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Then he shifted slightly in his chair, and relented. “Yes. We met at a bar. It was a bar where a lot of servicemen went, back then. We were both underage, which wasn’t unusual there, and neither of us was drunk, which was. You were dancing.”

She leaned forward. “I was dancing?” When he nodded, as grumpily as he did everything else, she found herself grinning. “And I lured you in with my smooth dance moves? I can’t say that I’ve danced a whole lot in the past six months, but I feel certain I would know if I possessed the siren-like power to lure men to me like that.” Ruthie was delighted at the very idea. “Was I putting on a show?”

“You were not. You were with your friends, jumping around to some old song. I don’t know the name of it. And you weren’t being alluring.” Dallas looked uncomfortable. More uncomfortable, that was. “You were smiling. You looked…joyful. And then you looked at me.”

Once again, there was a long, fraught silence between them. She sighed. “That’s it?”

Those blue eyes of his slammed into hers, then, and what looked like temper flashed there—sending an echoing pulse of something electric straight through her.

“You can be flippant about this, because you don’t remember,” he told her in a low, hot voice that seemed to make that pulse in her light up. “But I do remember. Our connection was never the problem, Ruthie. Yes. You looked at me. I looked back. And that was the truth of it until you left.”

The intensity made something inside her tremble. Or maybe the idea of it was doing that. Either way, it occurred to her that maybe it was smarter to backtrack. “Okay. Tell me the timeline. All I remember is living with my grandmother after high school.”

“We dated for about six weeks. We got married fast—in a courtroom, not a church, and your grandmother wasn’t pleased. But we both knew that I could be deployed at any moment.” He looked grim, she thought, as he recited these things that were clearly facts. She thought she would know if he was lying—because if she thought about how stunned he’d been to see her last night, and how darkly simmering he was now, it was clear the man was no actor. “And I was deployed, for three or four months at a time. That was hard, but we made it work. Until we couldn’t.”

She considered that. “Where did we live?”

“Military housing,” he said tersely. “You didn’t like it. Not because of the house, but because you didn’t love the forced interaction with some of the other military wives when I was deployed.”

“I know lots of military wives and like them just fine,” Ruthie protested. “Why didn’t I like the ones there?”

Dallas did that jaw thing again. “I don’t know how to explain this, but you and I were serious. Deadly serious. And not all of the other marriages but a lot of them…” He shook his head. “Well, they weren’t like that.”

She nodded and hoped that she looked calm, even though she was trying to figure out all the things he wasn’t saying. “Okay, so how did all of this turn so bad?”

“I can’t…” He bent his head and blew out a breath. “You don’t understand how difficult this is.” His voice was quiet now. But with such a darkness that it made her shiver. “I’m not going to let myself off the hook. But the temptation to do it is just about killing me.”

“I won’t know the difference,” she assured him. Maybe a little carelessly, she could admit.

He lifted his head and those blue eyes slammed into her all over again. “That’s the trouble. You should remember and you can’t. Instead, you’re sitting across from me hearing a story told to you that could be about anybody.”

“I believe you, Dallas—” she started, thinking that had to be the issue.

“What I’m doing is trying to decide just how much of a shitty person I am,” he bit out. “Will I tell you the truth? Or will I tell you whatever I need to tell you so I can get back something I lost that I never thought I’d see again?” The look on his face made her heart seem to change its position beneath her ribs. “This is not easy, Ruthie.”

And she found herself breathless as he got up again and stalked back up to the counter. She watched him talk to one of those redheaded women, who set the small pizza he’d ordered on a platter and chatted with him about things she probably could have overheard if she wanted.

But the thing was, her pulse was thundering around inside of her. It was too loud in her own ears. And not only in her ears. She could feel that storm inside him like it was a part of her, like there was a cold wind inside this restaurant, biting at her from all sides. It was almost overwhelming.

It was also the most alive she’d felt in a long, long time.

As long as she could remember, even.

Dallas came back and slid the pizza onto the table between them. And it smelled so good, and she was suddenly so hungry even though he’d made her breakfast not that long ago, that she found herself diving in greedily.

She hadn’t even looked at what he was ordering, but it didn’t matter. Because whatever this was, it was the perfect combination of salty and a little bit sweet. If she really focused, she could see that it was a pepperoni and hot honey situation, and she approved heartily. The crust was neither too thick nor too thin, and had just a little bit of its own bite.

It was easily the best pizza she’d ever had.

And she tried not to crack herself up at that, because for all she knew, she’d had a deep pizza-related trauma and had completely forgotten about all the pizzas she had known. But she could see that the man sitting across from her, with that dark expression on his face, was unlikely to find anything she said about pizza trauma funny.

So she kept it to herself and ate in silence.

“I’m glad to see that hasn’t changed,” he said some while later, when she sat back and sighed happily. When she looked at him, he indicated the table between them. “You always did enjoy your food.” When she laughed at that, he frowned. “It’s a good thing. You used to tell me that it was amazing to you how many people wandered through this life, never allowing themselves the simple joys that are all around us, like enjoying good food.”

“I sound very wise,” Ruthie said, still laughing a little. “I actually remember that. Not telling you anything, of course. But I didn’t lose my appetite in the crash. Food is joy, and it should be treated that way. It can be simple fuel too, of course, but I don’t think it should be punishment.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”