Leaping Hearts(66)

A couple walked by and peered over curiously.

“Why don’t I walk you to your car?” she asked.

He smiled. “Isn’t that a man’s job?”

“In this neighborhood, you never know what’ll happen after dark. You might get accosted by a bond trader or some rabid media mogul.”

“Better than some twenty-year-old Internet guru who’s hit the skids,” he said, opening the front door.

As they stepped free of the house, they were greeted by the crisp night air. The noise of the party faded away, and her ears rang in the silence.

Before anything could be said, they were approached by one of the uniformed parking attendants who’d been hired for the night. The boy must have been in his late teens and he was wearing a black blazer that was too big for him and a pair of running shoes. Shrugging, Devlin handed over his ticket and the kid went sprinting off down the driveway, out of sight.

“As far as privacy goes, I guess this didn’t make a lot of sense,” A.J. whispered. “I forgot about the valets.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the lineup of young men loitering around.

“We can drive around the block and park,” he suggested.

“Like two kids hiding from their parents?” A.J. giggled, partially because she found the idea funny, mostly because she felt anxious about what he would say when they were alone.

“You have no idea how much I’ve missed hearing your laugh.”

Her breath caught. She saw his hand rise up and nearly touch her elbow, but then he hesitated.

“I came tonight to ask for forgiveness,” he told her quietly. “To apologize. And to ask you to come home.”

A.J. flushed with happiness and was sorely tempted to throw her arms around him and tell him that was exactly what she’d hoped he’d say. But she needed more from him. She was far too in love to be able to risk going back to the farmhouse without a clear understanding of where things stood between them.

The fleet-footed attendant returned without a vehicle. The kid looked worried. “Excuse me, sir. I can’t find your car.”

“Maybe because it’s a truck,” Devlin said dryly.

“You mean that thing? With the bed all bent out of shape?”

“I know she’s not pretty but she’s sound under the hood.”

“It’s the back end I was worried about.” Abruptly, the boy blushed and shut his mouth.

“What happened to the truck?” A.J. asked.

Devlin clapped a hand on the kid’s shoulder, slipping him a couple of dollars. “Not to worry. I’ll go get her myself.”

“Hey, thanks,” the boy said, looking at the cash. “But I didn’t earn this.”

“With that crowd in there”—Devlin nodded over his shoulders—“you most certainly will have by the end of the night.

The teenager looked happy as he rejoined his friends.

“What happened to the truck?” A.J. asked again.

“Nothing good.” Devlin shrugged and noted her shivering. “Should you go in? It’ll kill me but I can wait until tomorrow if it means you don’t get the flu.”

She shook her head, thinking she didn’t care if it was snowing and she was barefoot. She was determined to hear him out.

“Come on,” she said, and started down the driveway, heading in the general direction she’d seen the attendant go. Devlin caught up with her, slipped his jacket over her shoulders and fell into step at her side.

“It’s to the left,” he said as they approached the end of the driveway.

She turned blindly.

“No, your other left.”

She went the other way.

Down at the end of a long line of cars, standing out among the Mercedes and Jaguars, the truck was a workhorse in a field of Thoroughbreds. As Providence would have it, the thing had been parked right under a streetlamp and the added light wasn’t kind to its fading paint job or the recent damage.

Which was extensive, A.J. noted.

“Good Lord! What happened?” she exclaimed, going in for a closer look. Crushed and mangled as it was, she wondered why the bed was still attached to the cab. “You back into something? Like maybe a wrecking ball?”

“Run-in with a tree limb.”

“That fell out of the sky like a meteor!”

“Yeah, something like that,” Devlin muttered.

A.J. inspected the truck briefly.

“Those are beautiful earrings,” he remarked when she came back and stood in front of him.

“Thank you. They were a gift from my father.”

“They’re a magnificent color.” She watched as his hand reached out and caressed one of the stones. “Although I prefer the red in your hair.”

She warmed under the husky desire behind his words but remembered she should be wary. “Devlin, I—”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so damned sorry. I can’t believe I yelled at you when you were injured and hurting. And then left, for chrissakes. I don’t blame you for being mad. I’ve thought about nothing except you for the last week, trying to come up with a rational explanation for my behavior, some way of explaining why I became so unglued. When I saw you go down, I was terrified, absolutely terrified. I had images of you in a hospital bed, never to get up again. In retrospect, that was highly unlikely but I wasn’t thinking clearly. When you were able to get to your feet, I thought, Okay, she’s all right. But then you got up on that stallion, who was halfway to insane and looking like he was going to jump out of his skin, and I felt like I was in a nightmare. It was awful, watching you hold yourself up by will alone, driving that panic-stricken animal over those jumps.”