Extreme Measures

“Arden, I need a favor…”

It was only as he reached for the door of the restaurant that Colin realized he still held Nikki’s newspaper in his hand. He glanced at the headline again.

“Get out of town for a while,” Detective Brock had advised. “Go somewhere quiet. Keep a low profile.”

Good advice, but how the hell was he supposed to keep a low profile when the local media still believed he was some kind of superstar?

Colin knew better. The reality was that he’d failed at everything that had ever mattered. He’d failed as a player and a coach, and he’d failed to be the kind of husband Nikki deserved.

He shoved the paper into the garbage can and headed toward the counter, wondering if his careful planning had been compromised by that seemingly harmless headline.

He’d put his plan into action forty-eight hours earlier. The first step was a flight from Texas to Maryland, where he’d reserved a room in his own name at the Baltimore Courtland Hotel. He’d taken a cab from the airport to the hotel and checked into his room, with explicit instructions that he did not want housekeeping services. After unpacking some clothing and toiletries, he’d taken another cab to the bus terminal and paid cash for a ticket to Washington, D.C.

In Washington, he’d picked up the rental car his agent, Ian Edwards, had reserved for him. Then he’d found a small roadside motel, paid cash for the room and crashed for a few hours before driving through to Fairweather yesterday morning, where he’d checked into another Courtland hotel under Ian’s name.

He wasn’t convinced the circuitous route and subterfuge were necessary, but after what had happened in Austin he didn’t want to take any chances. If someone was looking for him, trying to track his moves, they’d be concentrating on the Baltimore area.

Unless they happened to pick up a copy of the Fairweather Gazette.

He’d told no one of his plan to return to Fairweather. It was just his bad luck that he’d run into Traci Harper as soon as he’d arrived in town yesterday afternoon. Traci was an old high-school friend, now a reporter with the Gazette. He should have anticipated that she would somehow turn a chance encounter into a news item.

His only consolation was that it was unlikely anyone outside of this smack-in-the-middle-of-nowhere town read the local rag. Few of his associates even knew he’d grown up in Fairweather, which made it the obvious place for him to find solitude and anonymity.

Or maybe what he’d really wanted to find was Nikki.

He took the two steaming mugs to a vacant table near the window, where he could see her.

He hadn’t let himself think about her until he was on the plane; he hadn’t been able to think about anything else since. After more than five years, he wouldn’t have expected that she’d figure so prominently in his thoughts.

Maybe it was the realization that he could have been killed, the stark reminder of his own mortality. Whatever the reason, he’d suddenly felt a compelling need to see her again—to explain something he still wasn’t sure he understood himself.

He watched as she disconnected her call, tucked the phone back into her purse. As she crossed the street, her short blond hair bobbed with each step.

She was dressed in casual work attire: short-sleeved sweater in a misty shade of blue, tailored pants a few shades darker, white running shoes. It wasn’t a seductive outfit by any stretch of the imagination, but he felt the familiar tug of desire, anyway. Just like the first time he’d seen her.

He’d fought it at first, refused to believe it. The coolly reserved, completely professional physiotherapist wasn’t anything at all like the women he was usually attracted to. But something inside him had recognized her as his mate.

He’d pursued her relentlessly, and when he’d finally broken through her barriers, he’d found an incredibly passionate woman—a woman who’d touched him on levels he hadn’t known existed before he met her. Whatever else might have gone wrong between them, the sex had always been phenomenal.

He shifted in his seat, cursing his body for choosing to remember that now.

“Thirty minutes,” she reminded him, sliding into the chair across from him.

He pushed one of the mugs toward her. “A little bit of cream, a half a teaspoon of sugar.” He’d remembered her preference, as he’d remembered everything about her.

She wrapped her hands around the mug, a wry smile curving her lips. “It’s been five years. A lot of things have changed in that time.”

“Some things never do,” he countered.

“Are you going to tell me the real reason you came back to Fairweather now?”

“You always did cut right to the chase.” It was one of the things he’d admired about her from the start. She’d been the first therapist assigned to work with him after the injury that had prematurely ended his career, and he’d always appreciated her straightforward approach—even when she was telling him things he didn’t want to hear.

“So why are you here?”

“I was ready for a vacation?” he suggested.

“And you chose Fairweather?” Her eyes narrowed speculatively. “Or is your sudden reappearance somehow linked to the explosion in your apartment?”

Talk about cutting to the chase. “How did you know about that?”

“It was on the news.”

Colin had caught mention of it himself during the previous evening’s sports highlights. The commentary was brief, mentioning only that police were investigating a suspected bombing at the residence of Tornadoes’ head coach Colin McIver. There was no mention of Maria Vasquez, the forty-seven-year-old mother of five, who’d been cleaning his apartment at the time and who was still fighting for her life in ICU.

“Was it a gas leak?” Nikki asked.

He only wished the explanation was something so innocuous. “The cause is still being investigated.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“My apartment needs a little work,” he said, deliberately downplaying the situation. “But that’s only part of the reason that I decided to come back now.”

“And the other part?”

“To see you.”

She stared intently into her cup for a long moment before lifting her gaze. “Why?”

“Because I’ve spent some time in the past few weeks reevaluating my life, facing my mistakes, acknowledging my regrets.”

Her smile was sad. “Where do I fit in? A mistake? Or a regret?”

He reached across the table and covered her hand with his own. “The mistake was in letting you go.”

“You say that as if I wanted out of our marriage, but you were the one who left. You were the one who wanted the divorce.”

“I was too screwed up to know what I wanted. After my father died…” He shrugged.

“I know his death was hard on you,” she said gently. “I know you wished you’d had a chance to bridge the distance between the two of you.”

“I tried. I guess I just didn’t try hard enough.” The sense of regret, of guilt, still gnawed at him. “Did I ever tell you about the last conversation I had with him?”

She shook her head. “What happened?”

“We argued.” He smiled wryly. “It seemed like we were always arguing about something. This time it was about you.”

“Me?”