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over here?” She
took her clothing from him, and he stepped into his jeans.
    “After what we
just did, I don’t think I have a right to be.” Her eyes drifted up his torso
before finding his face. “At least you copped to it rather quickly. The lying
that is. I guess you’re making some progress on the truthfulness front.”
    Ouch . “Okay,
I deserved that. But how long are you going to keep punishing me?”
    She began
jerking on her clothes. “It’s not meant to be a punishment, Ryan. Or maybe it
is, I don’t know. I just need you to tell me why you left me like you did. It’s
the only way I’m ever going to finally bury all that old pain, put it behind me
for good, and I want desperately to
do that.” She blinked away a sheen of tears and turned
away from him, scooping up her shoes before walking out of his bedroom.
    Ryan followed,
his heart pounding so hard he thought it might crack a rib. “Tate, listen. I’ll
tell you why I left … I just…” She stopped dead in her tracks and faced him,
ready to hear what he had to say. Only thing was he didn’t think he could spill
his guts just yet. The past was a topic that hurt like hell to talk about. “I
had a valid reason, okay? But it’s something that’s not going to be easy for me
to tell you.”
    “Why
not? I don’t understand why you can’t just say it! Did you kill someone?”
    “No!”
    “Cheat on me and
knock some girl up and now you have a child somewhere?”
    He gritted his
teeth and glared. “Fuck no. I never even looked at another woman when I was
with you.”
    “Then what is
it?” she asked, her voice growing louder. “Dammit, just spit it out!”
    “It was my
family, all right?” She jerked like he’d slapped her, her lips parting in
surprise. Ryan swallowed the bile that rose in his throat and shook his head.
“It wasn’t me or you. It was my family, and I had no choice but to leave you.
I’m not lying to you about this. And that’s all I’m going to tell you tonight,
so you’re just going to have to fucking trust
me . Please, will you at least do that much?”
    She drew a
stuttered breath, some of the tenseness in her body easing away, before nodding
weakly. “I’ll let it go for now. But if you expect me to trust you ever again,
you’re going to have to do the same with me.”
    Tate opened the
door and walked out. Ryan pressed his forehead to the cool wood, realizing his
days were numbered. If he wanted Tate back in his life for good, he had to come
clean very soon. Otherwise, she’d slip through his fingers again like sugar.
And that thought made him even sicker.

Chapter
Five
     
    For the next
three days, Tate worked herself into an exhausted stupor on purpose. She’d even
covered a few partial shifts for other doctors, just so she wouldn’t have time
to think about what Ryan had said. It was all for naught. She puzzled it out in
the car on her way home, over the sink as she brushed her teeth, and in her bed
before sleep overtook her. Then somehow her dreams formed conclusions and wove
together ridiculous scenarios that made absolutely no sense whatsoever, but
when did dreams ever make any sense?
    Whatever the cause
of Ryan leaving was, it obviously still caused him a lot of pain to talk about,
and for that reason Tate now felt like a selfish asshole for seeing things so
one-sidedly. She’d made giant assumptions that he’d left Atlanta for purely
self-serving motives, and that might not be the case at all. There was no room
in her professional life for assumptions, so why she’d made such a monumental
one in her personal life was beyond her realm of comprehension.
    Perhaps she owed
him an apology. Or maybe not. She didn’t know what to
think, really. At least not until he finally decided he was ready to talk and
could clear up this problem that hung between them like a dense, gray storm
cloud.
    In the interim,
he called or texted. Just little short, sweet messages asking
how her night had been, or what the last