By the time he dressed, Derek looked like he had four months ago, when summer was just getting underway and he hadn’t hidden himself from the rest of the world. Skin once sickly pale now took on a healthy, tanned appearance. He almost didn’t recognize the strong, lean, sun-kissed legs that stepped into a tight black swimming bikini, and when he pulled on jeans to cover those legs, the tan feet poking from beneath the denim looked like they belonged to someone else, not him. Someone confident, someone alive. Someone determined to take back what had been stolen from him.
So maybe they were his.
He pulled on a battered T-shirt, then took one of Tad’s old flannel shirts out of the closet and shrugged it on. He sat down on the bed again and untied the twine that bound the love letters togethe
