“Did you tell Win Walker we broke up that summer because I didn’t love you?”

“Damn it,” Angie said, pulling away sharply. “Can’t a person have a private conversation in this town?”

“Sometimes,” John said calmly. “This conversation, for example, is completely private.”

Angie spun around and saw that the nurse had left the desk, that all the chairs in the waiting room were empty, and outside the windows the lights had gone on in the parking lot, and that was empty, too.

She inhaled noisily. With her eyes closed she said, “This is a dangerous game you’re playing.”

“Angie,” he said, his voice a little harder now. “I’ll ask you again. Did you tell Win Walker—”

She cut him off with a short sound and then forced herself to look him in the eye. “I said that, yes.”

He went very still. “I understand the need to explain things away, but, Angie, that’s too much. There were things we couldn’t get past—”

“Like what?”

He sat back. “You couldn’t get comfortable, I couldn’t figure out how to fix that. Maybe you didn’t want me to. But you can’t say that I didn’t love you.”

Those words in John Grant’s voice, at a low whisper. Her whole body shook with it and her mouth was so dry, so very dry, that when she tried to speak, her voice whispered and cracked. But she swallowed and swallowed again until she could make herself understood.

“Not enough,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t have let me walk away.”

He had turned his face toward the wall. She could see him struggling, with disappointment, with anger, with resolution; she had no idea what he was thinking. Then he swung back toward her and Angie saw that under his tan he was pale.

“Okay,” he said. “I don’t think it’s so simple, but I’ll let it go.”

“You’ll let it go?”

“I’ll concede the point, for now.”

“And?” she said, suddenly very tired and unsettled.

“And, I’ve got some things to straighten out before we can take this conversation any further. Before I can make you any promises.”

Angie got up so fast that the chair rocked in place. She felt herself first flushing and then all the color draining out of her face, and all along her arms nerves were jumping. “What makes you think I want promises from you, you arrogant prick?”

He stood, too, caught her wrist and pressed his fingers to her wrist. Then he gave her a grim smile.

She pulled away from him. “Oh, please.”

“You want me.”

“Maybe I do,” Angie said, anger pushing up and out. “But that’s nothing an hour in bed wouldn’t satisfy.”

“No,” he said, his expression utterly calm. “That wouldn’t be enough, and you know it. This isn’t about sex.”