TRAVIS READ CALLED COLE.
“Hey, Tori is saying she’d really like to visit with Evan and Maddy since her mother’s not going to be home tonight.”
“Rachel’s going out?”
“Yeah, you know, with the other women of the revival committee. For a picnic by the lake.”
No, he didn’t know. Honey had left earlier without saying goodbye.
“Anyway,” Travis was saying, “how about you and the children come for supper? Sam’s bringing Chelsea.”
Madeline would love that. She’d liked Chelsea. Plus, it would relieve Cole of dealing with his first evening alone in the house with the children.
They drove to Travis’s comfy Victorian for a supper that the children, and Cole, enjoyed.
Cole couldn’t stop worrying about Honey, though. He remembered the women going to Cloud Lake a few times last summer, and where their favorite spot was. The lake was a bit more isolated than he’d like, being off the highway out of town.
After dessert, Travis settled the children in front of the TV to watch a movie.
They snuggled on the sofa with a couple of bowls of popcorn. Cole was relieved to see Evan and Maddy becoming more comfortable with every passing day in Rodeo.
“Listen,” Cole said quietly to Travis and Sam in the kitchen, “they’re happy watching the movie. Do you mind if I go out for a while?”
Travis’s brows shot up. “You got somewhere important to be?”
“I just need to do something.”
“Okay. Sure. Go.”
Sam nodded. “We can take care of the kids.”
Cole left through the back door so Madeline and Evan wouldn’t see him go. He didn’t plan to be gone long.
He drove to a spot just past where the women had picnicked regularly last summer. Cole backed his pickup into an overgrown laneway on the far side of a Siberian elm, edged his seat to a flat position and settled in to wait. The women wouldn’t be much longer at their partying.
His truck could probably be spotted if anyone were to look for him, but the women had no reason to. Or, if their headlights picked up the nose of his truck—every one of them knew his truck—inching out from behind the tree on their way out, they were free to guess the truth...that he liked to watch out for them.
To watch out for Honey.
She might not be the right partner for him, but he loved her, and his decision that he couldn’t pursue her was his burden to bear.
Last summer, he’d sat out here on a number of Sunday nights watching until the women got in their vehicles to drive home, making sure they left the area safely.
He remembered thinking at the time that he should get a life, and that the townspeople could take care of themselves when he was off duty.
Well, he sure had a life this summer, didn’t he?
Those children and the house would keep him busy.
Fifteen minutes later, a vehicle passed his truck, and another and another—all but Honey’s.
She would be along soon.
He waited. And waited. And became worried.
It was taking too long.
Where was she?
Why hadn’t she followed the other women out?
Had something happened to her?
He waited five more minutes. Dusk was falling. He pulled out and drove down the road to park on the shoulder just this side of the track leading to the stream.
He got out and walked down the track quietly—if someone had come along to hurt her, he needed the element of surprise.
In the clearing, he found a picnic blanket with glasses and two empty bottles of white wine, not enough for any of the women to have had too much to drink before driving home.
In the dying light of the sunset, the remnants of a small picnic dinner sat beside a bunch of clothes.
Now why would there be discarded clothing?
His gaze shot toward the water.
A body floated midstream.
Dear God. Honey!
Fully clothed, he dived into the lake and swam to the center, where the pale body was indeed Honey, eyes closed, body still.
He grabbed her to save her. She turned into a wildcat, fighting him. Not dead. Just floating.
“Honey!” he shouted. “It’s Cole.”
She stilled in his arms, staring with wide eyes. “What are you doing here? Why did you grab me?”
“I thought you were drowning.” Now he could see clearly what he hadn’t discerned from the shore. Honey had been enjoying a quiet, solitary skinny-dip in the lake. Naked.
“This isn’t how drowning people look.” She sounded cross, and breathless. “I would have been facedown, under the water.”
He knew that. He had first aid training out the wazoo. “You were still. You were pale and...unmoving. I panicked.”
“You scared me. I thought you were a stranger attacking me.”
“You could have drowned, out here alone with no one the wiser.”
“I wasn’t drowning!” she shouted.
“You could have been. Or a snake could have swum into the water. Or a stranger could have found you, out here in the middle of nowhere alone and naked.”
“You forgot about the rabid raccoons!” she yelled back.
“What raccoons?”
“The ones that don’t exist! Just like the stranger who doesn’t exist. I was not drowning. I was not in danger.”
Her hands clung to his shoulders. Angry nails dug into his skin.
His hands encircled her waist, her soft, wet, unclothed skin cool to the touch in the still water of the lake warmed by the recent high temperatures.
His breath rattled out of him in sharp gusts.
Angry and scared, unable to speak, hands shaking beyond control, he grasped her face and kissed her, the language of his fear spoken with an invading tongue and mobile lips.
Chapter Twelve
Her response, fueled by anger, as unbridled as his, inflamed his desire.
Cole lost his precious control, his reason, his measured mastered response to Honey.
He’d wanted her for an eternity, for ages before he had ever existed on this earth, his cells floating in the universe looking for a home.
Here. Honey. Home.
His mind had resisted Honey for years, but his heart had known.
He’d been a fool for ever trying to stop what had to happen.
She joined him fully, pulling his shirt out of his jeans and ripping open the buttons, undoing his buckle and unzipping his jeans.
Crickets sang and a soft breeze hummed, the only music they needed to serenade them under the gathering stars.
Her body, slick with cooling water, ran like silk under his palms, full breasts with peaked nipples, a tiny waist and full hips—his idea of perfection, of womanhood.
Her generosity, apparent in every part of her life, flowered full-blown into passion and surrounded him.
Her arms slid around his neck, her palms holding his head in place to deepen an already deep kiss, and her legs circled his waist, strong, her core seeking.
He entered her. Heaven had been here waiting for him all along.
Waist-deep water swirled around them. Cole’s wet shoulders cooled in the night air while heat built below in moisture and passion.
Honey’s tongue tasted of wine and chocolate and sweet, sinful longing.
Her hair, her arching back, her full behind...all were magnets that drew his big palms to explore.
To the rising rhythm of their lovemaking, water churned, exquisite fervor built and they came in joyful surrender.
Cole’s love too massive for words or thought, he drank in Honey’s sighs.
In the subsequent quiet, his pounding heart calmed and finally stilled. Against the cool skin of his chest, he felt Honey’s heartbe
at. It, too, calmed in time.
Her head lay against his shoulder as she rested boneless and sated in his arms, her trust humbling.
In his wildest dreams, he had never imagined it could be this...fulfilling, beautiful, incomparable.
He’d never experienced the rare spectacle of passion with not just desire but also love.
He trailed kisses across her shoulders. She shivered.
“Cold?” he murmured.
“Only my back. My wet hair.” She sounded breathless.
He felt breathless.
She had robbed him of his sanity, his reasoned, controlled response to life.
He knew he should carry them to the blanket, but not yet. Not yet.
He cooled in the now-tranquil water.
Maybe this should be all of life, this peace and acceptance. This beauty in the darkness. This slice of outstanding respite from reality.
Maybe this should be reality.
Maybe tomorrow should take care of itself.
But that wasn’t Cole’s way. He knew better.
He knew how fleeting this was. His responsibilities were real and calling.
With regret, he carried Honey out of the water. He should put her down. He couldn’t. He held on for just a few more moments, because tomorrow would come quickly enough. Too soon. And then he would be Sheriff Payette again and she would be a business owner, and this fantasy interlude would be over.
He lay down with her in his arms, brushed aside the detritus of the picnic and curled the two sides of the quilt over them.
“Warm enough?” he murmured.
“Hmm.” She lay curled against him, this miracle of womanhood. “What was that about?” she asked, her breath fluttering across the bare skin of his chest.
Inside the cocoon of the blanket, he feathered his fingers down her spine, touching tiny knobs of delicate bone belying Honey’s strength, both physical and of spirit.
She raised up on her hands to hover above him. Light from the rising moon, oblique across the water, lit her breasts, full on a tiny woman’s frame.
She was perfect.
He’d sensed the danger in losing control.
Now he knew the peril of loving Honey intimately. How was he to take it back? How could he keep his distance when he’d tasted the beauty of Honey’s lovemaking?
She was every bit as wild as he’d feared, out here alone naked in the water. An untamed nymph. A goddess.
Tension as dark and edgy as unwanted temptation knifed through him.
Before he could sink into Honey again, before he could indulge the man who wanted what could never be, he lifted her from him, rose and stalked away.
At the truck, he rummaged in the back until he found the bag of spare clothes he kept there.
* * *
WHAT ON EARTH just happened?
Cole had happened.
Honey lay on her back staring at the pinpricked night sky. Tiny hard dots of silver sparkled in the blue blackness of the night ceiling.
The breeze kicked up and cooled her damp skin.
She stood slowly, legs weak and shaky.
Boy, had Cole ever happened.
She’d been minding her own business when Cole Payette had swept her off her water-logged feet like a fire-breathing dragon, hot and angry.
His fierce lovemaking...
How was she to forget his lovemaking?
Where did they go from here?
Anywhere?
No. Not judging by the way he’d stomped off, angry with her.
She’d done nothing wrong.
Whatever was going on with Cole was his problem, not hers.
It did leave her with a new realization, though. She loved Cole. Good, decent, honorable, screwed-up Cole. It had snuck up on her when she wasn’t looking.
She didn’t want a cop, a deputy, a sheriff. She wanted safety and security...without the possibility of more heartache. She’d lost her father, her mother and Daniel. A heart could take only so much grief.
The impregnable walls she’d built against falling in love with the most unsuitable type of man had just crumbled.
Sighing, she dried off with the towel she’d packed for the evening and got dressed. Mere minutes later, she left the clearing as spotless as she’d found it.
She’d lost a battle. Now she needed to see if she’d lost the war.
At the end of the trail, she found her car boxed in by Cole’s pickup truck. He stood beside his driver’s door, big and silent and hard, in dry clothes.
Even from a distance she could sense his refusal to accept all that had just happened, the earth-shattering passion that had heated the water around them like magma rising from the earth.
She knew him well, could read him effortlessly. He’d gathered his defenses around himself.
It angered her. She wouldn’t be used and thrown away.
But he hadn’t used her. He’d loved her, his passion springing from fear. For her. She had participated fully. It was that simple.
Yes, she understood, but this push-pull that was Cole’s desire for both love and control had to end.
Dropping her bag onto the ground, she came right up to him, grasped his face before he could object and took his mouth with her own.
He tried to push her away—oh, how he tried—but couldn’t. He opened his mouth, thrust his tongue into hers and played a mighty tune.
She played right back.
When she finished, she said, “I know you, Cole. You’re going to control the daylights out of this situation. Tomorrow morning, you’re going to pretend this never happened.”
His heavy breath ruffled strands of hair drying around her face.
She released him, stepped back and pointed her finger at him. “This isn’t over.”
“It is.” He sounded like he’d been running uphill.
“Not by a long shot, buddy.”
She stalked to her car and climbed in.
He stood like a Norse god, immobile. A wall of opposition.
She waited him out, refusing to tell him to move his vehicle.
Slowly, never moving his eyes from her shadowy presence in her car, he opened his door and climbed in, the vehicle shifting with his weight.
His headlights blinded her. She turned hers on and hoped she’d blinded him.
Dueling headlights.
He backed out and tore off down the highway.
Cole Payette was so far out of his trademark control that Honey laughed out loud.
She didn’t know why.
If Cole didn’t want her as she was, there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.
Fine.
She could accept that. She would not ignore what had happened tonight, though.
She would remember making love in the water with Cole with the joy it deserved.
For, no doubt, many nights to come she would celebrate the memories.
To be honest with herself, she didn’t know why she’d pushed Cole so hard. She was as lost as him. After all, she couldn’t commit to him when he was sheriff any more than he would commit to her—and he would never give up his career.
She would never ask.
* * *
HONEY HEARD THAT Cole went back to work the next day.
She wondered how Maria was doing with the children, but she refused to walk over to the house to find out.
Cole and Maria had to work things out on their own.
She decided that she would, however, visit Cole after the children were in bed that evening. It was time for them to hash things out.
What they had done together couldn’t be ignored. They had a lot of years left to live in this town. They had to find a way to get along.
She arrived at nine thirty, long after he should have the children sett
led, but early enough for him to still be up.
A lone lamp burned in the living room.
She knocked on Cole’s front door softly.
When he opened the door, he took her breath away, solid and tempting. Images of last night’s lovemaking flashed through her.
She thought they might have done the same to him, because his cheeks turned suspiciously pink.
“We need to talk.”
“No, Honey, we really don’t.”
“Yes, Cole. Please.”
He hung his head, sighed and opened the door wider. “Fine. Let’s get this done.”
She sidled past him and into the living room. She heard the front door close and Cole come up behind her. He gestured toward the sofa.
“Sit.”
She did and started in without preamble.
“You love me.” Baldly stated, but only bold talk would get them through this. “For some reason that escapes me, you don’t want to love me.”
When he would have answered, she raised one hand. “Let me finish, and then it will be your turn.
“I’ve come to realize that I care deeply for you, too, but I can’t. I won’t let it happen because of what I went through when Daniel died. So here we are, two people who care for each other but have decided not to.” She curled her legs up beside her and hugged a pillow to her chest. “And yet we have to live in the same town. How are we going to do that?”
He didn’t respond.
“I suggest that we talk about our reasons for not wanting to pursue a relationship, so we can understand where the other is coming from.”
Seated in an armchair across from her, he threw back his head and stared at the ceiling. When he finally straightened, he met her eye, expression tormented.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.
“What could you possibly say to hurt me? That you love me but don’t like me?”
“No, not exactly.”
Meaning exactly. “You’d better explain, Cole, because nothing you can say will be worse than what I’m thinking. I’m not a horrible person, but you’re about to give me a complex.”
“No. You’re a fantastic person, but...”
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. While staring at the floor, he told her about his life growing up in Georgia and then running away with a woman named Shiloh.
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