by Kait Nolan
“I’m sorry about this morning,” he said.
“Which part?” The question slipped out before she could stop it. But since when had she ever avoided asking the difficult questions?
“Right now, it’s an even split between not kissing you back and letting you walk off embarrassed.”
Well. That was more honesty than she’d expected.
“You said it wasn’t about me and that you aren’t with anyone. Are you in the middle of a divorce?” It was one explanation that had occurred to her as she hung forty feet above the ground.
“No. Never married. Not coming out of any other relationship either.”
Okay, so she hadn’t been unintentionally poaching in someone else’s territory. Which left what? The possibilities circled around her brain as he led her toward the gazebo by the lake, her analytical mind taking what she’d seen, what he’d said, and turning over the pieces, trying to make them fit. As they stepped into the shade of the gazebo, she voiced her conclusion. “You lost someone.”
His head snapped toward her.
“You weren’t calm and collected after the fire the other night. It wasn’t the fire itself, because you didn’t hesitate. It was that you thought I was hurt. Since you’ve been doing the job for years, the only way that made sense was that something happened on the job.”
Hudson’s eyes narrowed. “What exactly is it you’re a professor of?”
“Sociology. I study broader trends in the development, structure, and functioning of human society, not individuals.” Though she’d taken enough graduate courses in psychology out of her own interests to complete a master’s degree. “But I am someone who’s been on the outside for most of my life. I’m good at observing people. You’re hurting. You’re good at hiding it, but you’re hurting.”
He just stared at her, saying nothing, for long enough that her shoulders began to twitch.
“What?”
“I’m just wondering, if I wait long enough, if you’ll guess the rest.”
“That’s as far as I’ve gotten.” She squeezed the hand she still held. “Tell me what’s going on, Hudson.”
He released her hand and turned away, leaning his forearms on the railing and looking out over the water. “I shouldn’t be here.”
“With me? At camp?”
“Alive.”
Whatever Audrey had expected, it wasn’t that. She moved up beside him and mirrored his position, close, but not touching, and waited.
“Three months ago, my company got called to a structure fire. Multi-story apartment building. Three of us were on the roof. Me, John, and Steve. We’ve been tight since diapers. Done everything together. School. Firefighter academy. Joined the same company when we finished. We were a unit.”
She didn’t miss his use of the past tense.
“Shit was getting dicey, but there was a woman trapped in a corner room on the back side of the building. We were trying to get a handle on the blaze, redirect it so our people could get to her. But things took a turn.” Hudson closed his eyes, his face twisting.
Audrey couldn’t stop herself from laying a hand on his where it curved over the rail. It was hard as iron beneath her touch.
“The roof collapsed on us. Steve and I fell through. I hit the top floor landing. Steve crashed through the railing and fell all the way to the lobby below. Four stories.”
She felt her heart twist and bleed with all the emotions he wasn’t letting into his voice.
“I was out of it from the fall. Dislocated my shoulder, sprained some shit. Didn’t know which way was up. Probably would’ve tried to go down the stairs, even though it was too late for Steve. John came down after me. He—well the details don’t matter. He got me out. But before he could get out himself, more of the roof collapsed.” Hudson’s throat worked as he swallowed. “The rest of the company got him out, but he sustained some pretty awful head trauma. He’s been in a coma ever since.” He turned toward her, and the grief in his eyes all but brought Audrey to her knees. “I walked away because of him.”
She wrapped her arms around him, holding tight. She didn’t say a word, didn’t offer false platitudes or “It’ll be okays.” Because who knew if it would? She just hung on, pressing her cheek against his heart. “I’m so sorry.”
He folded her in, wrapping his arms tight around her and burying his face in her hair. She had the impression he hadn’t had—or let himself have—any comfort. It was clear he still blamed himself. And instead of embracing his second chance at life, as she had, he’d shut himself off. That made her heart ache for him. He felt such wells of grief, and she couldn’t fix it.
Eventually he pulled back enough to look down at her. “I don’t know why I told you that.”
He’d made her a deal, but Audrey knew if he really hadn’t wanted to tell her, he’d have found a way around it. “Because I’ve also been through stuff. You were there for part of it, so you know. And sometimes, you just have to talk about it. To get it out.”
“I’m a guy. We don’t talk about feelings.”
“I won’t tell anybody.” It was part teasing, part serious. She’d keep what he told her in confidence. “But it doesn’t change the fact that you have to deal with what you feel. I don’t want to make you feel guilty.” No camp fling was worth that.
Hudson lifted a hand to her cheek, searching her face. “I feel a lot of things when I’m with you. Guilt isn’t one of them.”
She arched a brow. “So, you feel guilty about that?”
He gave a wry smile. “Yeah. Then I felt guilty for letting you walk away.”
Her heart gave a hard bump under hear breastbone. “I’m not walking away now.”
“I should.” But he didn’t move.
“Hudson.”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe you should just acknowledge we both need this.” Because this thing growing between them—whatever it was—had moved well past just wanting, well past the simple.
The corner of his mouth tipped up. “Are you always this rational?”
“Usually.”
“Thank God.” He closed the distance between them, settling his mouth firmly over hers.
Audrey sighed into the kiss, relaxing against him when he pulled her closer. His body was hard and hot, but his mouth…his mouth was a sweet seduction. No rush, no impatient escalation, just a bone-melting assault on her senses. She’d never been kissed like this, never even imagined this existed outside the pages of a book or a Hollywood screen. Like she was the center of his world and he had an eternity just to explore her mouth.
When he eased back, she sagged, hanging onto him for balance.
Instantly concerned, he shifted his grip to better support her. “You okay? Are your knees hurting?”
“Nope. I just don’t have any anymore. You dissolved them.”
The rumble of his chuckle felt delicious. “You’re good for my ego.”
Audrey had a feeling he’d be good for her everything. And that was just a little bit terrifying. She turned her focus back to stiffening her legs so she wasn’t hanging onto Hudson like a limp noodle. Now that she thought about it, the exhaustion from her day’s exertion was starting to make itself felt. She hadn’t been kidding about needing a rest earlier.
As if reading her mind, he wrapped an arm around her waist. “How about we find one of those two-person hammocks and take a little nap?”
Snuggling up against that big, warm body and snoozing? “That sounds…perfect.”
~*~
Hudson didn’t know quite how it had happened, but he was smack dab in the middle of a camp fling. Well, okay, he knew how. He’d kissed Audrey and quickly discovered one taste would never be enough. But he didn’t know how he’d gotten to a place where he wasn’t beating himself up about that.
There’d still been no change with John’s condition. After assuring Hudson that she’d contact him the moment there was anything worth reporting, Rachel had threatened total radio silence if he didn’t actuall
y focus on his vacation. So, he’d focused on Audrey. It had been a blast. Somehow, when he was with her, his world felt—not okay, exactly, but less out of balance. And since they’d spent every waking minute together for the last three days, he was feeling—dare he admit it?—happy, for the first time since the fire.
“That’s what you’re wearing to go canoeing?” He eyed her cargo pants and long-sleeved t-shirt. “You do know it’s June, right?”
“I also know I’m a red-head, and I’ll be applying SPF 100 all day.” She added a wide-brimmed hat to the outfit. It should’ve looked ridiculous. Mostly, he just thought she was adorable.
He had yet to see her in anything but long pants. Fair complexion aside, he figured her legs were pretty scarred from the accident and subsequent surgeries. It wouldn’t be surprising if she were sensitive about that. “And if we go in the water?”
“I’ve got a swimsuit on underneath. Although you assured me you’re good at this, so I’m not anticipating getting wet.”
His brain went off on a highly inappropriate mental detour at that. They were paddling out to the island in the middle of the lake. Total privacy. He wasn’t taking her out there with the express purpose of getting her naked, but…the island did have a reputation. He was willing to bet that big brain of hers had precluded her from having quite a few of the more typical high school experiences. If she wanted to cross a few off the list, who was he to deny a lady?
“Hudson?”
“Yeah?”
Her mouth quirked, as if she knew exactly where his mind had gone. “I said do we have everything?”
“Pretty sure.” He’d already stowed the picnic the camp kitchen had packed for them, along with a blanket and first aid kit. “You ready?”
“Always.”
He loved that Audrey was game for anything, ready and willing to grab life by the horns. Such a different response to nearly dying. Then again, nobody else had died or nearly died because of her. Hudson shoved that thought away and helped her into a life jacket, lingering a little over the checking of the straps so he could tug her in for a fast kiss.
She was grinning as he set her back on her feet. “I like that part of the safety check.”
“You’ll want to keep a low center of gravity to avoid tipping.” He handed her into the canoe.
She bobbled a little, then crouched and planted her butt in the seat.
Hudson climbed into the stern, taking up his paddle and pushing them away from the dock. “You hold your paddle like this—one hand curled over this little cross piece at the top, the other down here, close to the juncture of the blade and the shaft.”
Not a good enough reason for using the word shaft, he thought, as his brain offered up a flood of images that had Audrey wrapping her hands around his shaft.
Hudson’s voice was a little rougher when he spoke again. “You’re going to turn your torso so the paddle side shoulder is forward and dip the blade into the water, perpendicular to the canoe. Then drag it back through the water in a long, smooth stroke.” His cock jumped as he demonstrated the proper technique. Jesus, when did everything about canoeing turn sexual?
“Like this?” she asked, mimicking his movement.
“Don’t come back quite so far. You want to stop each stroke about your hip. And you’ll swap sides every few strokes. Try to use your core strength, not your back, or you’ll regret it later.”
After a little more practice, she had the technique down—and thank God. All this talk of shafts and strokes and proper rhythm had his board shorts uncomfortably tight.
They lapsed into companionable silence as they worked out their paddling cadence and made their way down the lake.
“Where are we headed?”
“Blueberry Island. Best place around for a picnic. Quiet, secluded, no cabinmates hanging around to be nosy and annoying. And if we’re lucky, the wild blueberries haven’t been wiped out by wildlife yet.”
“Mmm. And how many girls did you take there to get lucky back when you were at camp?”
“I was fourteen when camp closed for good.”
“So, you’re saying you never took a girl out here?”
“Well, I might have brought Claudia Collingsworth out one night in the hope of scaring her pantsless with ghost stories.”
Audrey snorted. “I gather you were unsuccessful?”
“Only partly. I got to second base, before a noise convinced her that Big Foot was coming to kill us both, and she ran screaming back to the boat.”
She threw back her head and laughed, the sound rolling over him like a wave. He couldn’t even be annoyed that it was at his expense.
“I never did anything so normal.”
“I guess the age-gap between you and your classmates made dating pretty hard.”
“I was, shall we say, a late bloomer. Dating mostly just didn’t happen. Age-gap aside, nobody wanted to date the freak.” She said it with the kind of ease that told him she regularly used the term, and Hudson found it really pissed him off.
“You’re not a freak.”
“You’re sweet to get insulted on my behalf.” He could hear the smile in her voice. “But I was. I barely existed on the same planet as my peers. The people in my age group were intimidated as hell. The people who were intellectual peers either didn’t look at me twice because they considered me a child or resented the hell out of the fact that I’d gotten where they were so much sooner than they had. I had no idea how to be normal. That’s more than half the reason I went into sociology. I was trying to understand how society was supposed to work, to figure out how I fit. And the truth was, I didn’t. So, I didn’t date. Not really.”
It was such a bleak picture and didn’t at all fit how he saw her. How had she turned out so warm and open and well-adjusted? She’d just described an almost total lack of relationships with people her own age for a huge chunk of her life. He couldn’t imagine that. Couldn’t imagine the years without John and Steve. He couldn’t imagine it now, and it was needing to face that reality that had brought him to his knees after the fire and kept him there.
He swallowed past the lump in his throat. “Sounds lonely.”
“It was.” She said it without an ounce of self-pity. Just a simple statement of fact. “It’s only been in the past few years, as everybody else started catching up with me in their own education and career paths, that it stopped mattering so much. I’m old enough now that it’s not weird I have a PhD, and most people don’t think to ask. Not that dating has been on my radar at all since the accident. The guy I was seeing when it happened rapidly disappeared, and I spent pretty much every waking minute in physical therapy.”
“Wait a minute. The guy you were dating bailed on you after the accident?”
“After the first surgery. He wasn’t prepared to deal with someone who’d be permanently disabled.”
Hudson’s hands fisted on the paddle. “I’d like to permanently disable him. What a dick.”
“He was. He didn’t love me, and I didn’t love him. So, it all worked out all right in the end. I think that’s part of why I fought so hard to walk again. Not because I was worried no one would ever want to be with me if I couldn’t, but just as a kind of ‘fuck you’ to Lance. That and I didn’t want to be dependent on my parents for the rest of my life. Don’t get me wrong,” she rushed on, as if she’d just insulted the Pope. “My parents are amazing, and I love them. But they liked being needed again way too much. They both had an epic case of empty nest syndrome when I finished school.”
“I think a lot of parents have a hard time remembering how to have an identity outside of being a parent once their kids are grown. That’s probably worse with yours, since you’d have been so young when you went through college and grad school. I’m guessing they stayed way more involved than parents usually do at those stages.”
“Did yours? Have the empty nest thing, I mean.”
“Not with me. My baby sister was still around for another four years, and she was someth
ing of a hell raiser, so I think my dad was grateful to see her out on her own and thankful for whatever hair he had left at that point. Mom’s a teacher, so I think she gets her fill of parenting still with her students. But it doesn’t stop them from wanting to be involved or doing what they think I need. They’re why I’m here. Mom thought camp would be good for me. Probably because it’s one of the few things I did growing up without John and Steve.”
Audrey was quiet for a minute, smoothly dragging her paddle through the water. “Has it been good for you?”
“You have.” No reason to pussy foot around that.
“I’m glad.” Her voice was soft.
Hudson wished he could see her face. They hadn’t talked about what they were doing here. They’d just been living in the moment, enjoying each other. Simple. Uncomplicated.
Except if this had been just a simple fling, he’d never have told her about the fire. And nothing about the pull he felt toward her was uncomplicated. It was all bound up in their shared history and a strangely compelling desire to protect her. To keep doing what he could to put that look of excitement and pleasure on her face.
Audrey cleared her throat. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Could you—oh my God! Snake! Snake!” She shot to her feet, rocking the canoe.
Hudson immediately dropped lower, trying to counter her shifting weight. “You’re going to tip us. Sit down.”
“There’s a snake at my feet,” she squeaked.
“Okay, calm down. Sit back—”
She tried to step backward on the bow seat, rocking the boat until water sloshed over the edge.
“Don’t!” But his warning came too late. The canoe lurched and Audrey tumbled straight into the lake.
