Page 79 of Operation Rescue

Especially when it had nearly cost her their son, too.

“Erin?”

Blaine. He’d come back. She’d half expected him to take off. Maybe even take Ethan with him. And she wouldn’t have blamed him.

In the rush she hadn’t shut the bathroom door, and he quickly found her. And almost as quickly he was down on the floor beside her.

“Are you all right?”

She tried to smile but was pretty sure it came out more like a wince. “Dinner came back for a visit.”

“Didn’t agree with you?”

“Figuratively and I think literally. Because right now I don’t agree with me, either.”

“Agree with what?”

“Something just hit me. Hard. About why I’ve been…the way I’ve been with Ethan.”

He seemed to hesitate, then said, “Cautious?”

“You can say it. Overprotective. Or as Ethan put it, coddling.” She let out a disgusted breath. “And there’s another phrase for it that seems appropriate. Helicopter mom.”

That one got a slight twitch of a grin out of him. And that enabled her to go on.

“I’ve been overprotective of Ethan because I couldn’t protect you.”

Again he hesitated, but then he said softly, “I thought I was the protector.”

“You are, in all the ways that matter. I was just…trying to control what I could, because I was terrified of what I couldn’t.”

He slipped an arm around her. And because it was what she’d always done with him, she leaned against him, resting her head gratefully on his strong shoulder.

“I have to let Ethan be himself. I know that now.” She sighed. “It’s going to take him a while to get past this, but he won’t at all unless I give him room.”

“Within reason,” Blaine said. “There have to be limits. He is only fourteen.”

“I think he’ll only accept those limits from you. For now, at least.”

He was quiet for so long she had to wonder what he was thinking. Then, at last, he said, “Then I guess I’d better stick around.”

She straightened abruptly, turning to stare at him, fixing on those eyes she’d once teasingly called “clear flying blue.”

“Just how,” she said carefully, “do you mean that?”

He shifted on the floor then, turning to face her. She had a brief flash of memory, from the time when that simple movement, when getting down here with her would have been impossible. She’d always looked at that time as him doing all the fighting, she was just the support staff. But now, thanks to his insistence, she was thinking maybe she had fought, maybe as hard as he said.

“You said you never stopped loving me,” he said bluntly.

“And I meant it.”

“So do I.”

Her breath caught. “Are you saying…you want to try again?”

“I’m saying I’m tired of not having the woman I love in my life.”

Her heart leaped, but this was too important to go on impulse. She thought about what she’d admitted, that if his injuries had been permanent, she would have stayed.