He’d gone through the pain meds issue once before when they were still together. She’d been there for him – probably more than he had any right to expect her to be, and for that he owed her a debt of gratitude. Hell, he owed Melanie a lot of things.

‘I’m off the pills now,’ he told her. ‘Johnny set me up with a trainer who’s making sure I stay on the straight and narrow.’

‘Wow, glad to hear it,’ she said. ‘Out of all the people in your life, Johnny’s the best. The two of us always had something in common.’

That caused him to raise his eyebrows. ‘Really?’ he asked. ‘What do you guys have in common?’

There was another long pause. ‘We both always want the best for you, obviously.’

Out of all the words that could have come through his earpiece, Ward hadn’t been expecting that.

‘Forgive me if I find that hard to believe, considering that I haven’t heard from you in months.’

‘Well, work has been keeping me busy and I wanted to take some time out too. See what was going on with me and how I was feeling.’

‘Right. Well, just in case you’re interested in what I was feeling, I was feeling like you just walked out of my life and left me hanging. I was feeling like everything that you and I had been through didn’t mean a damned thing. I didn’t mind when you moved away, Mel, I understood that was something you had to do. But you cut all ties with me. You didn’t answer my calls, didn’t reply to my texts. Hell, you even blew off Johnny who you suddenly seem to like so much.’

There was a long pause and Ward wondered if he’d gone too far and she’d set the phone down.

Finally, Melanie spoke again. ‘I was scared, to tell you the truth. The thought that there might be something real between us scared the hell out of me.’

‘It scared me, too,’ he admitted softly.

‘So I know that when you get scared, the first thing you do is put as much distance between yourself and what’s scaring you. That’s what I was afraid was going to happen with us. I was afraid that one day, you were going to wake up take one look at me and decide I wasn’t what you wanted. I figured that you’d get bored and move on to the next girl. Like you always did.’

‘You didn’t know that, though. And you never gave either of us the chance to find out.’

‘I know,’ she admitted, ‘and that’s totally on me. I take full responsibility for that. Things are different now though. Things have changed.’

‘How?’ he demanded. ‘What’s changed?’