“Zack.” She lifted her hands, dropped them. “I still don’t understand. I wasn’t a doormat when I met him, I wasn’t a victim waiting to be exploited. I came from a solid, steady family, as functional as any family manages to be. I was educated, independent, helping to run a business. There’d been men in my life before, nothing really serious, but normal, healthy relationships. Then there I was, manipulated and abused. And trapped.”

Oh, baby, he thought, as he had when she’d fallen to pieces in the café kitchen. “Why are you still blaming yourself for it?”

The question broke her rhythm. For a moment she could only stare at him, baffled. “I don’t know.” She walked over to sit in the chair beside him.

“It’d be a good next step to stop doing that.” He said it easily, taking a sip of his beer. There was still temper inside him, dregs of it for Nell, but a new and ripe well of it for the man—the faceless, nameless entity—who’d scarred her.

He thought he might work that off later by pounding the hell out of Ripley’s punching bag.

“Why don’t you tell me about your family?” he suggested and offered her the beer. “You know my mother can’t cook worth a damn and my father likes to take snapshots with his new toy. You know they grew up here on the island, got married, and had a couple of kids. And you’ve had personal acquaintance with my sister.”

“My father was in the Army. He was a lieutenant colonel.”

“An Army brat.” Since she shook her head at the beer, he took another pull himself. “Saw some of the world, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, we moved around a lot. He always liked getting new orders. Something new to handle, I suppose. He was a good man, very steady, with a wonderful, warm laugh. He liked old Marx Brothers movies and Reese’s peanut butter cups. Oh, God.”

Grief caught her by the throat, choked off her voice, dug raw wounds in her stomach.

“He’s been gone so long, I don’t know how it could seem like yesterday.”

“When you love somebody, it’s always there. I still think about my grandmother now and again.” He took Nell’s hand, held it loosely. “When I do, I can smell her. Lavender water and peppermint. She died when I was fourteen.”