A million times in the years she’d known him, she’d thought about telling Jack how she felt. Maybe if he knew, things would change. But right now, this moment, was why she never did. Because in her heart of hearts she’d always known Jack McKibbon could never return her feelings. Never.
His wounds were too deep, his brain was too big and his heart was just a bit too cold.
And she was always going to be little Mia Alatore.
She took another sip of her white wine and tried to ignore the whispers that buzzed around her like horseflies.
It wasn’t hard to guess who the dean’s wife was. Mia would put money on the tall redhead staring at her from the corner of the room with enough malice to cut steel.
But the rest of the women at the party were staring at Jack, who, even in his ill-fitting suit, was the handsomest man there. Tall and broad, rough around the edges, he was so different from the slick men surrounding him. Like a wild animal surrounded by domesticated cats.
She’d bet that most of the women in the room wouldn’t mind seeing Indiana Jones without the suit. Herself included.
Maybe she should try to get that wedding night before it was too late.
She snorted into her wineglass.
“Mia?” A vaguely familiar young woman with bright eyes and a slightly plastic smile stepped in front of her. “I’m Claire, Devon Cormick’s wife.”
“Hi.” Mia shook hands with the woman. That’s why she was familiar; they’d met three years ago at her first of these cocktail parties. When she’d actually felt like a wife. When hope had made her excited to be on Jack’s arm.
“Devon’s going to El Fasher with Oliver and Jack in March to fix the drill.”
“Next month?” Mia asked, before she could stop herself.
Claire blinked, the plastic fading from her expression. Replaced by a baffled concern that looked, to Mia’s jaded eye, like pity. “You…didn’t know?”
Mia took a deep breath. “No. I didn’t.”
She finished her wine and handed the glass off to a passing waiter and without a second thought, picked up another.
She was going to get drunk, and right now, with the pain lancing her body like a thousand arrows, it seemed like a great idea.
“Mia,” Claire said, “I’m not sure what the situation is between you and Jack and I certainly am not going to speculate—”
“Really?” Mia asked, not believing it for a minute. She could feel the speculation from every single person in the room like hot air suffocating her.
Claire stiffened, her eyes shooting out sparks. “No,” she said. “I’m not. But Devon and Jack are the only two on the team with wives and…”
Realization sunk in. Claire wanted someone to commiserate with. Someone to hold hands with and pray, to pore over the newspapers and pull apart embassy reports.
I have to do this?
she asked herself, bitterness making her feel a million years old. She wanted to find her rusty, beat-up truck in the employee lot and head back to the land she loved and that loved her back.
I have to live all of this again?
“I’m just so scared for him,” Claire breathed, and Mia couldn’t mistake the fear in the woman’s voice.
A fear she knew too well.
“Stay away from the internet,” Mia said, staring into her wineglass, sucked unwillingly into the past. The first trip Jack took to Africa, Mia had been glued to her computer and the unsubstantiated reports had given her ulcers. “Try to stay busy. Focused on something other than your husband.”
“That’s it?” Claire asked. “No internet and get a hobby?”
Mia nodded, remembering the crushing anxiety all too well and knowing that there was nothing Claire could do to really combat it.
“Unless you can convince him not to go?”
“That didn’t work with Jack, did it?” Claire asked softly.
Mia finished the wine in her glass, gulping it down without tasting it—wishing the rest of her body could go as numb as her taste buds. “I didn’t bother trying,” she said.
She and Claire made difficult small talk—it was all too obvious that Claire wanted to ask about Mia’s relationship with Jack. Hash it out, woman to woman.
But that wasn’t going to happen.
Finally, Claire made some excuse about needing a bathroom and left.
Thank God, Mia thought, stepping onto the balcony where it was quiet. A cool breeze blew off the ocean and her skin chilled. Her nose went cold and her eyes stung.
Jack was leaving. Again. It had become so common; he didn’t even bother to tell her anymore.
“There’s my girl,” a happy British voice said from behind her and Mia turned to see Jack’s partner, Oliver.
Mia wasn’t what anyone would call a hugger. But the sight of Oliver, his bright, bald head, his dashing dinner jacket with gold buttons, drove her right over the edge and she pushed herself against his barrel chest.
“Whoa there, Mia,” he said, stroking her arms. “Are you okay?”
“You’re going back,” she said against his chest. “Next month.”
“He didn’t tell you?” Oliver whispered, and at her silence he swore.
“The government and JEM signed a cease-fire.”
“That doesn’t comfort me, Oliver.”
“We’ll be fine, Mia. You know that. We have lots of security—”
“And you don’t take risks,” she said, finishing the line she’d heard seven times over the past four years. Jack and Oliver had the same script.
She stepped away, already regretting the show of emotion. Wishing she could take it all back.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Fine.” She flashed him a bright smile. “Great. Just surprised. How are you?” She squeezed his big shoulder, a far more Mia-like greeting.
“Bored to tears,” Oliver said. “And wishing I had a wife to liven things up at these parties.”
“Well, don’t do anything drastic,” she said, proud that her voice was light. None of her grief or bitterness leaked out.
But Oliver’s piercing eyes saw through her. “You and Jack make quite a pair,” he said, sipping at a glass of tonic water. “He’s about to bite off every single hand that’s here to feed us and you look like you’re going to cry or start a fight.”
“Jack doesn’t like these things,” she said with a shrug. “And I’m not so hot on them, either.”
He watched her carefully and she watched him right back. If she was here to be the loving wife, she’d better get her act together.
“You know that first summer when Jack and I worked together and I heard he was married, I thought it was a joke. We’d worked side by side twelve hours a day for a week and he never said a word about you.”
“Are you trying to start a fight?” she asked.
“No.” Oliver leaned against the banister, looking like a man settling in for a long chat. A chat she had no interest in. “But when I asked him about you, he wouldn’t shut up. I heard about when you were a baby and your family first moved to his ranch. I heard about how you followed him around as soon as you could walk, snuck into the bed of his truck when he drove away to college.”
“What is your point?”
“He said you were his best friend.”
Her throat tightened up and she angled her face toward the wind, the breeze cooling her burning eyes.
And that’s all I’ll ever be.
“What’s going on, Mia?” Oliver asked. “I’ve never asked. I figured whatever relationship you two had worked for you—but something is wrong. It’s all over your faces.”
It was hard, but she didn’t look away or flinch.
The tension inflated inside her like a balloon, and she couldn’t get a deep breath. But she didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
“You don’t let anyone in, do you?” he finally asked.
Just Jack,
she thought,
and that didn’t end so well.
“Don’t be dramatic, Oliver,” she said.
“I’m not, I’m simply putting my underused and underappreciated sensitive people skills to work.”
She laughed, the tension escaping. The relief was so great she couldn’t stop laughing.
“That’s more like it,” he said, grabbing two more glasses of wine from a passing waiter. “Now, let’s have a party.”
By the time Jack found them, Mia was doubled over with laughter listening to Oliver’s story about Jack eating bugs as the guest of honor in a family’s hut.
“He was picking legs out of his teeth for two hours!” Oliver said, and Mia screamed, imagining it.
“Oliver is exaggerating.” Jack’s familiar low voice sent goose bumps down her arms and over her chest. Her laughter died in her throat, the tension back in force.
Her stomach was never going to be the same.
“Don’t listen to him, Mia. You have my word,” Oliver said, putting his hand over his heart, “every syllable is the truth.”
Jack sighed and leaned against the balcony next to Mia. Static leaped between them, small currents zipping along her skin letting her know just how close he was.
And how far away.
“This night is miserable,” he said, tilting his head back.
“Because you don’t hang out with the right people,” Oliver said, winking at Mia. “Did you make anyone mad in there?” Oliver asked Jack.
“Probably,” she said.
Jack looked at her. “How much have you had to drink?” he asked.
“Are you going to scold me?” she asked.
“No.” He raised his hand and one of the ever-present waiters appeared. “I’m going to join you.”
“I’d better do some damage control,” Oliver said. “You two have fun.”
The silence left in Oliver’s wake was thick and heavy, and she wanted to collapse under the weight. The sheer volume of all the things they weren’t saying.
“You remember fun?” he asked and she knew he was looking at her. Her skin felt raw under his gaze.
She nodded.
“I think the last time I had fun was your high school graduation.”
“Come on, isn’t Africa fun?”
“Fun?” He laughed, but it wasn’t joyful. “No, Africa is hard work and a bureaucratic nightmare.”
She wasn’t all that shocked to hear it. His emails had been increasingly rant-related.
“But your high school graduation?” His eyes twinkled. “Remember?”
She would never forget. “You drove all night from Cal Poly only to get me out of bed and drag me to the roof of the high school.”
And at dawn he drove her home and left—back to college—without once talking to his family. Without even stepping foot in the house.
“Oh, like I had to drag you,” Jack said with a laugh, and her body shook at the sound. “You jumped into my truck. And, if I remember correctly, you led the way up to the roof.”
“Only because you showed me.”
“That was probably a mistake. I spent a lot of sleep less nights in college sure you’d fallen or hurt yourself.”
“I never went up on those roofs without you,” she said.
“Really?” he asked, looking down at her in surprise.
Jack had this thing, growing up, whenever he got a chance to get into town, he would sneak around Wassau, finding his way up onto the roofs of every public building. The high school, the grocery store, the two churches.
He could walk from Second Street down Main Street without ever touching the sidewalk.
When she started following him around like a lost dog and he realized he couldn’t shake her, he took her to the roofs with him.
A whole other world existed up there. He had little forts with sleeping bags and food. Flashlights and books. Sometimes, he’d told her, he slept on those roofs.
His home away from home.
He had a thing for adventure, even then.
She just had a thing for him.
But once he was gone, the roofs were just roofs.
“I can’t believe you never got caught,” she said.
“Mom found out,” he said, his smile fading.
“Really?” she breathed. “I never knew that.”
He nodded. “The second night I did it,” he said. “I was fifteen and Dad took me into town while he had a beer at Al’s and I fell off the grocery store, came home with my clothes all torn.”
“What did your mother do?”
Because tearing clothes and climbing buildings weren’t something Victoria would let pass, and Victoria had been fond of punishment. Jack shot Mia a dubious look, which hid more pain than she could imagine. “What she always did.”
She didn’t say anything, didn’t offer any sympathy, because he hated that. Always had.
And she respected his wishes. If he didn’t want to talk about Victoria’s temper, about the abuse, that was his business.
Besides, the night was a big enough bummer as it was. Scandals. Affairs. Divorce. Painfully high heels. They didn’t need to stroll down memory lane with Victoria McKibbon.
“You hungry?” he asked, standing upright as if jerking himself away from his thoughts.
“Starving.”
“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”