She tightened her fist in her lap and then opened her fingers, shaking out the pain she’d caused. And then panic struck her hard in the chest. She’d left Alex at the barbeque with Poppy. Alex would be well cared for. He always was when he was with a McKinnon. After all, they were family even if they didn’t know it. From the moment Alex had been born, Kate McKinnon had referred to Alex and Keith as Irish twins, born just a few months apart and always inseparable. She’d said the two boys always reminded her of her twins, Logan and Ethan, the youngest of the McKinnon boys.

  Her little boy! He had no idea Wade was his real daddy. How could she tell him the truth when he was still mourning the loss of the father he’d always known?

  The phone rang, sending a shrill through the quiet room and shocking Skylar’s already fragile senses. It took a second to register what to do. Taking a deep breath, she pulled herself up from the bed and walked to the phone on the nightstand. She barely had the phone to her ear when she heard Kate’s voice.

  “Skylar? Honey, are you okay?”

  Okay? No, she wasn’t okay. She didn’t know what she was, but she definitely wasn’t okay.

  “I can’t talk, Kate.”

  “I’m sending Hawk over there to check on you. You looked like you were ready to faint before you ran out.”

  “Please don’t. Tell Hawk I’m fine.”

  “He’s already on his way.”

  There was a short pause that left Skylar empty. There’d never been uncomfortable feelings between her and Kate. But all that may very well change today when she learned the truth about Alex.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, Skylar. Or what went on. There’s plenty of time to sort out all those things. But it’s going to be okay. My Wade is home again. He’ll make it okay.”

  She wished she could believe that. But so much had happened between the last time she’d seen Wade McKinnon and now. The short time they’d shared together seemed like a lifetime ago. She’d had a child, been married and then divorced. How could anything be okay after all that?

  * * *

  Hawk had come and gone from Skylar’s house. The address was something Wade had committed to memory a long time ago. All part of making sure both Skylar and Alex were safe, he’d told himself at the time. But as he drove the distance from his parents’ house to Skylar’s across town, he realized he’d really been waiting for this moment when he could finally come back into her life again.

  Alex was snug in bed at Logan and Poppy’s house. There was no chance someone would walk in while Wade talked to Skylar. He only hoped she’d open the door and let him get that far.

  Wade parked his car behind Skylar’s in the driveway and got out, easing the car door closed. After taking the few short strides to the front door, he looked through the window into the kitchen. The light over the sink was on, but the rest of the house was dark. He tried the door knob and found that the door wasn’t locked.

  Wade let go a guttural grunt of frustration. “Why not invite the whole damned world in?” he muttered.

  Deciding Skylar probably wouldn’t have answered the door if he had knocked, he eased himself through the door and slowly stepped into the kitchen. He got three steps into the kitchen when he caught the fast moving shadow on the wall. He ducked just in time to avoid being hit by the object that was aimed at his head. Instead, the airborne shoe slammed against the wall behind him and fell to the floor.

  “Skylar, it’s me,” he said. “It’s Wade.”

  “Get out!”

  This time he saw the small vase coming at him. As he ducked, the vase flew past him and crashed against the door. It fell to the floor, breaking into several pieces much as the bowl of potato salad had earlier.

  “I hate you!”

  Skylar stepped into the kitchen and turned on the light. She’d never been one to hold her emotion back. Now her face was red with rage. Her eyes were blazing, just the way he’d remembered them. But any chance of a homecoming filled with kisses and the hot love making they used to share instantly evaporated. Still, the unbridled passion in her that he’d always been drawn to was still there.

  His lips lifted to a slight grin. “No, you don’t. You love me, Sky. You’ll always love me.”

  She pointed a finger at him. “I used to love you. For five years I didn’t even feel like I was living because I loved you so much losing you nearly killed me. Nearly. Now I hate you. Get out!”

  “Sky.”

  “Don’t you dare even try to get on my good side. Five years, Wade. You watched me? You couldn’t call? You couldn’t send me a note? Hell, I would have settled for a homing pigeon. Something! Anything!”

  His stomach burned. “You were married.”

  Her eyes flared again, but Wade still caught the slight sag in her shoulders. “Don’t you dare put this on me. I didn’t just run out and get married. I thought you were dead! For four years I tried to have a marriage where you didn’t creep into my mind every time Jay touched me. It’s your fault. You destroyed me and then you destroyed my marriage. All because you selfishly faked your death. Why, Wade? Why did you do that to me? For God’s sake, why did you do that to your family?”

  “It was too dangerous.”

  “You keep saying that. But what does that mean? Kate. My God, I can only imagine what she’s thinking right now. Do you know she was like a mother to me all this time? I lied to her because you said it was too dangerous. And I believed you. For who, Wade? Who was it dangerous for?”

  “All of you.” He watched the rise and fall or her chest. “Are you going to throw anything else at me or can we sit down and talk?”

  “I’m not making any promises. And I don’t want to sit down. I’m too angry! I’ve been sitting here in the dark, playing the last five years of my life over in my mind trying to make some sense out of how I could have lived this life and still have you standing here in front of me now. It doesn’t make sense, Wade. Help me make sense out of it!”

  “I never worked for the Peace Corp,” he confessed.

  She shook her head. “Of course you did. I was there, remember? We worked together. We were part of the same team.”

  “I worked for the government. If I could have told you that I was alive, I would have, Skylar.”

  “I don’t believe you. Your brother was a Navy SEAL for eight years. He couldn’t tell your parents a lot about what he was doing, but he could at least have gotten word to them if he had to. He wouldn’t have let them believe he was dead for five years!”

  “If something had gone wrong on any one of Ethan’s missions, it may have been different.”

  “What were you? What are you?”

  Wade drew in a deep breath, not sure how much Hawk had managed to tell Skylar before he’d gotten here.

  “The Peace Corp is a United States Government Agency. That’s why it was easy for me to use it as a cover. But there are some military operations that…step outside of the boundaries. There’ve been military personnel working alongside the Peace Corp in delicate regions all over the world for many years. That’s what I was doing.”

  “You told me you were no longer in the military.”

  “I was officially discharged from the Navy. But not from duty.”

  She looked at him like he was crazy. “What does that mean? Were you a spy?”

  “I worked for a branch of the CIA.”

  “You were undercover?”

  “Yes.”

  Her bottom lip quivered. “Then what the hell was I? A cover, too?”

  His heart melted. He took a step closer to her, wanting to touch her as he had in the kitchen of his parents’ home earlier. But she quickly took a step back and folded her arms across her chest.

  “You were and have always been the love of my life, Skylar.”

  # # #

  Chapter Three

  Skylar gave Wade a hard look of disbelief. She couldn’t believe what was happening.

  “The love of your life?”

  “Always.”

  She clenched a fist and laughed bitterly. “If that were true, then why did you sit back and watch me marry someone else? You said you’ve been watching since I came to South Dakota. If you’d loved me even half as much as I loved you, if anything we’d shared on that South Pacific island meant anything to you, then you never would have sat back knowing another man was making love to me if you could have stopped it.”

  He jaw tightened and she knew she’d hit a nerve, and yet, Skylar didn’t care.

  “Would it be easier for you to understand if I did have amnesia and couldn’t remember who I was until now?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’d be a lie.”

  “Then lie to me! At least there’d be an explanation I could wrap my mind around. This…I can’t.”

  “What do you want me to say? I’ll say it. Just tell me.”

  She shook her head. Unshed tears hung heavy in her eyes. “I want a truth I can understand.”

  “I can’t give it to you.”

  Feeling betrayed, she folded her arms across her chest.

  “The less you know about what I do, what I did, the better.”

  “Why were we in danger? At least tell me that.”

  “Can we sit and talk about this? We used to talk all the time.”

  And make love. They used to talk and argue and make love. Skylar remembered every moment of it. She’d played it in her mind over and over during her marriage to Jay. Lying awake in bed, she’d listen to Jay’s breathing and hug the edge of the bed so he wouldn’t cuddle with her. Then she’d lose herself in the memories of dancing naked in her small cabana with her body pressed against Wade’s as the breeze from the ocean billowed the curtains and refreshed them after a luxurious night of lovemaking.

  Sky looked at the chair pushed against the table as a tear trickled down her cheek. She pulled the chair out, letting the legs scrape against her floor, then eased herself into the seat. Wade sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the table.

  With his hands folded on the table in front of him, he said, “The decisions I made were some of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to make. But you have to believe me when I say I did it because I love you.”

  “What happened?”

  “The moment I met you, I decided I was done working for the agency. Every moment we shared was real, Sky. Every plan we made to come back to South Dakota and start a family…I meant all of it. But then I learned through one of my sources that the cover for one of our agents, Adam Calhoun, was blown. In the process, a lot of sensitive information was leaked into the hands of the wrong people.”

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter who. What matters is that these are the kind of people who will do anything to take down anyone who crosses them. Calhoun was captured and tortured. He had a wife and a young daughter who lived with his mother and his brothers because he traveled so much. No one was sure how much information he revealed, if any, while he was imprisoned. But they got enough information out of him to warrant keeping him alive in order to get more information.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “What little information about the agency that leaked out was just the tip. When these people take someone out, they take out their whole family. They have people all over the world who do their work for them. Anyway, by the time the agency got word of the leak, it was too late. A team was sent to Chicago to protect Calhoun’s family, but his two younger brothers and his mother were found dead in their home. They made it look like a burglary. But it was a hit. His wife and daughter disappeared. No one knows if they were killed or if they managed to escape.”

  He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table.

  “These people don’t care how many they kill if they can somehow profit through money or information. If Calhoun had leaked information about me while he’d been tortured, then you and my whole family would have been killed in order to get to me.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “We had no way of knowing how many agents still in the field were at risk. We were all told to disappear until information filtered through our sources. That’s when we started making plans to leave the island and come to South Dakota. But about a week before we were supposed to leave, some information surfaced with my name attached to it. It could have only come from Calhoun. Very few people knew the details of some of the missions I’d worked on. But I’d worked with Calhoun on this particular mission so it was clear Calhoun had been broken and given up information about me.

  “I had to get you off the island and somewhere safe. I was trying to figure out a way to protect you all in Rudolph when the tsunami hit the island. Mother Nature provided the perfect cover. If I were dead, there’d be no reason for them to come after you or any of my family. So I disappeared. I figured I’d lay low and wait for all the details to emerge. And it worked. Everyone bought my death.”

  “Yeah, it worked a little too good, Wade. The only problem is, you never came back.”

  “By the time it was safe for me to come home, I’d learned you’d married Jay.”

  Anger surged through her as she pushed back from the table and walked the sink. There were no dishes to wash. No busy work she could do that could deter her from memories that converged on her. She fisted the kitchen towel she always kept folded on the counter for cleaning up quick spills and swung around to look at Wade directly.

  “One call could have changed that. I would have waited. You gave me nothing to wait for!”

  “Weren’t you just listening to me? Calhoun’s family was murdered. In all likelihood his wife and daughter were taken hostage or killed. No one knows. I needed to make sure you were safe. Everyone needed to believe I was dead.”

  “Well, you did good, Wade,” she said, “We all bought it. And we all moved on without you. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work? Life goes on? Or did you think everything would just be suspended in time?”

  “It was for me.”

  Skylar squeezed the dish towel she held in her hand. “Well, it wasn’t for me. It was hell.”

  “Sky, listen to me.”

  “Why?”

  He got up from the table and took a step toward her. She put her hands up to stop him. Despite the years that lay empty between them, Skylar remembered with too much familiarity how easy it was for Wade to break her down.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  He put his hands up in surrender. “Sky, we loved each other once. I know you still do. I know I do. We just have to find our way back to each other. We can do that now.”

  She shook her head again, ringing the kitchen towel in her hand so tight her fingers hurt. “I meant what I said, Wade. I used to love you more than anything in the world. So much I thought I died with you. But the truth is, so much has changed since we were together. I’m not the girl you fell in love with in the Peace Corp. That girl believed all those promises you made about our future together. Remember those? That girl is never coming back.”

  His smile became wider. “Hey, I came back.”

  She stumbled on the word. “You waited too long to come for me. That girl doesn’t exist anymore thanks to grief and a bad marriage.”

  “Then we’ll find her.”

  “Do you know what I was doing here when I left your parents’ house? I was sitting here alone for the longest time, trying to figure out what I’ve done for myself over the last five years that has been for me. Truly for me. And I couldn’t think of one thing. I came to South Dakota because you wanted me here. I stayed here because Hawk convinced me it was the right thing to do. I married Jay because he asked and I thought, why not give Alex a father.”

  “I’m his father.”

  “Yeah? That’s news to him. He thinks Jay is his father. Are you going to be the one to tell that little boy he’s wrong?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that Alex and I are leaving Rudolph.”

  “What?”

  “Not right away. I can’t do that to Kate. She needs to find someone to replace me. And Alex won’t be happy leaving his best buddy. But I think it’s time. There’s too much here that is a reminder of…of things I don’t want to remember.”

  “You can’t leave now, Sky. I just got back.”

  “Well, I am. I’ll probably go back Massachusetts for a while. My college roommate, Cara, still lives in Boston.”

  “Boston is a long way from Rudolph. What about Alex?”

  “What about him?”

  “I have a right to see my son and get to know him. He has a right to know me.”

  “Biologically, yes, he’s your son. Jay isn’t considered Alex’s father legally because we were married after Alex was born. But to Alex, Jay is his father. He doesn’t know anything else. It’s already been hard on him since Jay left. I’m not going to confuse him more by telling him anything different. At least not right away.”

  The look on Wade’s face was heartbreaking. She couldn’t have hurt him more if she’d stabbed him in the heart.

  “It’s a lie.”

  “No bigger lie than the one you left me with. All this time you were alive, Wade. Every day I thought of you when I looked at Alex. Every day I kept the love I felt for you hidden from everyone because I was scared. I didn’t know why I should be scared because you never told me until right now. I thought I’d lost you forever. And all that time you were alive. I know you believe you were protecting us. But I don’t know if I can forgive you for what you put me through. I know I can’t live here pretending anymore. That’s why I have to leave.”

  # # #

  Chapter Four

  Don McKinnon was sitting on the front porch, looking up at the stars when Wade arrived home. Wade remembered the familiar scene from when he was a teenager. His father was still smoking cigarettes back then, despite Kate McKinnon’s constant lectures about good health. But he’d given up that habit long ago. Now he just sat in the quiet and enjoyed the night sky.