by Jill Shalvis
for the life of her understand how he’d gotten up there. “Are you injured?”
“No.”
She drew a deep breath. “Okay, good. Now what the hell?”
“I drew something in the sand for someone and left them a note to come see, but then I wasn’t sure if it looked right so I climbed up here to check. And now I’m stuck.”
“Stuck,” she repeated.
“As in I can’t get down.”
She took another deep breath. “You free-climbed up the rocks sixty feet to see if your picture was any good…” She whirled around and stared at the rocky sand, and realized she was indeed standing in the middle of a…heart. “Aw.”
“No,” he said. “No aw. It’s not straight.”
“Where is she?” Callie asked.
“I texted her and told her not to come, that I couldn’t get out of work.”
“So you lied,” she said. “Because…?”
“The heart’s crooked.”
Being a teenager had been the most difficult time of her life. Stood to reason that Troy was feeling the same. “And now you’re stuck,” she said.
He sighed.
“I’ll call your dad. He’ll know what to do—”
“No!” he said urgently. “You can’t call him. I’m supposed to be working on a research paper for English. I sneaked out.”
She stared up at him.
“I know,” he said. “You can yell at me later.”
“Troy, I have no climbing skills. I can create a website and I can worry a lot. Those are my two skills.”
“You have more skills than that,” he said. “You make my dad happy. That’s a real talent.”
“Let’s call him,” she said softly.
“I’ll get in trouble.”
“But you’ll be alive.”
No answer.
“Troy. It’ll be okay.”
“We’re finally sorta getting along,” Troy said. “What if he sends me back to my mom’s?”
There was such naked pain in the question that it stabbed right through Callie’s heart. “Oh, honey, don’t you get it yet? He’d never do that. He’d never walk away from you. He’s not like that.” Even as she said the words, she realized she really believed them.
Tanner didn’t walk away.
Not from his son.
And not from her…
She could trust him, she knew this to her very soul. Which of course made him more dangerous than ever because she could fall. She could really fall for him, and he would catch her. “Let me call him,” she said quietly into the phone. “He’ll know what to do.”
Troy didn’t say anything, and she could feel his fear and hesitation through the phone. “Trust me,” she said. “I’m going to disconnect. Hang tight—literally. I’m not going to move from this spot and I’ll call you right back.” She hit END, then sucked in a breath and called Tanner.
He arrived in three minutes, in navy running pants with a white stripe down the outline of each long leg, a skin-tight long-sleeved dry-fit tee and a backward baseball cap as he jogged across the beach toward her. “You okay?” he asked immediately, reaching for her.
Damn, he was a good man. “I am, yes,” she said. “Listen, I was hoping you could make me a promise.”
“Anything.”
She gaped at him. Anything? Anything? And he’d answered so quickly too. But she’d have to marvel over that later because Troy was waiting. In fact, he was still on her cell phone listening to every word. “I want you to promise not to get mad.”
Tanner studied her for a beat. “Have you ever seen me lose my temper?”
“Yes. When you lost your very last senior football game by one touchdown. You trashed the locker room and got taken to the police station where your mother promised the sheriff that she’d punish you far worse than he ever could just so he’d let you go into her custody.”
He stared at her. “Let me rephrase. Have you seen me lose my temper lately? Say in the last decade?”
“A little bit, at the bar that night you told Sam and Cole to butt out.”
“That wasn’t me losing my temper. That was me telling my two nosy-ass friends to butt out.”
Okay, yeah. And in truth, Callie couldn’t really imagine him completely losing it. This Tanner, the man who’d been a SEAL and on the oil rigs, wasn’t a loose cannon. He was careful, pragmatic, tough, and absolutely stoic. He was also hardheaded and opinionated, but he was right, she hadn’t seen him lose his temper in a long time.
Giving up on waiting on her, he scanned their surroundings and she knew the exact moment he found Troy because he went still. “Give me your phone,” he said to Callie without taking his gaze off his son.
“Um—”
He simply took it out of her hand and held it up to his ear. “Talk to me.”
She had no idea what Troy said, but Tanner whipped around and eyed the crooked heart. She wasn’t sure but she thought maybe the very corners of his mouth quirked slightly.
“Hold tight,” he said into the phone, then handed it back to Callie.
“We need ropes, right?” she asked worriedly. “Maybe call search and rescue? Or I can call Matt Bowers—he’s an old friend. He’s a forest ranger now, but he’s also a rock climber. He’d help.”
“I know Matt, but I don’t need him.” And with that, Tanner strode across the rocky terrain, got to the cliff, and started climbing.
Callie sucked in a breath and held it, watching Tanner shimmy up the rocks toward his son, his movements sure and strong despite his leg injury.
When he reached Troy, there was some discussion and then they both began a descent. Tanner went first, remaining within touching distance of his son, clearly dictating his every move.
When father and son finally hit the beach, Callie let out a long shaky breath and hugged Troy hard.
He went still as stone for a beat and then awkwardly patted her back.
“I told you it would be okay,” she whispered in his ear.
“I’m probably grounded for life,” he whispered back.
“Not life,” Tanner, said and cupped the nape of Troy’s neck, giving him an affectionate but none-too-gentle shove toward the way they’d come. “Just your foreseeable future. But hey, look on the bright side, you’ve got a dark purple room to sit in.”
Troy sighed.
Tanner pointed to his truck and Troy got in.
Tanner walked past the vehicle and opened Callie’s driver-side door for her, waiting until she sat before crouching down and looking into her face.
“Are you mad?” she asked worriedly.
He ran a finger along her temple. “My son got into trouble and he called you for help. I’m not mad. I’m fucking grateful. Now I have to go have a very long, very detailed discussion with my knuckle-headed son.”
“You can’t get mad at him,” she said. “I promised him that you wouldn’t.”
“Not a smart promise, babe.”
“Tanner, I’m serious.”
“Me too,” he said. “He screwed up. There’s got to be consequences for that.”
“You can’t,” she said. “You said you weren’t mad.”
“At you. I’m not mad at you.”
“Tanner—”
“Callie, he’s getting a D in English and he was supposed to be working on a research paper to help his grade. Instead he sneaked out of the house,” he said with calm steel. “He put himself and nearly a teenage girl at risk. I have to deal with that.”
“And in doing so, you’re making me go back on my word.”
“You shouldn’t have promised him anything that had to do with him and me.”
She heard him, heard the logic and accepted that he was right, but it didn’t make it any easier for her to take. Nor did the fact that she had no idea why she was so fired up about this. Maybe because she could still see the fear on Troy’s face, and how desperately he’d wanted to keep this screwup from his father. “He kept it from you not because he
didn’t want to get in trouble,” she said, “but because he was afraid you’d send him away.”
“I’ll never send him away,” Tanner said with such utter conviction that it brought tears to Callie’s eyes. Great, and now she was envious of a father/son relationship. “Please move,” she said, and when he did, she shut her door and drove off.
Callie was awoken yet again, this time to a knock at her door.
Becca, she thought. For breakfast. Damn, she’d overslept. No wonder, since it’d taken her hours to fall asleep after she’d gotten home.
At the thought of what had happened the night before, she sighed. She’d overstepped a line and tried to tell Tanner how to parent. She, who had no idea how.
What had she been thinking?
And even then, Tanner had followed her home to make sure she’d gotten there okay. Well, that or he was making sure she wasn’t going to his house to yell at him some more. In either case, she’d seen him pull into the warehouse lot and wait until she’d let herself in.
A good guy to the end.
And it was the end. She’d let herself get in too deep. It was time to swim for shore and call it a day.
The knock came again.
She cracked a lid open. Muted, gray daylight poured in the windows. Rain slashed against the glass, drumming against the roof noisily.
A storm had rolled in.
And there went the third knock. “Coming!” she called out, and rubbed her eyes as she ran to the door. “I’m sorry,” she said as she pulled it open, shivering at the chill that hit her. “I’m going to need a few minutes to—”
But she broke off because it wasn’t Becca.
Nope.
Not even close.
It was the last person on earth she’d expected to see.
Okay, maybe not the last person. That honor certainly would’ve gone to Perfect Eric and his Perfect Wife with her freakishly straight white teeth…
Instead, it was Tanner, clearly having just come in from the rain, his clothes plastered to him, looking hotter and more awake than any man should look, holding—oh God, how was she supposed to resist this—coffees and a bag that smelled even more delicious than he did.
Chapter 21
Tanner had done a lot of crazy shit in his lifetime, often taking his life in his hands while he was at it: playing football without a healthy respect for the danger of the sport, going into the navy and then into Special Forces from there—talk about a not-guaranteed happy ending. And it hadn’t gotten any better on the rigs.
So yeah, he’d say he was pretty good at danger, at adrenaline rushes, at living in the moment—knowing the next moment might never come.
What he wasn’t so good at was doubt. He’d long ago learned to squelch that emotion deep and ignore it, pretending it didn’t exist.
And yet a lifetime of lessons of doing just that flew out of the window as he stood there drenched from the pounding rain in Callie’s doorway, never having felt less sure of himself.
He couldn’t even bank on her opening the door.
But then she did. Hair wild, not a lick of makeup, wearing…well, he wasn’t sure what that was. Either really, really big sweats or a potato sack.
And it didn’t matter.
She looked beautiful.
Her first expression was a flash of things. Relief. Happiness. A welcome heat.
But all that was quickly buried behind an expression of calm indifference.
He didn’t even try to reason with her. He stepped into her, forcing her back a step if she wanted to avoid a collision.
Which clearly she did. Whether it was because he was wetter than the ocean or because she was still mad at him remained to be seen.
He took the liberty of shutting and bolting the door and handed her a coffee.
“Tanner—”
“Drink,” he said firmly.
He waited until she’d taken a few sips, until her eyes cleared and focused, and then he braced for the real battle. “About last night,” he said.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said stiffly.
“Tough shit.”
She set down her coffee and went hands on hips. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” He took her hand and led her to the couch, deciding that her passiveness was more due to the fact that she’d not yet fully absorbed the caffeine than actual submissiveness.
He gave her a gentle shove, and she plopped backward onto the cushions and sputtered.
Before she could bounce up again, he sat at her side and faced her, planting a hand on the couch at either side of her hips.
Caging her in.
“You’re all wet and cold,” she complained.
“If that was what was bothering you, you’d not have let me in,” he said.
“I didn’t let you in, you just helped yourself.”
“You could’ve stopped me.”
She lifted a shoulder and turned her head away. “I don’t care for the caveman treatment.”
“And I don’t care for being shut out.”
“Shut out?” She shoved at his shoulders, but instead of moving, he caught her hands in his. “You can’t be shut out when you’re not in,” she said.
“Oh, I’m in,” he said, shifting closer so that he still wasn’t touching her, wasn’t getting her wet, but there was scarcely a breath separating them either. “I’m in and that’s the problem, isn’t it? You’re not happy about that.”
She didn’t have a response. At least not one she was willing to share.
“You said we were friends with benefits,” he reminded her.
“You’re getting my couch wet. And I said we were friends with benefits without the friends part.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “We’ve become friends in spite of ourselves.”
“We…” She frowned as she gave that some thought.
“You saved me a seat at the bakery,” he said. “That was a friendly thing to do.”
“I was saving the seat for you so that I wouldn’t have to be friendly to anyone else,” she said.
