by Cara Colter
Now he clambered up on the float, and repelled her efforts to get up on it. Soon, the air was shimmering with their shouts and their laughter.
She forgot to be self-conscious. She just became immersed in the playful sensuality of the moment: cold water, wet bodies, a perfect summer day and a perfect man to enjoy it with.
She finally managed to get her hands locked around one of his knees and refused to let go, hanging on like a terrier to a bull.
He plunged into the water beside her. Surfaced, shaking droplets of water from his hair, shouting with laughter.
“Okay,” he said, finally, when they were both gasping for air, breathless from laughing, as sodden as half-drowned puppies. “You’ve worn me out. I’ll share the float with you.”
“May I count that as a surrender?”
“You may count it as a truce.”
She pretended to be thinking about it. “All right.”
He pulled himself up on the float, held his arm out and she took it. He yanked her from the water with amazing strength, and they stood there in the bright sun, dripping water and staring at each other, something as sizzling as the sun in the air between them.
Rory Adams was as perfect as God had ever made a man. His features were chiseled, masculine, glorious. His muscles, beaded with water, told a story of easy, self-assured strength. And his eyes were the most intense shade of green she had ever seen.
His gaze moved with frank appreciation to where the water slid from her hair down in between the minute protection of the two tiny scraps of fabric that hid her breasts.
And then they moved to her lips.
And for a moment, while they rested there, she felt the heat of it, wanted what he wanted.
But then he turned, flopped down on the deck and patted the worn boards beside him.
She flopped down and felt the delicious heat of the sun on her cold skin.
“How come you never came home, Rory? Graham came when he could. For Christmas at the very least.”
He was silent, she sensed debating how much of himself to trust her with. And she felt a little thrill when he spoke, knowing intuitively she had passed a test not many had passed.
“I was so glad to get out of my house that, except for my brother, I never looked back. The military was heaven for me. Routines, rules. Meals.”
“You could have come home with Graham. I know he asked you.”
“I tried to spend holidays with my brother. We both liked to pretend it wasn’t Christmas at all. We went skiing, sometimes. California, once. France, another time.”
Despite the fact he tossed that out casually, she hurt for him. “How are your parents, Rory? They moved out of the neighborhood shortly after you left.”
“They’re both gone. My mom first, cirrhosis, my dad a few years later in an accident.”
“I didn’t know,” she said. “Graham never said anything.”
“They lived hard. People who live like that die young.”
She scanned his face. It was closed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Not for the deaths of his parents, but for him. For growing up like that, for the loneliness of having nowhere to go at Christmas, for being so alone in the world he had not shared his pain with his best friend.
He closed his eyes. For a moment, she thought he had shut down completely.
“How are your parents, Grace?”
He obviously wanted to move on. She could tell he did not like it that he had revealed so much of himself to her.
But she felt deeply honored by his trust. And somehow, despite the fact she was nearly naked beside the most glorious man in the world, it suddenly felt easy to be with him. In so many ways it was as if he was brand-new to her, but there was also a sense of knowing him. He had been in and out of her house with her brother for a couple of years.
She told him about her parents, and then ventured into the territory of old haunts: the park at the end of the street where she’d caught him and Graham smoking cigarettes and threatened to tell.
“You were a sanctimonious little brat.”
The high school and mutual acquaintances, what childhood sweethearts had married and who was now divorced. He closed his eyes and it gave her a chance to study him, to breathe in the just-out-of-the-water purity of his skin, to marvel at the thick ropes of his hair where they touched the broad perfection of his shoulders.
When she had gotten up this morning, could she have predicted a day like this? When was the last time she had allowed herself to be surprised? When had she developed this death grip on life, feeling as if she ever let go of control things would spiral wildly toward chaos and destruction?
The sun dried the water on their skin, and she became aware of how good she felt. Relaxed. Did she dare say happy?
Yes, happy.
“I’m happy,” she said it out loud, with the wonder it deserved.
“I’m glad,” he said, and he opened one eye and looked at her.
“Are you?”
He closed his eye again, seemed to feel the rough boards of the float under the roughening whiskers of his face, seemed to contemplate the question with a deep seriousness.
He opened his eyes and stared at her, and the surprise showed in his eyes and then ran in a grin across the beautiful curve of his mouth.
A real grin, a grin that lit the darkness of his eyes like sun being filtered through a glass pot of steeping tea.
“Yeah,” he said, “I am.”
“It’s been a long time since I felt happy,” she admitted.
He was silent. She was aware of his dark eyes on her, aware that something in him was guarded, was aware of it giving way.
“Me, too,” he said slowly.
And again some delicious tension built between them. He reached out and traced a drop of water that fell from the thickness of her hair, trickled down the curve of her face to her neck.
He’s going to kiss me, she thought.
* * *
I’m going to kiss her, Rory thought with amazement.
Being with her was amazing. What was it about her that made him feel powerless over what was going to happen next?
He didn’t talk about his family. And yet he had. And instead of feeling as if he should have kept his mouth shut, he felt unburdened.
Accepted.
And so his sense of amazement increased as his hand traced the droplet of water down her neck, felt how delicate her skin was, possibly the softest thing he had ever felt.
He leaned toward her. He could smell the water on her skin and feel the temperature of her skin changing as it heated under the sun.
Happy.
The thing about happiness for him? It had always felt like a challenge to the gods, something that could be taken away with remarkable swiftness.
He had never gone for Christmas at the Day house because he had known how it would be. Happiness. Closeness.
Him on the outside, looking in, knowing he couldn’t have what they had.
He pulled back from the temptation to taste her, looked into her eyes, saw the light, that miraculous light that seemed able to pierce all his shields, that seemed to be able to reach right inside him and pierce the darkness, too.
Having allowed her to make him happy made him feel vulnerable. Open. If you opened yourself to happiness, what other feelings slipped in? He didn’t want to be open.
He carried too much with him that he didn’t want to let out of the bag. He had lives on his head. From both sides. Brothers who haunted his dreams. Men he called enemy, but that did not make doing what had to be done in any way easier.
He had formed an attitude of survival that involved no attachments.
Except to Graham.
He could not kiss Graham’s sister. Or maybe
he could. That’s what happiness did. It was like wine. It impaired a man’s judgment.
A splash broke just off the edge of the float, and there was enough warrior left in him that he was annoyed with himself for not having noticed the approach of the boys.
This was the second time with her that his guard had been broached—yesterday Tucker had caught him off guard.
Today it was young men, teenagers, maybe sixteen or seventeen, three of them.
They hauled themselves up on the float, and began a rambunctious shoving match that was punctuated with some very foul language.
Was he faintly relieved to be exchanging one kind of intensity for a much more familiar kind?
In one move, lithe and silent, Rory found his feet. He crossed his arms over his chest, placed his feet wide, presence was second nature to him.
“Enough of the language,” he said quietly. He said nothing else. They could clearly see there was a woman here. He wouldn’t point that out to them.
For a moment he saw all the things he’d seen too many times before: boys on the cusp of becoming men, thinking of challenging him. Their expressions were momentarily belligerent, sullen. There was a moment, right here, that he felt, wearily, he had visited a thousand times.
Two teenage boys. Something about them.
It was that microsecond of decision when a bright day could suddenly be marred by darkness. Rory was aware of being completely relaxed, and completely alert at the same time, like a large, predatory cat. He altered his stance only slightly, ready.
The boys saw it. He had sculpted boys their age into men, that he had then sent to die, and they read that history in his stance and his eyes as if he had spoken it out loud. The belligerence fell away.
They mumbled apologies and in a flash had slipped into the water and were gone.
But even so, the magic was completely gone from the day. This was what he carried inside him.
Grace in her world of perfect Christmases and planning birthday parties, did not need it.
Gone, too, was the moment when that kiss had shivered in the air between him and Grace. When he looked at her, he was aware there would be no returning to it. He was not so sure if he saw that as a blessing or a curse.
Grace’s eyes were on his face, and he knew she had seen precisely what those boys had seen.
History. Mess with me at your own risk.
Looking at her, suddenly self-conscious again of her skimpy bathing suit, he was very aware it was not what she needed out of life. Grace Day did not need someone like him.
No, she needed someone solid and dull, who would give her afternoons like this one unmarred by the shadows of what they had seen and who they had become.
Not that being with her and playing in the water had been as dull as he had hoped it would be.
No, instead it had been pure. He had been refreshed. He had felt carefree and young.
It had given him a moment of purity, connection, happiness that he had not experienced for a very long time.
And then those boys had come along and reminded him that this kind of life belonged to someone else.
Rory was aware of needing to get away from her. From the sunny perfection of the day, from her wholesomeness.
From the feeling in his chest—what was that feeling? A heart heavy with yearning.
The thought astounded him. He eyed the water, looking for escape from the unexpectedness of that thought.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.
That’s where she was wrong. “Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
“I don’t need you to protect me,” she said. “I would have told them myself if they were bothering me.”
“Right.” She could have handled it, just like she was handling Serenity.
He felt himself drawing away from her, forming another plan. He suddenly didn’t like the way Grace made him feel.
As if he could tell her anything. Worse, as if he wanted to.
After he dropped her off, he’d head out to that land Serenity had set up camp on. He’d ask her point-blank what she was doing, demand answers, a DNA sample.
Bridey could look after his contribution to Warrior Down. On the way home he would confirm with Grace that his company would provide the perfect day—of her choosing—for silent auction.
And then, with relief, he would turn over the details of making that happen to Bridey. She could do a better job on it than him anyway.
Their roads—his and Grace’s—could part right here. He had a million ways to deal with the astonishing discovery of the yearnings he harbored without involving her.
Melbourne, Australia, seemed to be calling his name.
He looked at her, her flawless skin, the bathing suit showing off her perfect womanly curves, the wide eyes, the tangle of her wet hair, the droplets of water pebbled on her skin.
He wondered if Melbourne was going to be far enough away.
“It’s getting late,” he said. “We’d better go.”
He didn’t like the way she was looking at him. As if she could see everything about him that he didn’t want anyone to see.
What she didn’t seem to be seeing? That he would never be worthy of a day like this or a girl like her.
The drive back was sadly silent. He answered her questions with monosyllables. Pulling away. Saving her. Protecting her.
From him.
Finally they pulled up in front of her now-darkened office windows. He got out of the car, held open her door for her.
She didn’t hurry by him as he had hoped.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Sure.”
“We didn’t talk much about Warrior Down.”
“Just let me know what you consider a perfect day.” He gave her a business card. “Call me at this number, and I’ll make it happen.”
“There couldn’t be a more perfect day than the one I just had.”
He wasn’t getting sucked into her gratitude. He wasn’t even going to look at the warmth spilling out of her eyes. Why couldn’t she respect the fact he was pulling away for the good of both of them?
“Well, try and think of something that someone might part with a few thousand dollars for. Helicopters. Yachts. Caviar. You know.”
And even though she dealt with what people thought was the perfect day all the time, aggravatingly, she did not look like she knew.
Then she did what he least expected. She refused to accept that distance he was trying to put between them.
She reached up, stood on the tips of her toes. Her hair was dry now, but it had dried in a rumpled pile of curls that made him want to touch it. She had put on her uptight suit again, but it was rumpled to the point of ruination, and it didn’t hide the woman she had been on that float.
He thought he had never seen a more beautiful woman. And maybe that’s what made him helpless to pull away from her, to do what needed to be done.
He saw it coming. He could see it coming from a mile away. Her half-closed eyes, her deeply inhaled breath, the bow of her mouth drawing into the most adorable little pucker.
He had plenty of time to get away.
But he didn’t. He let her.
He let Gracie Day kiss him.
And it was everything he knew it would be. Her lips touching his contained a sweetness he had never known, a delicious innocence.
But when her kiss deepened he detected something else in there. Her hidden Ferrari dreams, her passion, the place in her that old Herbert or Hoover or whatever the hell his name had been would have killed for good.
He pulled back from her, touched his index finger to her chin.
He fought the temptation to take her lips again, to tangle his hands in her hair, to pull her to him, to coax her wild side to the s
urface.
He’d done hard things his entire life. But nothing quite as hard as walking away from Gracie.
“Don’t settle,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
It meant not to settle for someone boring and stupid like Harold. But he didn’t say that. He said, “It means get rid of that gas-guzzling old-people car you are driving and get something a little spiffy. Don’t settle for anything less than your dreams.”
Rather than looking appreciative of his advice, she looked annoyed. A good note to leave her on. He went to turn away.
And stopped. Something caught his attention, something not quite right. In the darkness of her door stoop a paper was fluttering on the window of her office.
Cars parked where they shouldn’t be. Teenage boys with a certain look on their faces. Papers fluttering on windows. Things out of place unnerved him, and he went and yanked the paper off, and scanned it briefly.
It should have made him relax, it should have allowed him to register, no threat, stand down.
No phone, it read, Did you still want me and Tuck to come for supper at your place tomorrow? Love,
Serenity.
Love. As if Serenity had a clue what that was.
Of course, neither did he.
Instead of standing down, he felt he was on red alert. Wordlessly he handed Grace the note, and saw the little smile tickle her lips when she read Tucker’s name.
“You invited them over to your place? For supper?” He folded his arms over his chest and glared at her.
Melbourne seemed to be fading by the second.
“Yes.” She looked defiant, having correctly read by his tone he did not approve of Serenity and Tucker being invited to her house.
“I don’t think you should.”
The last of the dazed look left her face. “Don’t think that just because you gave me a perfect day and an okay kiss, you can boss me around.”
An okay kiss? “You didn’t have to invite them to your house, for God’s sake. If you’re worried about the kid being hungry, you could have taken them for a pizza.”
Shoot. He had not played that one very well. He could tell by the stricken look that crossed her face it had not occurred to her that Tucker might be hungry.
