"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry about what happened at the Elliotts' today. Franki filled me in, and I was just sick about it."

Apparently Franki had kept her word. Craig breathed a cautious sigh of relief. "Don't worry about it. Just go find Sloan and make sure he doesn't do something stupid."

She snorted. "I could never stop him before. Thanks, Craig." And she hung up.

Craig was just considering whether it would be a bad idea to go in search of Franki's company again, despite the fact that he'd left her only an hour ago, when the phone rang again.

Thirty seconds later he hung up, and stared at it. And a slow, sweet smile curved his lips. He got up and headed into his bedroom where he grabbed the spare blanket out of the blanket box at the foot end. He tossed it over his shoulder and strode out of the room. Still smiling.

He exited the inn, and was soon ambling toward the beach, whistling You Are My Sunshine, and imagining the crackling fire and warm embrace that would be awaiting him up ahead. He wondered how she had talked her brother into making that call for her. And why. Derek probably didn't even know who he had been talking to, the message had been so terse and brief, a quick recitation of a message to some anonymous acquaintance. Only Derek would fall for it.

It took him less than five minutes to arrive at the designated spot. He stepped out of the trees onto the sand that was still warm from the heat of the day. The gentle lullaby of the waves greeted him, but no fire crackled, and no delicate fingers reached for him.

"Franki?" he called. She must be late. She must have- Something struck him from behind. Pain rocketed through his head as he fell to his knees, grappling for a solid hold on consciousness as well as his supper. Nausea and vertigo held him hostage. He remained on all fours. He couldn't even risk a glance behind him to catch a glimpse of his attacker.

He managed to lift a hand and touch the back of his head where a bulge had already formed. He drew his fingers back, sticky with blood. He groaned out, "If you want money, I left my wallet in the room."

He sensed a presence beside him, and then a low, husky voice whispered in his ear. "I don't want your money, you fuckin' queer."

Craig tried to turn his head, but he didn't get far. A vicious kick to his ribs sent him flying into a pile of stones and driftwood. His jaw cracked against a branch, and he felt something sharp pierce into his back. Raw panic clawed at his gut as he tried to right himself, but his limbs hung from his body like lead weights. He felt powerless. Helpless. He could barely move or speak. And no one was going to venture by to help him.

"Why?" he whispered as the dark, shadowy figure approached. "What did I do?"

The form blotted out the moon and the stars. "Did you think I'd just look the other way? Did you think I'd let somebody like you put her through that hell again? Did you actually think you'd get away with it?"

Craig licked his lips and tried to shift his weight off the biting edges of the rocks and shards of wood. "I don't get it. Get away with what?"

His attacker grabbed the front of his shirt and lifted him to his feet. "Don't play dumb, asshole," breathed the man, and Craig caught a whiff of beer and...some other odor that was vaguely familiar but he couldn't quite identify.

He was finally close enough to see a face, but a black knit ski mask obscured the features.

"I'm not playing," he pleaded. "I don't understand." His feet finally had purchase and he wanted to run but his legs felt like molten rubber.

"You don't really need to understand, do you?"

A gloved fist lashed out and rapped Craig across the mouth. The assailant let go and Craig sank to the sand. He felt a warm trickle on his cheek. "Please..." was all he managed to whisper. And then he hated himself for cowering like a child.

The black-clad figure towered over him. "You people make me sick." Craig caught a hint of a slur to the words. "Screwin' each other in public bathrooms and kissing on the street. But even so, I can leave you be as long as you keep to yourselves. But not if you start stickin' your dick into places where you've got no business stickin' it. Franki needs a real man."

Franki . This was about Franki? "I-I'm not really gay," he stuttered, as he held a hand to his bleeding lip. "It's all a misunderstanding."

He heard a strained chuckle. He looked up and a fresh, hot fist of terror gripped his insides. The man was holding something-something that glinted in the moonlight.

"Misunderstanding," taunted the man. "I like that. You don't know the half of it."

Bree slipped out from behind the wheel of her car. Her sandaled feet sank into a thick shag of grass and clover. Dew immediately drenched her toes and a vicious wind played whip-and-tangle with her hair.

Way up here, where the Niagara Escarpment soared a hundred feet above the Bay, the wind rarely rested. It blasted the limestone rock face with the constant barrage of fine spray and dust that had worn it down and smoothed it out over countless centuries.

From this cliff you could see for miles. On a clear, sunny day you could swear you were gazing over the sweet, blue edge of infinity. At night there was no finer spot to listen to the distant crash of waves and contemplate the stars. The setting was rich and lush and beautiful. And she hated it.

For years she had loved it. For years she and Sloan had considered this their special hideaway. They used to bring blankets and picnics up here for midnight snacks that invariably led to passionate feasts of flesh. Not even Troy or Franki had known where they met for their midnight trysts. It had been an isolated, magical, enchanted place where they had shared of their dreams and themselves. But then, in a heartbeat, all that had changed.

She had come here tonight on a hunch, hoping with all her heart that she was wrong. But Sloan's rental car blatantly advertised how well she still knew him. And when she crested the small rise and saw him sitting there, his feet dangling over the edge, his eyes trained on the star-studded horizon, a wall of memories crashed down on her. Her stomach clenched just as it had when she found him here twelve years ago. The night of Jonathan Carver's funeral.

She stopped at the top of the rise and watched him, taking a moment to study him in the moonlight. As she watched, Sloan drew up his legs, and planted his feet beneath him. He stood, but he didn't turn to walk away from the edge. In fact- "Sloan!" she shouted.

Startled, he whirled around to face her, and for a moment he teetered on the edge. A scream caught in her throat, and she watched in mute horror as he struggled to regain his balance and step away from the precipitous ledge.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he shouted as she ran toward him. "Jesus Christ! I almost fell." As if to confirm the jaws of death that he had just escaped, he turned to look down at the bed of jagged rocks that would have surely been his final resting place.

"Well, I'm sorry," she stormed once she reached him. She grabbed his shirt and dragged him back a few more feet. "But you scared me, too. I screamed because I thought you were going to jump!" Tears burned her eyes but she refused to give in to them.

He set his jaw and glared at her. But she noted that he didn't deny it.

She took a step back. "My God. You were! What's happening to you, Sloan? Are you depressed about something? Surely nothing is that bad. Is it something to do with Craig? Or us? Or..." She clasped her hands together. "Or with what I asked you to do? If somehow I've opened up old wounds or-"

"I'm not depressed and I wasn't going to jump. I-"

"But you were thinking about it!"

His eyes glittered in the starlight. He said nothing.

He moved to step past her but she caught his arm. "Please! Talk to me. You stopped talking to me the last time I found you here." Even as she said it she knew it was true. Now that she looked back, she could see it so clearly. That was the day it all changed.

In the years after Jonathan's death, her relationship with Sloan had changed, the difference subtle but undeniable. They had continued to fight and make love. They had gone places and shared of themselves, but there had been something undeniably different about him. As if a little piece of him had been chipped away, and they no longer fit quite as well.

Jonathan Carver hadn't only ended his own life. Somehow he had also killed something in his son. And in so doing, had also ended any chance Bree had ever had at happiness.

"There's nothing to talk about." He shook off her hand. "I'm sorry you worried and came out here for nothing. But I just needed some time alone."

She could smell the liquor on his breath and hear it in his voice. "No. I think that's the last thing you need. You practically drowned yourself today, and now I find you, half-drunk-"

"I didn't try to drown myself, and I'm not half-drunk." Even as he said it he swayed.

"All right. I'll amend that. I find you completely drunk, sitting on a precipice contemplating a trip to hell. I think you very much need to be with someone. You need to talk to someone, Sloan. Why not me?"

He shook his head. "You don't understand. Hell, I don't understand."

"Understand what? At least tell me the question, for God's sake!"

Something flickered over his features-something that could have been confusion, or pain, or indecision. Or maybe a combination of all three.

His Adam's apple bobbed once and then he whispered. "The question? The question is so simple. It's the answer that screws me up every time." At that moment his eyes lost their glaze and his body steadied. "The question is why?" He whispered it but the word echoed inside her ears like a drowning man's call for help.

She grabbed his hand and pulled him close, close enough that she could feel his heart pumping and his lungs straining. "Why what?"

"Why did he do it?" he choked out. "Why did he leave me? Why did he leave us? I never had a clue that he was unhappy. I mean, sure he had his problems, but doesn't everybody? Was it just a moment of anguish that made him snap? Or was it something inherent in him? Something in his genes that-"

"You're afraid he's passed it on to you, aren't you? You're afraid that someday you're going to end up like him. You're afraid you're going to have some strange, mysterious urge to take your own life, and you won't be able to fight it."

He tried to push her away, but she just clung on tighter. "Is that why you pushed me away so long ago? Why you pushed us all away? Is that the real reason you left, and never called or came back? Not because you were afraid of rejection, but because you were afraid that you'd cause all of us the same pain as you felt when he died?"

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't I? It makes so much sense. I can't believe I didn't think of it before." She plowed ahead, heedless of the waves of tension that shimmered around Sloan. "You have to know how ridiculous that is. Suicide doesn't run in families."

"I don't know... I look like him. I act like him. Everyone always said how alike we were." He sighed. "When I was a kid that used to make me feel so proud. So strong. Now it makes me sick." He dropped his eyes, as if sharing this with her shamed him. "It terrifies me."

She squeezed his hand, even as his words squeezed around her heart. "I can see that. And I can understand it. But you have to convince yourself otherwise. You can decide your own destiny. He was just one man. One man with a problem that he couldn't solve. You may never figure out what that problem was, but it doesn't mean that you share it. Just look at your mother. She took a chance and found happiness. Maybe she didn't make any friends doing it, but-"

His laughter shocked her.

"Sloan?" she asked as he swallowed his giggles and blinked back tears.

He extricated himself from her grasp and shook his head vigorously. "I'm afraid you're making

judgments with only half the information, Bree. That's not nearly all of it. That's not why I left, and that's not why I'm leaving." "What? What do you mean, leaving?" "I'm leaving tomorrow. I've already booked the flight." "But...you just got here. Surely you could stay a week and-" Then it hit her. "You cowardly bastard." He blinked. "What?" "You weren't even going to say goodbye, were you? You were just going to take off again."

"I would have said goodbye."

"Bullshit. And what about my request? And my mother? Were you just going to ignore me? Dismiss me like some pathetic Hollywood starlet who asked you for a part in one of your movies."

"I don't do casting."

"Answer the question," she snarled. "Are you going to do it?"

"No. For a while there I considered it. But things have...they've changed. I just can't. It's too risky."

"And you never take risks," she mocked.

"Not like this." But his voice caught, and she knew he was lying. He was covering something up, and

that infuriated her. "Fine," she shot back. "Take care of yourself. That's what you're good at, after all. Don't worry about me, or Troy, or Franki. Don't care about anybody, and don't let anybody care about you." She clenched her fists at her sides and put some more distance between them. "Go put a gun in your mouth, and blow your brains all over a wall for all I care. Just don't expect me to come to clean up the mess."

She already regretted saying it. Even as it was coming out of her mouth, she regretted it. But she had never hated herself so much as she did the moment he turned away from her and whispered, "Fuck you, Chicky-Bree."

And then his shoulders hunched.

And Bree felt herself melt. She wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her cheek against his back. "Dammit, Sloan, I'm sorry. You always could set off my sparks like no one else."

His chest heaved once. "I miss him, Bree." She felt the words reverberate through his body. And into hers. "It's been twelve years. I thought it would be better, but it's not. It was easier down there. I could almost forget. But coming back, seeing all of you, just knowing that the house is there..."

He turned around and wordlessly closed his arms around her. He rested his cheek against her hair.

"If I close my eyes I can still see it so clearly. I can smell the gunpowder and that stale, metallic scent of blood. I walked in that door, and it was like a freight train slammed into my chest. When I lost him it felt like I lost my whole world."

She blinked back the sting of her own tears, and then he muttered, "Shit. I'm sorry. I know you lost your dad, too. I've got no right to talk like my pain is bigger or stronger than yours."

She stopped him with a finger on his lips, and when she looked into his face she noticed a glistening trail beneath each eye. "You have every right. You were younger, and much more vulnerable. What you went through was different. Harder. I know that. I just wish..." Of their own accord her fingers moved from his mouth to trace the soft line of his brow. And then the hard ridge of his cheekbone.

His eyes closed as he pressed his cheek more firmly against her palm. "What do you wish, Bree?"

"I wish we could have shared things better. We were so young and earnest and eager to prove our independence. We weren't afraid of anything, and we never thought anything could come between us. And then when our fathers died I think we didn't know how to be vulnerable, or how to grieve. I think we kind of lost ourselves."

"And each other." He murmured the words against her palm and a familiar shiver skittered up her arm.

"Yes. And each other."

His grip around her waist tightened and her heart began to pound against her throat. She laced her fingers through his hair-first one hand, and then the other. But it took no coaxing from her to urge him to lower his head and settle his mouth over hers.

They fell into the routine as easily as dancers who hear a familiar suite and their bodies move reflexively to the melodic lilt of the flutes. Her body melted against his, just as it had a thousand times before. Just as she had dreamed a thousand times since.

His hand fisted in her hair, and his lips became more insistent, crushing hers in a desperate search for...for something that perhaps neither of them could identify. Coherent thought abandoned her as his hand cupped her breast, and she lost her will to look beyond anything but her body's immediate

demands for fulfillment.

Only when he released her mouth to nip at her jawline, and press a kiss to the pulse at the base of her throat-only when he murmured against her skin did she catch her breath enough to speak.

"What?" she breathed. "What did you say?"

"I said, it seems like I've missed you forever. No one else has ever come close. I've wanted this back since the day I left."

Puzzled, she halted her hands where they were-bracketing his rib cage beneath his shirt. "What do you

mean? I thought-" Her eyes flew open as realization hit.

"Oh, Sloan," she groaned. "I can't do this."

He tried to pull her close again. She resisted but her resolve was weak.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "Why not?"