Coming Home by Marie Force Read Free Book Online Page A

conveyed a world of meaning. They were a couple. They lived here together. She slept with him and made love with him and ate dinner with him.  
    “I can see why.”
    She pointed to a distant figure on the beach. “Reid is down there, working on his beloved boat.”
    He had a beloved boat. Kate wanted to know all about it, but she didn’t ask. She had no right to ask anything of the woman he shared his life with. Were they married? Kate shook off that thought as fast as she had it. “Thank you.”
    Feeling somewhat deflated as she took the long set of stairs to the beach, she felt the eyes of the other woman on her back. Kate wanted to apologize for showing up uninvited into their piece of paradise. She wanted to assure the woman that she was no threat to her, but she didn’t do any of those things. Rather, she stayed focused on the dot on the beach, the man she’d thought about every day for ten long years.  
    At the bottom of the stairs, she kicked off her sandals and walked barefoot through the warm sand, making her way to him as if in a dream. If it is a dream , she thought, please don’t let me wake up until I’ve actually spoken to him .
    He was sanding the bottom of an old skiff and was so focused on his work he didn’t see her coming.  
    She approached him tentatively, not wanting to startle him. When she was six feet from him, she stopped and feasted her eyes. He wore only a pair of khaki cargo shorts. His skin was very tan, his body still lean and fit. Silver streaks ran through his dark hair, and perspiration made his back glisten in the bright sunshine.
    Kate watched him for a full minute before she cleared her throat. “Reid.”
    He froze and then straightened, turning slowly to face her. The shock registered in his expression and the rigid way in which he held himself. “Kate?” he said in a hoarse whisper. “What’re you doing here?”
    The sound of his voice transported her right back to the first time she’d ever heard him speak, in the drawing room of the vast house he’d once called home, the day her dad had brought her to meet his old friend from Berkeley.  
    Say something! Don’t just stand here and stare! “I, um… I needed to see you.”
    He glanced up at the house before returning his focus to her. “Why?”
    “I…”
    “You’ve been ill.”
    “You heard about my flake-out on stage, I take it.”
    “It made the papers—even down here.”
    “I had pneumonia and went back to work too soon. The media said it was drugs, but that’s not true.”
    His smile was just as she remembered—slow, sexy, sweet, and she absolutely melted. “We’re not so far from civilization down here that the rumors don’t reach us.”
    Kate shrugged. “I don’t give them much to work with, so they make up most of it. I hope you didn’t think—”
    “I knew you weren’t on drugs, Kate.”
    “Oh, good,” she said, surprised by how important it was that he not think poorly of her, despite having given him plenty of reason to think poorly of her.
    “Why did you need to see me? Has something happened?”
    All the words she’d rehearsed in her mind for weeks and months were gone now that she stood before him, needing to explain why she’d suddenly reappeared in his life so many years after she’d ended their relationship.  
    “Kate?”
    Hearing her name in that honeyed Southern accent sent shivers down her spine the same way it had when they were together. He’d liked to call her Katherine when they made love. That memory sent a flood of heat rushing through her veins.
    “I wanted to apologize to you.”
    He crossed his arms and leaned back against the boat. “For what?”
    “For the way I ended things between us. It’s bothered me for a long time, and I wanted you to know that.”
    “Oh. Well…”
    “What you did, telling Buddy about me—”
    “It was wrong of me to do that after you specifically asked me not to.”
    Kate shook her head. “Everything I have, everything I’ve