She nodded.
“Come on, then. I’ll walk you over to Noelle’s and then take the dogs home.”
“I have steaks thawing. I’d taken them out for my dinner with Peter. I was going to toss them back into the freezer, but we have time. Perhaps you’d like to stay for dinner?”
His eyes searched her face, and an ironic half-smile passed over his lips. “Sure, why not. Want me to grill them?”
“Can you?”
“Sure. And if you have potatoes and other vegetables, I can take care of them too.”
She pursed her lips at him. “What does that leave me to do?”
“A salad to start, and fruits for dessert?”
“You don’t think I’m any good in the kitchen, do you?”
“If you want to learn, now’s as good a time as any. Grilling is hard to screw up.”
“Don’t count on it,” Holly muttered, “but I’m game to try, if you are.”
Laughing, he went to her back patio to fire up the grill and returned shortly with a bemused smile on his face. “I’ll need a bunch of paper towels.”
“What for?”
“Clean off the cobwebs. When was the last time the grill was used?”
She thought hard. “Two years, I think. Independence Day weekend, so closer to two and a half years.”
He shook his head as he grabbed a roll of paper towels and the small shaker of garlic salt. “Can you bring out the steaks in five minutes?”
Holly chuckled. He’s definitely not after me for my cooking skills. Dutifully, she trotted out five minutes later with the steaks.
James glanced up at her. “You’ve got a great charcoal grill here. You should use it more often.”
“Does it come with instructions?” she asked, watching from a safe distance as he soaked the charcoal with lighter fluid and lit it with a spark from the lighter. Flames roared up, a merry heat that lured her closer to warm her hands. “Do we put it on now?”
“Not unless you want burned steak. We wait until the edges of the charcoal turn from black to white.” With a pair of tongs, he knocked over the little pyramid of charcoal, spreading the heat, and then set the grating on top. “Here, hand me the steak.”
“Do we put it on now?”
“After we season it.” He liberally rubbed garlic salt onto both sides of the steaks. “All right, are you ready?”
“Now?”
“That’s right. Come on.” He handed her the tongs and stood behind her. “Carefully, now. Don’t drop it on the grass.”
Holly giggled. “I’m not totally incompetent.” The heat from his body warmed her back, and his right hand was steady on hers as they lifted the steaks onto the grill.
“Two minutes each side to sear,” he said.
“You have a watch?”
He tugged his smartphone from his pocket and glanced at the time. He did not step back and Holly did not feel inclined to step away either. There was something simple and comforting about standing close to each other, their right hands clasped.
At the two-minute mark, they flipped the steaks together. Holly said nothing; she did not want to shatter the quiet intimacy of the moment.
With James guiding her hand, she flipped the steaks over again and then he lowered the lid over the grill. She thought he might have cast a quick glance at his phone to check the time, but at that moment, she was too relaxed, too languid to care. “This is a great way to spend the afternoon. Why didn’t we do this sooner?”
She could feel as well as hear the chuckle in the movement of his chest. “I think I overestimated my attachment to my job.”
Holly turned her head to look up at him. “What do you mean?”
“I think a relationship with you might have been well worth a frantic scramble to find a new job, but it’s probably too late for that now.”
“Is it?”
“You’re going to New York tomorrow.”
“It’s just for a visit.”
“I’m not sure Havre de Grace can compete with New York City.”
“It would depend entirely on what I’m looking for, wouldn’t it?”
He wrapped his left arm around her waist. “And what are you looking for?”
Her heart pounded, and the blood rushing through her brain left her lightheaded. She turned to face him. Their eyes met—his questioning, hers challenging. She thought she detected a hint of worry in the set of his eyebrows, but he lowered his lips to hers. She closed her eyes, and her world zeroed in on him.
He tasted of rich, dark chocolate—a terribly dangerous flavor for a self-confessed chocoholic—touched with a hint of a sweetness. His lips were firm, and the kiss started out as scarcely more than the exchange of breath deepened as she raked her fingers through his short hair and held him close. His kiss, tinted with urgency and anchored by constancy, reflected their unspoken relationship. What she had not expected, however, was how it made her nerves tingle with need.
For James?
She pulled away, breaking the kiss. Her chest heaved with her quickened breathing. Holly stared at James; the words tangled in her mind and never made it past her lips.
He gazed at her as if trying to gauge her reaction. When she did not move, he reached past her, raised the cover of the grill, and flipped the steaks before lowering the cover once more.
“Did…did the steaks burn?” Holly asked, her voice shaky.
“No.” His terse response told her that he was waiting for her reaction. She knew him well; he would step forward or step back depending on what she wanted and what she did.
Her heartbeat raced. For a moment, Brandon’s face flickered at the edges of her mind, but he did not seem as real as the man, as the friend who stood in front of her, the friend who had stood beside her for years.
She wet her lips, as much a nervous gesture as one of anticipation. “I figure that if the steaks aren’t burned, we’re not trying hard enough.”
James’s gaze hardened, and then a slow smile spread across his face. “I don’t burn food.”
Holly gave him a wicked look. “We’ll see about that.”
“It has a nice, charcoal-y taste,” Holly remarked a half hour later as she demurely sliced through her steak.
James, seated across the cozy kitchen table from her, gave her a rueful look as he scrapped the burned bits off his steak.
“Good thing I like my meat well done.” With some effort, Holly suppressed a smile. An overcooked meal was a small price to pay for finding out that James’s kiss could get a slow-burning fire going in the pit of her stomach. If she had been younger—eight years younger, specifically—she might have craved a searing, all-consuming passion, the kind that consumed all in its path and then extinguished, having consumed all its own fuel.
Eight years older and wiser, she was more than content with the slow and steady burn, the kind that generated fuel even as it consumed it, guaranteeing its existence long into the future.
The future.
Holly pressed her lips together. “What’s going to happen now?”
James inhaled deeply. “Are you going to New York City tomorrow?”
“I…I think I must.”
“Okay,” he said and let the topic drop entirely.
“Aren’t you going to talk me out of it?”
“I’ve told you how I feel about you, and I’m sure you can extrapolate how I feel about you going to New York. But I can’t make your decisions for you, and if I were in your position, I would want to understand all my options before making any decision.”
“Nothing is ever certain.”
“Of course not, but you can swing the odds by understanding the options and then giving the option you pick everything you’ve got.”
“What are you going to do?”
“When you’re in New York? Take the dogs for long walks. I have a couple of house projects to handle before the new year.”
“No, I meant us.”
He lowered his gaze. “I’ll see if any of the po
sitions I applied for pan out, just in case there’s an us.”
“And if they don’t?”
“I’ll look for a position outside the school district. It’d mean a longer commute, but it’s workable.”
“Why won’t you say what I know you must have surely thought of? You know that with the money I inherited, I could quit my job.” Holly’s jaw tensed. Peter had certainly thought of it. He had even made plans on what to do with her money.
James shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve earned the right to ask that. Let’s not have any illusions about what we are right now. We’re good friends who are considering becoming more, but as you say, there are no guarantees in life and it’s a big step for either one of us to quit a job for the sake of a potential relationship.”
And yet you are willing to do it. Holly toyed with the food on her plate. Didn’t it suggest a relationship that had gone beyond its first few tentative steps, a relationship accelerated by a deep friendship? “Why are you so noncommittal about us?” she asked.
“Because as long as you report to me at school, there is no us. Don’t you see, Holly? If we try to date and word gets out, one—or both—of us will have to leave our jobs. Until you’re sure this is what you want, I can’t commit. We’d have to go into this together.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “I think…I still want to go to New York tomorrow.”
He inclined his head, indicating that he had heard her. “Would you like me to drop you off at the airport?”
“No, it’s a long way to BWI. I’ll just drive my car over to Noelle’s tonight, and then leave from her place for the airport tomorrow morning.” She set her fork down. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” James said with a faint, tired smile. “I don’t want to be the guy you settled for because you didn’t know better.”
“You won’t be. Peter already holds that title from eight years ago. I don’t think I realized how much I grew up until he came back and I realized that he hadn’t grown up.”
He chuckled, but the sound was quietly ironic. “Change is difficult for most people, even for me.”
“I’ve known you for five years. I didn’t think you’d changed all that much.”
“My marriage to Elena was falling apart even before we moved to Havre de Grace, but I’d hoped that being in a small town would allow us to close out the distractions of a larger city and focus on each other.”
“I’m guessing it didn’t work.”
“No, because fundamentally, neither Elena nor I had changed. We didn’t want the same things. We married each other with our eyes half closed, probably each believing that we could swing the other around to our point of view.” He shook his head. “It didn’t work, and I learned that there are some things all the passion in the world can’t make up for.” With effort, he managed a faint smile. “I’d like to avoid the same mistake the second time around.”
Holly swallowed hard through the lump in her throat. Would she be making a mistake by going to New York or by staying?
Chapter 12
Holly did not expect traffic on the way to the airport; there were few cars on the road early in the morning. Even so, she had left for the airport with lots of time to spare. She had undertaken the journey often. Visiting her aunt had been a monthly ritual, made convenient by the commuter flights and trains between BWI and JFK airports.
Her wheeled bag had casual and dressy clothes, matching accessories, and complementary eye shadow colors. After a long internal debate fueled by unhelpful comments from Noelle, Holly had decided to wear a kimono-styled blouse over a pair of black slacks. She left her hair loose, and it swung around her shoulders as she walked through the airport to her gate.
A frown furrowed her brow as she took her seat on the plane and looked out of the window at the baggage handlers loading bags onto the plane. Why couldn’t she shake the feeling that she had left something behind? She ran through a mental checklist. Clothes for every occasion, makeup, sexy lingerie—she flushed—just in case. In her handbag, she had wallet, keys, her electronic tablet.
No, she wasn’t missing anything. Besides, as long as she had a credit card, she would be all right. Nerves. It was just nerves, she told herself sagely. It would her first weekend away with a man in a long time, and Brandon was sexy enough to set any woman’s libido on fire.
Something that James could do as easily and smoothly with a kiss.
She chewed on the edge of her fingernail, her mind lingering on her last glimpse of James the previous night. He had helped carry her bag to her car and then walked around to the driver’s side to close her door for her. She lowered the window and smiled up at him. “Thank you for taking care of Mojo.”
“No problem.” A faint smile curved his lips. “You have a good time.”
She bit down on her lower lip. The heat of a guilty flush crept up her cheeks.
“No, really,” James said. “I mean it; have a good time. If you come back and tell me you’ve chosen me, I’ll know I won fair and square.”
In spite of herself, she laughed. “All right. I’ll humor your sense of fair play.”
She had looked in the rearview mirror when she had driven away and left him standing in front of her driveway with Lucy and Mojo. Tears stung her eyes and she could hardly breathe through the pressure in her chest. It scarcely mattered that logic told her she and James were not in a relationship.
Somehow, her heart felt differently.
The disconnect made little sense. Holly mulled over it until the magnificent Manhattan skyline rose in the horizon. As the plane dipped lower over New York City, the silhouettes of buildings gave way to a blur of dull gray and dirty brown. Not very pretty, she sighed. Not quite like Havre de Grace. But this was where Brandon lived, in a city that promised everything she could possibly want.
In the depths of her heart, a tiny voice whispered, “No.”
The weight pressing against her lungs refused to go away. Her palms were damp, and her heart raced as she disembarked from the plane and walked toward the exit where Brandon had promised to wait for her. The wheels of her trolley bag rattled as she pulled it behind her. With every step, the feeling of dread grew.
Brandon stood just beyond the security gate. He waved when he caught sight of her and stepped forward to envelope her in a hug.
Holly sucked in a sharp breath. His aftershave shot straight to her head. The scent she had once found delicious made her recoil. He smelled foreign.
She wanted James with his clean scent of soap and faint hint of masculine musk, and the inexplicable taste of chocolate in his kiss.
The tiny voice in her head became a shriek. “No!”
Holly took a step back from Brandon and stared up into his surprised gaze. “I…I’m sorry.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve just realized I’m in love.”
Brandon’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Presumably not with me?”
“No.” Holly managed a weak smile. “He’s my boss. I think he’s been in love with me for a long time, and I’ve just realized…”
“You feel the same way.”
“I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, but in here—” She pressed her hand to her chest. “I’ve finally stopped hyperventilating. I think it’s the right decision.”
Brandon wore a faint frown. “Are you going to turn around and go home, back to him?”
“I think I will.” Holly pressed her lips together. “I…I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head, but his frown had given way to a rueful smile. “Relationships are tough enough that I don’t want to start it as the second place contender.”
What was it with men who saw relationships and love as a goddamned competition, Holly wondered.
Brandon looked annoyed, but his voice remained polite. “Come on, I’ll walk you over to the sales counter so you can change your ticket.”
“Thank you, Brandon. You’re a good man.”
�
�Don’t tell me; I think I’ve heard it before. Some day a wonderful woman will realize it?” His tone was ironic. He reached for her bag. “The counter’s this way.”
Holly was a hundred dollars poorer for the change fee, but her heart was light as Brandon walked her back to the security gate. Before she joined the line, she turned to face him. “Thank you,” she said. “And I’m so sorry about the weekend.”
“No worries.” He waved it away even though he still looked rather exasperated. “Have a good flight.”
She nodded awkwardly, decided a kiss—even just a friendly peck on the cheek—would be too personal, and then entered the line for the security checkpoint. She inhaled deeply what felt like her first clean breath in a long time.
She was going home to James.
So much for that, Brandon thought. He shoved his hands in his pockets. It was probably just as well she pulled out before the relationship got involved and messy, but it was galling to think that he had never really had a chance with her. He grunted under his breath; only a woman could fall in love without realizing that she had fallen in love.
A flicker of motion caught his attention and he glanced sideways at a man who hurried past other customers to enter the security line.
Brandon’s hyper-alert New Yorker instincts screamed at him. He stared at the man who wore a pair of sunglasses in spite of being indoors. Why did he look so familiar?
It came to Brandon suddenly. Cheryl’s ex-boyfriend—the one who had wormed himself into her confidences and caused her to betray professional confidences. He had cost Cheryl her job as Brandon’s paralegal and private secretary.
Asshole, Brandon thought.
Brandon’s momentary flicker of annoyance gave way to cold alarm. The man was staring intently at Holly’s back, his jaw so taut he must have been gritting his teeth. His hands gripped the strap of his small travel bag; muscles corded his biceps.
Brandon reached for his smartphone, but Holly did not answer. Her cellphone must have been off. Damn it.
He stepped away for a moment. What were the chances that he was overreacting?
Haunted: A Love Letters Novel Page 10
