Page 41 of Jasper

“No. I want to get this out before I lose my nerve.”

“You can say anything you want to me, Sloane, even if you think I’ll get mad.”

Her face scrunched up, and that was when he realized how hard this must be for her. Her ex played head games with her.

“Even if I get mad, I’m not going to take that anger out on you. I’m not your ex.”

“I know you’re not. Some habits are just hard to break.”

“That much I know, sweetheart. Some of our hang-ups might never really be broken.” He picked up his own plate and dug in. “Now, spit it out. Worrying over it isn’t going to make it any easier to say.”

Sloane took a deep breath and studied him. She’d been thinking about this all day and had debated talking to him at all, but if her dad’s story could help Jasper, she’d share it with him. He was a good man, and she’d hate to see her father’s ending become Jasper’s as well.

“Dad was a combat pilot. He had me in the cockpit a plane from the time I was old enough to understand what it was until two days before he died. I used to love going up in the air with him. Being up there, it was his life.”

She shifted, hugging her legs tighter as she let those memories come to the surface.

“When I was nine, we got a call saying Daddy had been injured, and Mom and I were flown to Germany. He’d been ambushed. Normally, he didn’t do any kind of groundwork, but for some reason, that day, he’d agreed to go out with a convoy, and the line was attacked. Dad was the only one to make it out alive. They even gave him a medal because he tried to save people.”

Jasper leaned forward, and Sloane noted he seemed more interested than he had before.

“He lost his leg, but he lived.”

“I’m sorry that happened to him.”

“Dad came home a few months later, but he wasn’t the same, and not because of his leg. That never got him down. He looked at it as just a side effect of serving his country. What he couldn’t get over was what the psychiatrist called survivor’s guilt.”

She watched him closely and noted how he stiffened. That was what she thought.

“He was the only person to survive that day. He tried so hard to save people, but there was nothing he could do. He lost his leg because he ignored it to try to help others. As a serviceman, he’d been trained to leave no one behind, and this time, hehadto leave them all behind because they died. He felt like he abandoned them. That’s how he put it. I heard him talking to Mom one night about how guilty he felt, like he’d failed them.”

“Guilt is a hard thing to overcome.”

“You feel guilty a lot, don’t you?”

“What?” His head snapped up when she asked that question.

“You said you came here to figure out where you went wrong with your client. To discover why you failed her twice.”

He nodded.

“You feel guilty about that.”

His nostrils flared. “That guilt has nothing to do with survivor’s guilt.”

“Doesn’t it?” she asked softly. “Can you tell me something similar didn’t happen to you while you were on active duty? And before you skirt the truth, remember who you’re talking to. I recognize the signs.”

“Why are we talking about this, Sloane?”

“Because my dad never dealt with his guilt, and he killed himself. I don’t want to see that happen to you.”

“It was the kiss earlier, wasn’t it?” He winked slyly. “Can’t bear the thought of losing these smoocheroos.”

Sloane understood what he was doing even if he didn’t. He was deflecting. Thanks to her own therapy, she understood that too. She’d employed that same tactic in a different fashion when people asked her about her ex. She’d always turned the conversation away from the real problem—why she stayed with someone who treated her so poorly.

Jasper didn’t want to talk about this, but she was determined to. She’d gotten to know him better over the last week, and while he aggravated her most of the time to the point she was ready to strangle him, the thought of him sinking into the same kind of depression her father had upset her.

And yes, deep down, she’d miss his smoocheroo lips, as he called them. But she pushed those thoughts aside for two reasons—she wasn’t ready to deal with those feelings, and this really was more important than hormones.

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