by Bella Andre
“I can’t believe I wrote these things,” Isabel was saying. “I had the future all planned out.” She pressed her lips together. Sighed. “Stupid girl.”
“I still don’t get it,” Ginger said, working like crazy to focus on what her friend was saying, rather than the swirling mass of emotions pushing around inside her. “How could all of that,” she gestured to the letters, “have become ten terrible words?”
Isabel shrugged. “Who the hell knows. Andrew and I were just kids who didn’t know any better, I guess.”
“Is it going to be weird to see him when he comes out for Sam’s wedding?”
“Very,” Isabel admitted. “But at least I have a few weeks to prepare myself for it, right? Not,” she said with a rueful grin, “that I should be wasting too much time on that.” Pushing off the stool, she said, “I know you have a lot of painting to get done. Thanks for bringing these to me.”
Understanding that her friend wanted to be alone with the letters, and glad to have some time on her own to think, Ginger headed out.
Was it possible for her to have fallen in love with Connor already? During her short drive home, her brain insisted on playing out a montage of images.
Protecting her from the falling branch, his heart beating wildly against her back, even harder than hers because he’d been so afraid of something happening to her.
Connor’s anguish the night in his bedroom when his fingers had gone numb as he stroked her. Holding his hand but feeling she was really holding his heart.
The way he’d looked at her paintings and seen straightaway what she was trying to get down on the canvas, understanding her in a way few people ever had.
And, of course, all those precious, sweet hours in his arms.
A sharp sense of relief shot through her when she came home and saw that the red truck was gone. She couldn’t face him yet. Not when the possibility of being in love was still so new to her, when she felt as if she were strapped into a runaway train that she couldn’t even remember getting on.
Walking over to stand in front of her canvas, she stared at the painting she’d been working on.
“Before Love” was how it seemed now. How, she wondered, was she seeing things so differently after such a short time with Connor? After only one incredible night in his arms?
And yet, there was no denying that even the colors in her palette were richer now. Deeper.
A voice in her head told her she should be looking at falling in love with Connor as a disaster, the biggest one of her life. But that scared voice sounded so much like the one that had told her for so many years that she didn’t know how to paint, that she couldn’t possibly follow her own heart and create something beautiful.
She picked up her brush and then, before she could possibly get ready for it, all hell was breaking loose, her fingers and hands and arms all pushing her to paint as fast as she could.
The images came to her as quickly as she could put them onto the canvases, one after the other. And while there was similar motion and color and energy to the paintings she’d made since coming to Poplar Cove eight months ago, there was something more to these paintings.
More emotion.
More tenderness.
When she finally stepped back to catch her breath, she realized what she was doing. She was painting Connor in all the ways she saw him. Swimming across the lake, doing sit-ups on the beach, but also naked and levered above her in bed, his eyes full of desire as he told her she was beautiful. She was painting him as a hero, saving the world single-handedly. And then, standing in the middle of flames, melting down inside, but doing everything he could to hide it.
She jumped as a sharp sound knocked her out of the zone. Realizing it was the phone, she dropped her brush and ran to get it.
After this morning, the phone felt like the bearer of bad news. What news could be coming now? She prayed it wasn’t anything that would hurt Connor more.
“Ginger, darling, it’s me.”
Ah, her mother. She plopped down on one of the nearby kitchen chairs. Alexandra liked to tell her all the gossip. And even though Ginger wasn’t at all interested in the comings and goings of a bunch of her mother’s friends, she was glad for the growing connection with her mother. Amazingly, in the eight months since she’d left the city, they’d spoken more on the phone than they had in person during her whole marriage when they lived just down the street.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch since last week. It’s been so busy with fund-raising for the upcoming opera season, as you know.”
Her mother cleared her throat and Ginger had the strangest sense that she was uncomfortable.
Alexandra Sinclair was never uncomfortable and it sent a flicker of unease down Ginger’s spine.
“In any case, dear, I needed to call and tell you the news. Before you hear it from anyone else.”
Ginger could hear her father saying something in the background.
“No, I can’t just hang up without telling her now,” her mother hissed at him, before saying to Ginger, “Honey, when I was at lunch today I heard that Jeremy and his new girlfriend …”
It wasn’t hard for Ginger to fill in the blanks. “They’re getting married.”
Honestly, she was glad if her ex could find happiness with someone else. Everyone deserved a chance at love. Including her. And Connor, too.
“Yes, they’re getting married.” Her mother made a small sound of distress. “Because they’re having a baby.”
Connor walked into the kitchen as she said, “Oh. I see. A baby.” She could feel her limbs shaking, her eyes starting to water. “But he never wanted—”
“Oh honey, you’re better off without him. You always were.”
“Mmm,” was all Ginger could manage around the lump in her throat.
Fortunately, her mother wasn’t a big fan of emotional scenes. “If I were you I wouldn’t give it another thought.”
“No. I won’t,” Ginger lied. “I’ll talk to you soon, Mom.”
“Ginger,” Connor asked, his eyes dark with concern as he came to kneel in front of her. “What’s wrong?”
“My mother called. My ex-husband is having a—”
The final word got lost on her tongue, refused to come, but he’d obviously heard enough of the conversation to guess.
“A baby?”
She nodded, hating the tear that rolled down her cheek.
“You want a baby,” he said again and overpowering longing hit her before she could brace herself.
“More than anything.”
“Did he shoot blanks? Was that the problem? Is that why you don’t have any already?”
Laughter was the last thing she’d expected, but his question was so perfectly timed—so perfectly Connor—that she couldn’t help but choke one out.
“No,” she said, a split second before her smile fell away. “That wasn’t the problem.”
“Then what was?”
“Our marriage sucked for one.”
“Plenty of people have kids when their marriages suck. Take my parents. It was the only thing they did well together.”
“Jeremy didn’t want a baby.” No, that wasn’t true anymore. “Not with me, anyway.”
“I know I’ve said this before, but he sounds like a stupid fuck. Why the hell did you marry him?”
She matched the anger of his words with hers. “Because I thought he was the best I could do. Because I couldn’t believe he actually wanted me. That he’d chosen me instead of one of the perfect sorority girls throwing themselves at him. It’s why I didn’t leave for so long. Because I thought I’d never do any better.”
“And you actually wanted to have a kid with this guy? Jesus, Ginger, don’t you have any sense at all? What the hell do you see when you look in the mirror? Who do you think you are?”
The answer was easy. A girl who had never been good enough for anyone, no matter how hard she tried.
“You’re coming with me.”
Grab
bing her hand, he pulled her out of the kitchen, up the stairs, into her bedroom, not stopping until they were standing in front of the full-length mirror, her back to his front.
“I’ve never admitted this to anyone before,” he said in a soft voice, “but do you know how hard it was for me to look at my burns for the first time?”
She swallowed hard, instinctively covering his hands and arms with her own, gently stroking the raised scars.
“When they unwrapped the bandages that first time and I saw the wreckage of what had once been perfectly good hands, perfectly good skin, I wanted to cry like a baby. But I couldn’t. Not with everyone watching. Not when everyone expected me to be the tough firefighter.”
She’d never thought about how hard it was on men like Connor to get injured and feel like they couldn’t break down, not even once.
Staring at the two of them together in the mirror, Ginger felt that her concerns about her weight were incredibly petty. How could she have spent so much time worrying about her size when her body was, essentially, perfect. Sure, maybe she didn’t fit into the current cultural norms of perfection, but she could run and jump and swim and paint. What on earth did she have to complain about?
Connor stroked her hair back from her face. “If you’re thinking I just told you all of that to invalidate your feelings, think again.”
“But it’s true. My issues are nothing compared to what you’ve been through.”
He squeezed her more tightly around the waist, pulling her closer against his rock hard chest and thighs. “Here’s how I see it. I’ve had a couple of rough years with my body, but before that everyone told me how great I looked, how strong I was, how well-built. Crazy as it seems to me, I get the feeling no one has ever said those things to you before now.” Holding her eyes in the mirror, he asked, “What do you see?”
Ginger’s chest was clenched and tight. “Just me.”
“Really? Is that all you can see, sweetheart? There isn’t anything else?”
To have such a big, strong man be so gentle with her … she could feel herself melting in his arms.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know what I see.”
His hands and arms still wrapped tightly around her, he whispered, “Then how about I tell you what I see? You’re strong.” Her breath came faster as he pressed a kiss just above her left ear. “You’re beautiful.” He spun her around to face him and cupped her face in his large hands. She blinked up at him and got lost in his blue eyes. “And every time I look at you, you completely take my breath away.”
He slowly undressed her and she drank in every touch, every caress, every path of his fingers across her skin. He ran his lips, his tongue, his fingertips over every inch of her skin reverently as her clothes seemed to disappear and she trembled everywhere he’d touched.
When she was finally naked, he said, “Turn around, sweetheart.”
She couldn’t do it. Not with years of self-hatred coming at her. She was stunned. She’d thought she’d beaten down the beast within, had been so confident of her triumph.
But he was already turning her in his strong hands, forcing her to see something she wished she could hide from forever—just as she’d forced him to see it in himself the night before.
God, how she hated this fear. So she forced herself to look.
And lost her breath.
“I look so small compared to you,” she whispered.
With Connor behind her, all six-feet-plus of him, she looked tiny. She’d never before thought that word in relation to herself. But he was so big, so broad, that instead of taking note of her bumps and lumps, she saw her breasts, heavy with arousal, the way her skin glowed from the afternoon sun that covered her on the porch as she painted, the fact that her lush curves were the perfect contrast to Connor’s hard muscles.
“Tell me what else you see.”
“A woman I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.”
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
Looking herself straight in the eye, she tried out the word in her head first to make sure it was really true.
“Yes.”
“Let me show you just how beautiful you are, Ginger. Let me love you.”
The four-letter word exploded in her head, filled her completely.
There was no longer any room for doubt. Not with Connor seeing her beauty like no one else ever had. Not when he wanted so desperately to make her see it too.
It would be easy, so much easier just to tell herself that she was confusing sex with love like she had with her ex-husband. But she wasn’t that naive young girl anymore.
She was a woman who knew her own mind, a woman who knew her own heart.
And yes, oh yes, she loved him.
Turning back around in his arms, she pulled him against her and then she was on the bed and he was sliding into her in one thick stroke, working to heal her with his body as she’d tried to heal him with hers.
His name on her lips as they rocked together, she got lost in the slip and slide of their bodies, the delicious friction of his skin on hers, the way he filled her so completely.
And when he sent her reeling over the edge it was the most natural thing in the world for her to take him with her.
She’d fallen asleep in his arms, utterly content to listen to his heart beat beneath her ear as her eyes closed and she let exhaustion take her. Now she woke up alone in the bed as the sun was setting to the sound of the phone ringing again, alone in the bed again.
In the end she spent a good hour fielding phone calls from not only Connor’s brother, but a dozen of his friends on his hotshot crew. So many people who cared about him. So many people who wanted to be there for him.
For every call she picked up, another voice mail came in. His mother sounded like she’d been crying and Ginger was selfishly glad that call hadn’t come through. She wouldn’t have known what to say. Just when she thought the lull in calls might mean that the rush was over, the phone rang one more time.
“Hi, I’m sorry to bother you again. This is Connor’s father. Is he there?”
She thought about everything Connor had told her about his father, flashing next to the letters Isabel had written him and the way she’d reacted to seeing the faded pages again on the bar stool in the diner. Ginger hadn’t even met the man, and yet, strangely, she felt that she knew him so well already.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. MacKenzie. He’s out, but I promise to let him know the minute he walks in that you called.”
“Please,” Connor’s father said, “just tell him I’m coming. I’m taking the red-eye out of San Francisco.”
He abruptly hung up and she held on to the phone for several moments before realizing she was staring blankly out at the sun setting over the lake through the kitchen window, the receiver still in her hand. How, she wondered, was Connor going to react to his father’s arrival?
No question, Isabel was going to freak. Instead of three weeks to prepare she’d have eight hours.
Ginger called the diner, but when no one picked up she knew they must be running like crazy tonight.
She was about to leave a message telling her friend to call. Tonight. Whenever. But just as she was about to hang up, she decided, no, it wasn’t fair not to just spit it out.
“Andrew’s coming, Isabel. He’s taking the red-eye out tonight. I figured you’d want to know.”
She left the same message on Isabel’s home phone, and then, as she hung up the phone for what felt like the millionth time, she saw a flash of light out on the beach in front of the house.
Someone was out there with a flashlight. Looking out the window, she recognized the dark figure as Connor, but couldn’t figure out what he was dragging behind him. A hose, she quickly guessed, although she couldn’t figure out why.
A couple of minutes later when she got down to the sand she had to speak loudly to be heard over the sound of water spraying out of the hose.
“Connor? Why are you hosing down the
boat?
“They’re shooting the fireworks off tonight.”
She knew July fifth was the makeup day for fireworks if it rained on the Fourth. Still, she didn’t understand what any of that had to do with what he was doing right now.
“But everything is still wet from the storm. It didn’t stop raining until late this morning.”
“You can never be too careful.”
Finally, she got it. For all that he was trying to pretend everything was fine, that he could roll with the punches, no problem, he couldn’t let go.
Fire hadn’t just burned his hands. It was as if it were burning him up from the inside too.
She knew exactly what she needed to do to help him, had known all along that he needed her to help him accept what had happened. “You got a lot of phone calls while you were gone.”
“Who from?”
As easy as his voice seemed, she couldn’t miss the slight change in the tenor of his voice.
“Your brother called again, wanted to let you know your friends from the crew would be calling soon. And they did call, Connor. So many of them I can’t keep track of their names, but I wrote them down. Your mother left a message too.” She paused. “And your father, he called again too.”
She waited for him to respond, but when all he did was nod and continue spraying water over the already soaked wood and canvas, she said, “He wanted me to tell you he’s coming here. On the red-eye. He’ll be here tomorrow.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me?”
Finally, a reaction. “Turn the hose off, Connor. Talk to me. Please.”
He did put the hose down, and she was filled with hope that maybe, just maybe, he was finally ready to take his first step toward healing.
“Come swimming with me, Ginger.”
Her head spun at the abrupt switch, but also from being pulled back into his arms. Because now that she knew she loved him everything felt so different.
Bigger. Sweeter. A hundred times more intense.
A thousand times more frightening.
“Swimming?” she asked stupidly.
