by Meg Collett
“I don’t want you as a friend.”
The words struck him like a physical blow to the gut. His shock wrote itself across his face in the stunned way his mouth popped open on a whoosh of air. “Wh-what?”
“I have nothing to hide behind,” Stevie whispered. “When I was drinking, I could hide behind the curtain of being buzzed all the time. It masked how I acted with people. I could get away with a lot more. People just wrote it off as me being drunk. But I don’t have that anymore.” Her heart was racing, and the rain had started, slating against the patio doors in gusting sheets. She had to raise her voice so Cade would hear her above it. “I don’t have the liberty of blacking out the night before and not remembering the next morning. So now when I say things, I have to be accountable for them, because I remember everything. I feel everything. And it’s a lot, Cade. It’s a lot to handle all at once. They don’t warn you about that when you’re getting sober. They don’t tell you how everything seems so much louder, so much closer. This thing inside me wants to get out, and if I have to hold it inside any longer, I think I might go insane. So I have to say it, okay? I just have to. This”—she waved her hand between them—“isn’t working for me. The friendship train has to stop.”
Damn him, but he gracefully took her words in stride once he’d recovered from the initial shock. The bastard even smiled. He was nodding almost before she’d finished, though his smile wasn’t without obvious strain pulling at his face. He would do anything for her, Stevie realized, even smile. “I can do that. I can—”
“No, Cade.” The plastic bottle crinkled in her grip. “I can’t be friends because I like you. A lot. Like—” She paused and choked back the L word. “I mean, it’s a lot of liking . . . seriously, like, a lot. And I want you, more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my entire life.”
As she spoke, the tightness in her spine and chest eased until she could breathe again. Her heart beat easier and the pulsing in her head went away, as did the hollow ache in her gut. She hadn’t felt this relieved since the night she hit the telephone pole, smashed her head against the steering wheel, and was put in handcuffs. It was weird to say she’d been relieved, but she had been. It had meant help was coming, because she couldn’t help herself. And now . . . she’d said the words that had been keeping her up at night. That had kept her throat aching for a beer. That had made her want to cry and yell and scream and laugh hysterically.
She’d said them.
Completely sober.
Across the island countertop, Cade had returned to his shocked state: mouth open, eyes barely blinking, a blush working its way down his neck. She would save him from this, just like he’d been willing to smile and save her if it wasn’t his friendship she wanted. Now that the words were out there, she felt stronger than ever.
She could let him go.
“I just had to say it,” she started. “It was messing with my head, but we can deal with it. I mean, I can deal with it. It’s my shit, I know, but don’t be, like, afraid of me now or anything. I just have to get past this.”
Cade swallowed, counting down in his head. When he spoke, the words were slow and deliberate and hurt her heart. “Get past me, you mean?”
“I think I can get back to where being friends is fine again, but I just can’t right now. It’s too hard to see you all the time and feel this way and try to hold it in when I’m holding so much already. I feel like I might explode at any second.” The look on his face and the resolve in the set of his mouth terrified her, but she’d come this far and wouldn’t let fear stop her from saving herself. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. It was probably really selfish of me, but I had to. Please tell me you understand.”
He shook his head, a lock of hair swishing across his forehead. “What if I said the thing I want more than anything is for you to not get past me? What if I said this entire time I’ve been so terrified of saying what I’ve wanted to say because I was worried I’d fuck up your sobriety and send you straight back to drinking?”
The wind and rain beat against her house. The moisture hung thick in the air, and she imagined she felt it beading on her eyelashes. She must have left a window open somewhere, because water was rolling down her cheeks, dripping off her chin, and splashing onto the counter. The moisture was from the rain, not tears. She didn’t cry. It was the rain.
“What if I said I’ve been terrified of fucking you up? I hurt everybody, Cade. I can’t stop myself.” Here it was, the fuckery of it all: “I don’t deserve someone like you.”
Cade’s jaw clenched. He shoved back from the counter and strode toward her. Every step echoed somewhere deep in Stevie’s stomach, where she used to feel achy and hollow, but now her stomach felt like a freaking lava pit of oozy feelings. Maybe Dr. Clemens would have told her to take a moment to examine how she felt, and maybe she should have.
But she didn’t.
When Cade wrapped his hands into her hair and pulled her onto her tiptoes, she went to him without a second thought. She gripped his button-up, crushing the material into tight-fisted wrinkles. When he leaned down and breathed her into the kiss, she didn’t second-guess it.
Cade pivoted her around with a twist of his hips and pressed the small of her back into the counter. His hand left her hair and seared a path down her back, over her butt, and to the top of her thigh. He scooped her up onto the countertop so quickly she nearly went dizzy.
He held her waist with one hand, his other still keeping her head in a tight embrace as though he thought she might try escaping the kiss, like he thought she was stupid or something.
He only pulled back when they both needed to gasp for air. She arched into him, letting her head fall back. He leaned into her neck, his hand gripping her waist tightly and bunching up her shirt until his fingertips traced the bare skin over her ribs.
Her body came alive with fire. The sound escaping her mouth. The lack of control. This thing inside her, her unending want for him and his touch, for the featherlight kisses he poured down her neck as his hand slid up her body, his fingertips just brushing the underside of her breast. Asking. Pleading. It all shocked her.
“Please,” she begged in turn.
His mouth stilled on her neck and he pulled back. His eyes, dark beneath the length of his lashes, locked on hers, and a vein in his forehead pulsed with every heartbeat. As he watched her, his hand crept farther up her ribs, finally cupping what had been his all along. Her mouth fell open at the possessive touch.
His smile was one of dark joy, nothing like his dimple-flashing bright ones he gave everyone else. This one was just for her, here and now, a revelation. His thumb flicked across her nipple. His grip tightened on her as her body jerked against him. Her head fell back again and more of those sounds rolled off her tongue.
“Hold on to me,” he said.
His words—the opposite of his usual careful reserve when he spoke—sent a delicious shiver into her core.
She hooked her legs around his tapered hips, and he lifted her off the counter, those long, graceful muscles contracting beneath her hands. He carried her into the living room. They hadn’t turned on the lights there, but he knew every step by memory. He’d spent so much time in her house lately, his friendship so complete that he’d noticed the rug’s corner that liked to flip up and trip people if they weren’t careful, and the way she kept the coffee table at an angle so her feet could reach it from the couch, even though the corner was at the right height for a shin. A friend knew those sorts of things because they noticed. They were around enough to earn bruises and learn from them and despite the hurt, they still came around anyway.
Cade was still here.
And he carried her so gently. When he sat in the chair, he didn’t jostle her even the slightest.
Then he kept kissing her like he could never get enough of her taste or the way her tongue met his.
She rose over his hips and rocked against his hardness. With building urgency, she pulled her shirt over her head and dropped
it somewhere behind her. Cade’s eyes traced a path along the curves of her breasts, and then his fingers followed. His every move was measured, controlled, giving him plenty of time to soak her up and memorize every touch.
Like this might be his only chance.
Stevie growled. She tore open his shirt, sending the buttons scattering across her floor.
With a low sound, Cade leaned back in her chair and looked up at her, the pale plain of his chest stark in the moonlight. As he breathed, the muscles right above the line of his pants contracted, the fine hair beneath his navel fascinating her.
She reached between her legs and stroked him over his khakis. The touch knocked the grin right off his face. With a tug, he brought her mouth back to his with a desperation that finally matched hers. She unbuttoned his pants and worked the zipper down. When she pulled his length free and held him in her hand, his mouth stilled against hers, a fraction of a breath separating their lips.
“Stevie,” he breathed into her.
She adjusted, pushing her shorts and panties to the side, too lost to even try taking them off.
“We’ve got this.” She followed the whispered words with a deep kiss, tasting his sharp intake of breath as she seated herself on him, taking him inside her in one move.
They moved together, the moon at her bare back, every sensation a sparking wire in her head, every thought present, and every word she spoke to him her own. No curtain remained to hide behind. It was just her and him.
When they finally made it up to her bed, and every time they reached for each other in the night, only sleeping long enough to let the want build up again, she simply reveled in the magic of Cade Cooper.
He could shatter her to pieces again and again, relentlessly bringing her to that peak, but he was always there to catch her and pull her back together, stitch by stitch. His carefulness and the way he watched her throughout, making sure she stayed present in every moment with him, kept her whole. Only when she was ready did he start taking her to that peak again.
The magic was that he was always there.
13
Stevie’s phone trilled a few hours later, waking her from her half-sleep, half-dream state, the wind chime alert indicating an incoming call.
Stirring, she blinked into the Saturday morning sun coming through her open curtains. She was warm, her skin soft from the heat. Her down comforter was wrapped around her just right, cocooning her.
She sensed him first by the weight next to her. He exuded warmth, his face pressed into her pillow, his hair the messiest she’d ever seen it. He had his arms wrapped in the blankets, and as her phone kept ringing, he mumbled into the pillow.
She shifted away from him, her naked skin gliding over the sheets that smelled like him and her, their scents mingling into one musky scent.
“Is that me?” Cade blinked up at her, eyes half closed and his head barely off the pillow.
“No,” she whispered, speaking around the sloppy grin on her face that she couldn’t make go away. “It’s my phone. Go back to sleep.”
“Hmm,” he mumbled. “The permits came in. We can dig tomorrow.” He lowered his head, then said, “Donuts,” and fell back to sleep.
Stevie’s heart swelled with such a surge of emotions from seeing him in her bed that it almost hurt. She thought she might not be able to stand it if she kept watching him, so she stood and crossed the room to her desk, where she’d left her phone. Before it could go to voice mail, she answered the call with a soft, “Hello?”
“Stephanie?” came the voice from the other end.
It had been years since she’d heard that voice.
“Hey, Mark. How have you been?” she asked, tiptoeing across the bedroom and snagging Cade’s button-up from the floor.
“Good. Good. The family’s doing great. My girls are in middle school now. How long has it been? Three years? Four?”
“Nearly four, I guess.” Back downstairs, she spoke normally as she slipped her arms into the sleeves of Cade’s shirt and buttoned one of the remaining buttons so the neighbors wouldn’t catch an eyeful—again. “I can’t believe your girls are that old. I feel like it was just yesterday they were borrowing Abby’s lipstick and drawing on the walls with it.”
Mark groaned. “I remember that. Vividly.”
She laughed a little, but the silence that followed was awkward. With one hand holding her cell to her ear, she went about making coffee as she stared out her kitchen window.
“So,” he said, probing the silence between them. “I got your email. I didn’t realize you were working again.”
The machine started gurgling and steaming. Stevie opened the back patio doors to the ocean brine and morning breeze. Late-season weekend tourists were already lying out on the beach and playing in the low surf.
“I’m not really working again. I just took this show for a friend. He’s in construction.”
“Oh, a friend.” Mark chirped out the word, zapping away the awkwardness like years and thousands of miles didn’t separate them. He’d been the closest person to a friend she’d had out in L.A. “A good friend?”
Stevie glanced at the stairs, half expecting Cade to walk down at any second. “Yeah,” she said. That smile was back, along with the wonderful new ache in her belly. “A good one.”
“I can’t wait to meet him.”
She expected an uneasy fear or worry about reconnecting with her television friends, but it never came. When she took a deep breath, it felt loose and easy in her chest. “You know what? That would be great. You, Abby, and the kids should all come down.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.” She heard his smile through the phone. He’d been a showrunner on one of her parents’ shows, one of a very select few that had done well for the network. He’d been like her shield back then, just six years older than her and more like family than her actual family.
She chatted with him a bit more, taking her coffee to the patio and sitting in her favorite chair to watch the ocean. As they talked, she marveled at the easiness of the morning, from waking up with a man in her bed to not hating herself. All without a hangover. She couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. It was life changing. This calmness was so much more than Stevie had expected.
This is what peace feels like, she thought.
She and Mark circled back around to talking about television and he told her about the projects he’d been working on since he left RealTV to join another network. And then the silence was back. “This email . . .” he began, the words hanging in the air.
“I know it was probably pretty strange.”
“No, not really. I always thought Shepherd was a piece of shit. I hated you two together. So, no, the email wasn’t strange at all. But what I found out is.”
Stevie sat forward in her chair, her fingernail between her teeth. “What did you find out?”
“You wanted to know why Shepherd was working on a low-budget sideshow for the network?”
“It just doesn’t fit. He was Richard’s right-hand man.”
Richard Bernard was RealTV’s president, the man who made all the calls, and also Shepherd’s golfing buddy, beer-drinking buddy, and “plow through some coke” buddy. Richard was fifty-seven and married with kids, but Stevie had once seen him lock himself and three “escorts” inside Shepherd’s pool house with six handles of Jim Beam, ten thousand dollars in drugs, and no clothing. He’d come back out on Monday morning, wearing a suit and looking fresher than a daisy, ready to carpool to work with Shepherd.
“I knew you wanted me to ask around quietly, so I did. My boss is a close friend, and he knows how to be discreet in this town. When I mentioned it to him, that I hadn’t seen Shepherd around much, he said he’d hired a few crew guys from Shepherd’s last show.”
“The one that ripped off The Bachelor and caused that big stir with some of the contestants being under age.”
“Right,” Mark said. “It also tanked. Horribly. That isn’t why Shepherd’s in trouble, tho
ugh.”
“What could be worse than underage contestants?”
“The network is trying to keep it all very hush-hush, but word is he was siphoning money from expense accounts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. And not just from his last show, but all the shows he’s done these last few years. The network’s board wanted him fired, but Richard went to bat for him. He got him sent down to do your show in Georgia instead.”
“Holy shit.” Stevie felt a little breathless. To steal from Richard’s network? That was ballsy, even for Shepherd. He must have money issues. It was the only thing that made sense. The fact that Richard had stood beside Shepherd, even when the board thought him guilty, made Stevie think Richard might have had a hand in the siphoning too.
“He’s the highest paid showrunner in town,” Mark said. “What the hell is he spending all that money on? But apparently, the board had trouble proving he was the one stealing the money and that’s why he’s down there slumming it with you rednecks.”
She snorted out a laugh. “Very funny, Mark, but you’d like it down here, I bet.”
“Can you have your groceries delivered?”
“Well, no—”
“Then I’m good. Does that gossip help you out any? I trust my sources and I think it’s true, but if you need me to dig around some more . . .”
“No,” Stevie said. “Let’s leave it there for now. I can’t have word getting back to him that I’m checking up on him.”
A beat of silence passed before he asked, “He’s got you pinned, doesn’t he?”
Heat flared through Stevie’s stomach, the scar tissue from her ulcers acting up. She reminded herself to take some medicine, but she also reminded herself of Shepherd’s threat. It wasn’t just against Cade, but the something worse he had against her. Something he hadn’t even mentioned yet. “It’s not bad. Yet. But I can’t let it go that way.”
“For your good friend.”
“Exactly.”
“Stevie,” Mark said, his voice going low like someone might be in the room and he didn’t want them overhearing. “Look out for yourself too. Shepherd is a shark, and he’s always known your weak spots. Don’t let him corner you.”
