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pulled her hair off her face, making a ponytail. “My scar is ugly, so I cover it, that’s all.”
    But somehow he didn’t think that was all. Not for a minute. And that only made Tom want to peel off more layers of Gussie McBain.

 
    Chapter Four
     
    “It’s no big deal,” Gussie said, using that cavalier tone she always copped when someone saw the scar. She’d learned early that the attitude helped ease the other person’s discomfort much more than her own.
    “Your eyes would say differently,” Tom replied.
    And then there was the rare person who saw right though her devil-may-care act. Immediately, she fought the urge to stuff her head back into the safety net of her favorite wig. Instead, she concentrated on the look in Tom’s dreamy blue eyes, a look that wasn’t pity or shock or disgust or curiosity.
    He looked… intrigued .
    And that gave her enough courage to let the wig hang in her hand and feel the rare sensation of a tropical breeze on her hair and scalp.
    “Well, the problem’s in the back,” she said, using another well-worn phrase. “It was a blessing I spun around the instant I did or that would have been my face.”
    He flinched with a millisecond of horror. “What happened?”
    She rooted through all the different versions of the tale she’d accumulated over the years. The quick-and-dirty “childhood accident” or “wrong place, wrong time” was fine with the occasional stranger. The more detailed “my brother was drunk with his friends and accidentally shot a bottle rocket at my head” usually sufficed for the very curious. But then there were close friends who deserved a little bit more.
    Where on the spectrum of trust did Tom land? She wasn’t sure yet, so she went with the simple truth.
    “Fourth of July accident when I was fifteen years old,” she said. “I was at the Cape with my older brother, and he and his friends got…well, like crazy teenage boys get on summer nights at the beach. Next thing you know, I’m an Independence Day statistic.”
    “Holy shit,” he murmured. “How awful. For both of you.”
    Somehow, the fact that he recognized how bad it was for Luke, and not just her, touched her heart. Truth was, it was worse for her brother than it had been for her, and he’d paid a higher price.
    “Yeah, it”—broke up the most perfect family—“was hard.”
    “Hard has to be an understatement.”
    She turned to the water, oddly unembarrassed that he could see her scar. She knew how to partially cover it with a ponytail and some creative hairstyling, but it wasn’t covered now. “Damn, you have a gift,” she murmured.
    “Don’t change the subject.”
    “I’m not. I mean it. You weren’t kidding when you said you have X-ray vision.”
    “I don’t generally unleash that on innocent bystanders, but…” He got a little closer. “You fascinate me.”
    She did? He was the fascinating one with all his secret powers of perception. Silent for a moment, she listened to the water lap and the sound of distant laughter from the resort.
    “So, did you forgive your brother?”
    The question stung, nearly taking her breath away. “If only I could.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “After I got out of the hospital, he…” She swallowed hard, wishing so much this story had a different ending. “He left.”
    “Where did he go?”
    She shrugged. “We don’t know.”
    Tom looked as surprised as anyone when she told them the truth.
    “Except for a few random calls after he disappeared, he dropped off the face of the earth.”
    “Damn.”
    “Yeah, damn.” Old emotions, anger and hurt and frustration, bubbled up and threatened to spew. But she shouldn’t tell him everything, not now, not here. This man barely knew her and had no connection to her. He wouldn’t care about how her happy, stable, perfect family shattered from the impact of one wayward bottle rocket and one stupid girl on a hot July night fifteen years ago.
    In her peripheral vision, she was