up, totally screwed up, but I was relieved too. Relieved because Ryder had come to Las Vegas not out of some weird obsession with getting into my panties but because he couldn't bear another woman he cared about dying on his watch. He was in bodyguard mode, not horny asshole mode.

"It's okay. I swear, it's okay. Tell me Neve's brother didn't get away with what he did?"

"He's dead."

"Did you…?"

Had Ryder taken the ultimate revenge? I couldn't blame him if he had, not when I'd dreamed of wrapping my hands around Julius's throat more times than was healthy.

"Not that way. I hit them where it would hurt the most." His smile was grim. "Right in their reputation. Between the voicemail Neve left, my testimony, and the DNA tests on the baby, the cops had enough to charge him with incest. He didn't last six months in jail. I've never met the guy who killed him, but I've been topping up his commissary account for the past decade."

Wow. Just wow. I'd always known Ryder was deep, but I'd never imagined he was keeping that kind of heartache bottled up inside. And even now, he was being a gentleman.

"You can hug me back, you know."

"You told me not to touch you, and I didn't want to assume."

But now he wrapped me up in his arms, and Ryder Metcalfe gave the absolute best hugs in the world. My crouching position was super uncomfortable, so I gave in to my burning thighs and sank onto his lap with a sigh. I'd missed him so much. I'd missed this. Us. Whatever "us" was.

"All this, and we haven't even gotten to the part about your wife yet."

He laughed, as I'd hoped he would. "That part's easier to tell. I made a mistake. I thought I could learn to love Shylah, but it turned out I was wrong."

"But you still married her?"

"Yeah."

He released me, and I felt the loss of his warmth immediately. But the hard part was over. Now we had to do the adult thing and have a civilised conversation over dinner, even if I'd completely lost my appetite. I took my seat again.

"Shylah and I met in a more conventional way. She attended the University of San Diego, and one night when we were both in a bar downtown, I saw her wallet fall out of her purse. She offered to buy me a drink as thanks for returning it, and…yeah." Now the colour came back to Ryder's cheeks. "I hooked up with her, my buddy hooked up with her friend, and we swapped numbers at the end of the night. It was just a casual thing, but she worried when I got deployed—I couldn't even tell her where I was going most of the time—and I wanted her to be looked after if something happened to me. She suggested getting married, and I went along with it."

"You got married because it was the easiest option?"

He wrinkled his nose. "Pretty much? Yeah. And I liked having someone there to come home to. But Shylah graduated, and her college buddies moved away, and suddenly she was stuck in San Diego with no family, no friends, and a husband who was never there, and she began to resent the Navy. Which meant I began to resent her."

"You loved your job? Even though you left?"

"I loved the job, but not the command structure. In the end, I agreed to leave, but Shylah wanted us to live in Iowa. Her dad owns the biggest agricultural equipment dealership in the state, and he had a sales job waiting for me."

"She wanted you to…sell tractors?" I couldn't help it. I started laughing because the idea of Ryder standing in a showroom selling farm machinery was so freaking funny. "Sir, see how big these wheels are? This is absolutely the vehicle you want for ploughing your fields."

"Something like that. I just couldn't do it. A friend gave my name to Emmy, and she offered me an interview at Blackwood, and after I spoke with her, I knew that was where I wanted to be. But it's notoriously hard to land a place on her team, so I swore to myself that if I didn't get it, I'd suck it up and go to Iowa."

"But you did get it."

"I did. And Shylah was as upset as I figured she would be. She refused to go to Virginia, and even if I'd moved into the four-bedroom ranch home her dad bought for us, there's no way our marriage would have lasted. We'd drifted too far apart by then. So I called time, and she threw a whole bunch of stuff at me. I ducked most of it, but…" Ryder gently took my hand and raised it to his hairline. I felt a small raised scar I'd never noticed before. "That was from our wedding photo. I needed six stitches. Her dad was visiting with us at the time, which was unfortunate, and he drove me to the emergency room, which made me feel like shit because he's a good guy. Her whole family is great, but we were just wrong for each other long-term."

I felt sorry for Shylah, but not too sorry. Because if poor dumb Shylah had won the showdown, then Ryder would be hawking the latest HarvestMaster Deluxe instead of picking through chow mein at my dining table. Iowa's loss was my gain.

And I couldn't push Ryder away, not now. The first time had nearly broken me, and I knew that whatever my future held, he'd be in it.

In what way?

Well, that was the big question, wasn't it.

What did I want from Ryder?

And what did he want from me?

Soon, I was going to find out…