by Sonya Weiss
Heart thumping, he swallowed hard. “This room gets an adequate air supply, right?”
“It does. Are you feeling okay?”
“Fine.”
“What happened with the lake?”
“The lake? Oh, yeah… On the way into the lake, I got a bunch of mud up my nose and in my mouth. Then in the water, I went under twice before my dad got to me. I couldn’t breathe, and I thought my end credits were going to roll. Pretty traumatic for a kid. I was terrified of water after that.”
She bit the side of her lip. “In the summer, you’re out on the lake every chance you get. I guess you conquered your fear.”
“I did. Because it was either control the fear or let the fear be in control.”
“How did you do it?”
“I faced it. Over and over again. I did it safely, in small steps, and then one day I realized that it no longer had any power over me.” He raised his eyebrows. “You want to talk about your fear?”
At first, he thought she was going to deny it. Then she shrugged. “It makes me feel helpless, and I hate it.”
Rafferty stilled, surprised, but glad that she’d confided in him.
Harper squeezed by him. She stopped a few steps behind him and without looking back said, “Not long after my father died, I was playing hide and seek with a friend, and she dared me to get inside a trunk. I did, and while I was locked in there, she and her mom left, and my mom didn’t know I was in there.”
“Since then, you don’t like being unable to leave when you want to,” he guessed.
“No. I don’t.” She gave him a look. “Don’t tease me about this.”
“I would never do that.”
She nodded as if she believed him, then her lips curved into a small smile. “Thank you.”
Rafferty smiled, too, hoping maybe this could be a step toward rekindling their friendship.
Then her smile faded, and she crossed her arms, body tensing as she looked warily around the room.
Wanting to rescue her from the fear, he said, “Let’s do something to keep your mind off being stuck in here. Any ideas?”
She nodded, expression brightening. “We can play a game.”
“What kind?”
“Probably not the kind you’re used to playing with a woman,” she said.
Rafferty sighed. “Look, we’re stuck in here for now, so let’s call a truce until we get out. You don’t insult my dating life, and I won’t insult you for being so uptight.”
“I am not—” She choked it off when he raised an eyebrow. “Fine. Truce it is. We can play a game my girlfriends and I call ‘reveal or pay up.’ You have to answer whatever question the other players ask. If you refuse, you have to ante up or accept a dare from the other person. Since we don’t have any cash on us, we’ll find some paper to use as the twenty dollar markers and square it once we’re out of here.”
Rafferty whistled. “That’s an expensive ante.”
She shrugged. “It’s supposed to be to deter players from not answering. Unless you’re too afraid to play?”
“I’m not afraid of Truth or Dare, darling.”
“Hmm,” Harper said like she knew something he didn’t. She tore small strips of paper from the side of a brown paper bag, divided them evenly, and passed a handful to him.
He spread out a couple of blankets on the floor and sat across from Harper, figuring if nothing else, the game was a harmless way to pass the time until someone noticed they were missing.
Harper studied him for a long moment before she abruptly asked, “What happened to you to make you anti-commitment?”
“Nothing. Not every guy goes the distance in a relationship.”
She frowned like she could see right through the excuse he’d perfected saying over the years.
Rafferty quickly said, “My turn. What’s the best thing about being you?”
“My family. My friends. The town. I feel blessed to have my life. Most days.” Harper toyed with one of the bag strips. “My turn. In all the conversations we had as friends, you never told me how you came to be a firefighter. Did you really want to become one, or are you following a family tradition?”
“I never wanted anything more than to become a firefighter. Every time I’d hear the sirens, I’d run outside. Did that a couple of times in the middle of the night until Mom laid the law down.” He laughed then thought for a second. “My turn. What do you want the most? Besides me, I mean.”
She gave him a huffy look. “I want to get married. Have kids. I understand why you don’t want that.”
“You do?”
“Yes. I’m betting it’s that you don’t want to be in a relationship because you think it’ll hamper your freedom. Am I right?”
Rafferty was silent for a second, torn between not wanting to delve into the past and wanting Harper to understand why he felt the way he did about relationships. He decided to be open about it. “I dated my college girlfriend Jill for a year, and she started pushing to get married.”
“That’s young,” Harper said.
He nodded. “I told her that with two more years of college and neither of us making much money, marriage would be a mistake.”
Brows furrowing, Harper asked, “Breaking up with your college girlfriend is the reason you don’t do relationships?”
“That’s not what happened. We fought, and a few days later as my roommates and I were coming back from spring break, following Jill and her friends in their car, there was an accident. A semi lost control and hit her car head-on.”
Harper gasped and covered her mouth with her hand.
Rafferty paused, lost in the memory. He’d run to the fiery wreck. Other motorists had tackled him, keeping him from jumping into the flames. On his knees on the highway, screaming at the sky, he’d sworn then he’d live the rest of his life and never break another heart. “I wasn’t fast enough to save her.”
“You do realize what happened wasn’t your fault, right?” Harper asked. “It was an accident. A crazy, messed-up event that life sometimes throws at people. Don’t hold your heart hostage over something you had no power to prevent or to change.”
Rafferty pulled himself back to the moment at hand and shrugged. Talking about the event poked at a grief he didn’t like to think about. And he didn’t want anyone’s pity.
As if she sensed he was done talking, she let out a sigh and smoothed a wrinkle in the blanket. Then she smiled a trouble-making smile. “Double or nothing?”
He nodded, thankful for the shift in conversation.
“My turn. Double or nothing,” he said, knowing he was about to win his ante back.
“Bring it,” she said in a soft voice.
“I dare you to kiss me.”
“Wh-What?” she sputtered. “There was—”
“Nothing stated in your rules about physical contact.” He motioned his fingers. “Pay up. Give me back my markers.”
She held out a hand. “Wait,” she said slowly. “One kiss. No tongue.”
“You don’t get to alter the dare. You either accept or you pay. Now fork it over.” He motioned again.
Her shoulders stiffened, and that stubborn look well associated with her crossed her face. “I accept,” she said.
“You… Huh.” Hadn’t seen that coming. Good thing he was sitting on the floor, because he would have fallen out of a chair. “You’d rather kiss me than pay?”
“I need the money.”
“Or it’s a good excuse to do what you’ve wanted to do for years, right?”
She ground her teeth and rolled her eyes. “Oh, so right. You had me at the first brooding smirk.”
“I don’t brood or smirk.” He rubbed his jawline, trying to find a way to backtrack. She’d called him on something he’d never thought she’d do. Wasn’t that just a kick in the shorts? But he ne
ver backed down from a challenge. “All right. Then let’s do this. Kiss away. I’m all yours, sweetheart.”
Her eyes dropped to his lips, and the tip of her tongue darted out, licking her bottom lip.
He felt like he’d been thrust into a heat wave the way his body warmed. Well, here was hoping he hadn’t just made a big old mess of things. Rafferty straightened then stood slowly.
Clearing her throat, Harper rose as well. She put her hands on his hips, searching his eyes intently before rising onto her tiptoes and touching her mouth lightly to his.
At the first taste, Rafferty thought she was sweeter than any honey he’d ever tried and ten times more addicting. He hadn’t expected that, either.
She leaned forward, off balance, pressing into him, and his arms closed tightly around her, his hands on her upper back, urging her closer. Heat shot through him, and all he could think was: more.
The longer he kissed her, the less he wanted to let go. For the first time in his life, Rafferty knew he didn’t own the situation.
Chapter Six
She was no longer the one leading the kiss. His mouth moved over hers like a gentle storm, causing pent-up longing to pelt at her like hundreds of rain drops. She stepped out from behind the emotional barricade she had in place and let him in. Her senses came alive, threatening to drown her in a rush of sensation.
Kissing him made her think of holding hands at sunset, the smell of a summer rain, the promise of a new morning, and everything that she thought was beautiful all wrapped into one. It was something she’d craved and had never found. Until now. With the wrong man. The not-forever guy.
This kiss was the best worst idea in the whole world.
Her body was leading her brain, running away with her sensible self, and even as her brain sounded the alarm, her body silenced it.
Harper raised her arms, linking them around his neck, bringing him closer. Desire licked through her body, intensifying her want, her need, heating her from the inside out. Her skin was on fire, and she wanted him to quench the thirst.
He lifted his head to move his attention to the side of her neck. She arched her head back, and a moan escaped her lips as he tasted her skin. His lips branded her. His.
She was lost. Swirling down further into a need so powerful, she couldn’t shake the grip of it. Didn’t care. She wanted him. And he’d walk away tomorrow. Leaving her alone.
Alone. Just like my mother. Looking out a window, watching, waiting for a man who’d never return.
And Rafferty was just like that. Shaken that she’d thrown caution to the wind so easily, she pulled away from him, breathing fast, unable to believe she’d lost herself so completely with one kiss.
If they continued down the course they were on, the heights would be fantastic, but the fall afterward could break her. What was I thinking?
She had to be rational about this. Call it what it was. “That was awful.”
“Awful?”
Pushing her hair back, she clarified, “An awful mistake.”
“It was just a kiss, Harper. Nothing more.”
“Right,” she said, embarrassed. “Why don’t we forget the game?” She ran her fingers through her mussed hair to busy her hands.
“Fine with me.” Rafferty settled on the blanket opposite her again. “Mind if I ask you something personal?”
“Go ahead.” She forced herself to look directly into his eyes. If she was creating a don’t-do list for herself, the first one would be don’t stare at the lips of this man and wish for a second kiss. Because doing so could lead to breaking a whole lot more don’ts she had in place for her life.
“You’d never talk about it, and I’ve heard a few rumors over the years, but what really happened with your father?”
Harper hesitated, toying with the strap of her shoe as she went back to the evening she’d learned her father had died. “He went parasailing, and a storm rolled in. The winds whipped up, and the tow line broke.” She looked up. “He was always chasing something wild or risky. The adrenaline high meant more than his family, and he told Mom the day he left us that he couldn’t be tied down and trapped in a life that wasn’t for him. I’ll never do what my mother did.”
“What’s that?”
“Choose a man who has one eye on the horizon, always wondering what else is out there. I want a man who’ll stick around, not one who’ll—”
“Abandon you.”
“Exactly.” She hugged her arms around herself. Growing up as the daughter of a man who thought nothing of throwing away his family had been hard. She refused to get involved with a man who might create the same legacy for her someday children. Wanting roots, a family, a home where love overflowed, and a man who’d always be there for her wasn’t wrong, and she wasn’t giving up on hoping for that for her future.
“A man can like an adrenaline challenge and yet not abandon a family.”
“Unless chasing thrills gets him killed,” Harper said. Then, not wanting to dig any deeper into past wounds, she added, “You’d think someone would miss us by now.”
Rafferty shrugged. “My brothers are kind of bone-headed. Takes them a while to clue in.”
Harper had always envied the easy relationship he had with them. “What was it really like growing up with a big family? As an only child, I always longed for a sibling.”
“You can have one of mine.”
She laughed. “Seriously.”
“It was fun. There was always someone to horse around with, argue with, or blame for something you did, but whatever came, I knew that if I ever got into trouble—which I know won’t surprise you I did an awful lot—there was always someone who had my back.”
“I saw you one year at the Fourth of July fireworks celebration. You punched Sebastian Carson after he smacked Casey.”
“Yeah.” A muscle worked in Rafferty’s jaw. “The idiot had a temper, and Casey called him out on it after he’d shoved his girlfriend. No guy hits girls on my watch but especially not my sister.”
Harper remembered watching the fight between Rafferty and Sebastian’s friends. Four on one against Rafferty until his brothers jumped in and it was all over. Sebastian was lucky to walk away with just the black eyes he’d received. “I would have liked to have a brother looking out for me,” she said.
“They’re handy, but they can be a pain. They like to butt into my business, though I have to say Mom and Grandma are worse than all of them put together.”
Harper found it difficult to look away as he talked. Thanks to that knock-her-out-of-her-shoes kiss, it felt like a turning point in their relationship. Add what he’d told her about Jill, and it helped her understand him even better than she had when they’d been friends. She wished he would have told her back then what he’d dealt with. They might not have lost each other.
Forcing her attention elsewhere, she glanced up at the window. She loved the night but not in combination with being locked in somewhere. Wishing there was something she could do to get out of here, she looked back toward the door, debating with herself whether there was anything else she could try or not.
As if he could read her mind, Rafferty switched sides of the blanket until he was seated on the same side as her. “I’m here,” he said quietly.
Harper tensed. She could handle anything, even being locked in, because she had to handle it. Better to always stand on her own two feet than lean over and discover no one was there to catch her fall.
“It’s getting cooler. Let me keep you warm.” He patted the spot beside him. “I’m not going to bite.”
“I’m plenty warm, thanks.” If she sat closer, she’d think about that kiss, and if she thought about that kiss, she’d think about—
“Why don’t you come over for Sunday dinner?” Rafferty suggested.
“You’re just trying to distract me from thinking about being locked in.
”
“True, but I’m also asking because you’d enjoy a front-row seat to the zoo. With Mom subtly trying to marry me off and Grandma not so subtly, it’s like herding feral cats. As soon as I let my guard down and think I’ve avoided the claws with one, the other makes a run at me.”
The image he painted made Harper smile. “You’re lucky to have them. They only want to make sure you’re happy and don’t end up a lonely old man.”
Rafferty snorted. “They’re after future grandkids and great-grandkids. My happiness doesn’t factor into it.”
“I’ll think about coming for dinner.” She yawned and covered her mouth. “Sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
Rafferty patted the blanket beside him again. “Stretch out and try to sleep.”
Harper looked at it, debating how hard the floor would be.
He followed the direction of her gaze. “Use these as a pillow.” He folded a couple of other blankets and put them near her.
“No, you can have them.” Harper rubbed her arms, not liking the idea of letting her guard down enough to sleep in the locked room. “I think I’ll sit up for a while.”
“Look at me,” Rafferty ordered, and when she did, he said, “I get it, okay? But you can lie down and rest. I will keep you safe.”
“I’m not… I don’t need—”
“Yes, you do, but it’s okay that you can’t admit you need someone other than yourself.”
Harper looked longingly at the folded blankets. She shouldn’t rely on him, but she was so tired. She went back and forth with herself for a few minutes, but finally, exhaustion won, and she stretched out. Rafferty sat beside her, his back against the wall. She lay there, rigid, unable to relax. Rafferty took her hand, gave it a gentle squeeze, and after hesitating for a minute, she closed her fingers around his and drifted to sleep.
…
In the middle of the night, Rafferty glanced down at a sleeping Harper and tried to sort out his thoughts about the woman who’d always been such a puzzle.
He felt out of sorts. She confused him. He wanted to protect her, and he also knew for certain he wanted to sleep with her. He wasn’t going to lie to himself about that, but he wouldn’t stoke that fire.
