Loving the Storm

by Linda Seed

  Of course, there was a third possibility. Maybe he really was as emotionally fragile as Gen had said. And if so, maybe it really was the best thing to leave him alone and move on.

  It was probably for the best. She was here in Cambria to focus on her work.

  She sighed, put a that never happened smile on her face, and went back to the table.

  Chapter Seven

  Aria had decided that it wasn’t going to happen between her and Liam. And that was fine. She tried to keep her mind on her work—mostly—the following day when Liam showed up to fix the skylight.

  Her ego was a little bit hurt, sure, but not enough to matter. She was polite and friendly when he showed up with the roof tiles and the ladder—and then she went back to the painstaking task of piecing together her yurt.

  “Uh … this shouldn’t take too long,” he said as he gathered his tools and prepared to go up on the roof.

  “Okay.” She was working with an unidentifiable piece of plastic that had washed up in Pismo Beach, attempting to reshape it with a piece of sandpaper to make it fit better into the frame she was making.

  “So … I’ll just go on up there,” Liam said.

  “Great. Thanks.” She looked up at him and smiled to show there were no hard feelings, then continued what she was doing.

  “I … uh … had fun last night.”

  That made her stop, the piece of plastic and the sandpaper in her hands. He seemed nervous, and that was interesting.

  “I did, too,” she said. “It could have been more fun, though, if you’d wanted it to be.” And now it was out there. What was the point in dancing around it?

  “Ah, hell.” He was looking at his work boots, and not at her.

  “Look, it’s no big deal,” she said. “You’re not interested. I get it.” She knew she sounded irritable and a little bit hostile. She hadn’t intended to be that way, but maybe Liam’s rejection of her had stung more than she’d thought.

  “Look … it’s not that I’m not interested.” He was still standing in the doorway of the barn, looking at his shoes.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s just …”

  “You don’t have to explain. Really.”

  “Would you just be quiet and let me say what I want to say?” His voice held no heat; instead, he sounded embarrassed. He set down his things and came a few steps into the barn.

  “Okay.” She put her things on the worktable and turned to face him.

  “You made me an offer last night,” he said, coming closer until he was just a couple of feet away. “And it was a nice offer. A very nice offer.”

  “But?”

  “But, maybe I want to take things slower.”

  She propped one hand on her hip and looked at him. “All right. I get that. And it’s sweet. It really is. But dating? That’s not … I don’t do that, Liam.”

  His eyes widened in surprise. “So, that’s it, then?”

  “Well … yes.”

  He seemed to consider that. He nodded thoughtfully. “You think it’s sweet.”

  “Yes. It really is.”

  He nodded again, his jaw flexing. Then he turned and headed toward the door.

  About halfway there, he stopped and turned around.

  “Fuck sweet.” In two long strides, he reached her, grabbed her around the waist, pulled her to him, and kissed her.

  Liam should have kept right on walking out the door. He knew he should have. It would have been so much smarter to go up on the roof, fix the skylight, and get the hell out of here like his ass was on fire.

  But what kind of man could refuse an offer of no-strings sex from a woman as appealing as this one? Whatever kind of man that was, it wasn’t Liam, and it wasn’t anyone he particularly wanted to know.

  He wasn’t a coward, and he wasn’t goddamned sweet. He wanted to put that thought—and every other thought she might be having—out of her mind with a kiss so thorough she’d forget she said it, or that she had the power of speech in the first place.

  He wrapped himself around her and devoured her, his mouth on hers, his tongue claiming hers. His heart was beating faster, and his blood seemed to have heated up several degrees. The feel of her body against his made him so hard he thought he might explode.

  And the way she responded to him—Christ. She was melting against him, giving everything back to him with a passion he’d only imagined she might be capable of. Her hands were in his hair, and he breathed her scent of good soap and warm, soft skin.

  He broke the kiss after a long time because he had to take a moment to slow down, to catch his breath. He didn’t let go of her, though, and she didn’t pull away.

  “Guesthouse?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “You sure?”

  She nodded.

  Only then did he start to think about the logistics of the thing, the practical matters.

  “I don’t … I mean, I didn’t …” Damn it, he was an adult man. Since when did he have such a hard time talking about safe sex?

  “I have condoms,” she said, as though she were reading his mind. “In my bedside drawer. I got them when you asked me to go to Ted’s.”

  He grinned at her, already feeling the lightheaded giddiness that resulted from all of the blood rushing to other parts of his body.

  “Well, then, let’s go.”

  They hurried to the guesthouse, hand in hand. The cottage was only about a hundred yards away from the barn, so it didn’t take them long to get there. Still, to Liam, it was too long. Now that he knew this thing was going to happen, he couldn’t wait to get her out of her clothes, to feel those soft curves against him.

  They weren’t in the door more than a couple of seconds before they were on each other, kissing and touching and undressing themselves and each other.

  Together, they fell onto the bed in a glorious tangle of limbs and bare skin. He ran his hands over every part of her, tasted her and touched her, unable to get enough of her.

  Once the practical matter of the condom was dispensed with, he slid into the silky warmth of her with something like sweet relief.

  For the moment, for right now, he wasn’t thinking about his grief over Redmond, or his heartbreak, or his injury, or any of the other myriad things that plagued him.

  For this moment, at least, he felt healed.

  And then something horrifying happened: He felt himself starting to get emotional, the hot sting of tears forming in his eyes.

  He blinked hard and held her closer, his face buried in her shoulder, so she couldn’t see.

  When she sighed and shuddered with pleasure, he tried to think only of that—of the bliss of the moment. He gave himself over to her until he felt the power of his own body’s release.

  The thing about sex with Aria was, Liam felt so damned grateful. It had been a long time, and he felt like a weight had been lifted. He felt as though he’d put down a heavy burden and could now walk lightly, with a new energy and optimism that had, until now, been lost to him.

  When it was over and they lay in each other’s arms in Aria’s bed, tangled up in the covers, he felt a buoyant good cheer he hadn’t experienced in quite some time.

  “That was pretty damned great,” he told her, enjoying the feel of her naked body, the cool sheets, and the pure luxury of lying in bed in the middle of a work day.

  “It wasn’t bad,” she said.

  “Not bad?” He grinned. “Well, hell. If the best you can say is, ‘It wasn’t bad,’ then I guess I didn’t get it right. Nothing to do but take another go at it.” He pulled her closer and moved in for a kiss.

  She accepted the kiss, then gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder and got out of bed. “I would, but I have to get back to work.”

  “Work?” He scowled.

  “Yes. That thing I do for money.” She’d pulled the blanket off of the bed and was holding it around her body, leaving him with only the top sheet.

  “It’s not like you have a boss who’s keeping a
n eye on you,” he said. “It’s not like you’re punching a time clock.” He reached out, grabbed a handful of her blanket, and pulled her toward him. On his knees on the bed, he hauled her in and wrapped an arm around her.

  “Well, neither do you,” she reminded him. “But that doesn’t mean you can slack off in bed all afternoon.” She unwound herself from his embrace and went toward the guesthouse’s little bathroom. “Besides, you have to get up and fix the skylight.”

  “Well … hell.”

  Even if she wasn’t up for another round, he still felt pretty damned happy about how things had worked out. If he didn’t feel entirely like a new man, he felt like the old one had gotten a much-needed tune-up. He got up, looked wistfully toward the closed bathroom door, and grabbed his jeans off the floor.

  Aria stayed in the bathroom until Liam had left. He’d called to her through the door, wanting to say goodbye, or thank you, or whatever was on his mind. But it was better if they didn’t talk. Especially if Gen was right and Liam was the type who’d want to have a relationship, maybe even—God forbid—an eventual commitment.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, because she did. And it wasn’t that she didn’t want to do this again, because that was a very appealing thought. But she wasn’t up for any kind of emotional entanglement.

  Lying in bed holding each other and talking, and maybe even having sex again, would send the wrong message, and she didn’t want to do that. She didn’t want to mislead him about what she was and was not capable of.

  The sex, though—it was good. Good enough, in fact, that she was cautious not only about misleading Liam, but about misleading herself.

  After all she’d been through, after all of the people she’d loved and needed who had left her, she wasn’t about to let herself need anyone again. The space between having sex with someone and beginning to need them could be deceptively short, and the slope was notoriously slippery.

  She knew the dangers, and she wasn’t about to succumb to them.

  When he was gone, she took a quick shower, dressed, and went back to the barn to work.

  Chapter Eight

  “So, did you and that artist have a good time?” Ryan asked, waggling his eyebrows. Liam had just come into the new barn, and Ryan had started in on him right away.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Liam asked, playing dumb.

  “Oh. You mean you two didn’t just have a quickie in the guesthouse?” Ryan gave him a wide-eyed, innocent look.

  “How did you …?”

  “I stopped by the old barn to see if you needed any help with the skylight. Didn’t want you to fall off the roof and split your head open. Your tools were there, and the two of you weren’t. Since I’ve been able to add two and two for quite some time now …”

  “Ah, shut up.” Liam said it without rancor. Actually, it would be nice to be able to talk things over with Ryan.

  “So?” Ryan did the eyebrow thing again. “You two did get together, right? How are you feeling about it?”

  If Liam were asking this same question to one of his friends, he’d likely ask it in terms far more crude than the way Ryan had phrased it. But this was Ryan, and he was too polite for that kind of thing. As a result, he sounded more like a therapist than like a guy shooting the shit with his brother about a woman.

  “I feel just fine about it,” Liam assured him.

  “Well, good,” Ryan said. “What about her?”

  Liam’s first instinct was to tell Ryan to mind his own damned business—mainly because that’s what Ryan would expect him to say—but instead, he leaned against a stall door and scratched the back of his neck.

  “You know … I’m not sure.”

  “Not sure about what?” Ryan asked. “She maybe having regrets?”

  “Well, hell, it was her idea,” Liam said. He ran a hand through his hair. “And it was fun. I mean … damned fun.”

  “So? What’s the problem?” Ryan had just brought a sick calf into the barn, and now he got it settled in a stall and faced Liam.

  “I don’t know that there is one. She was just in a hurry to get me out of there, that’s all.”

  “And you’re worried that she was just using you for your body?” Ryan smirked.

  “Ah, bite me.” That was exactly what he was worried about, but it didn’t seem manly to say so. Ryan must have known that, because he canned it with the teasing and smacked Liam once on the back in a brotherly kind of way.

  “Look, don’t overthink it. Just … let it go wherever it’s going to go, okay? If you’re having fun and she’s having fun …”

  “Yeah,” Liam said, embarrassed.

  “Meanwhile, while you were having personal time with the artist, I was out here working my ass off. You want to help, or you want to stand around talking about your fragile, fragile heart?”

  The smartass remark lightened the mood, and Liam was glad for that. Otherwise, next thing he knew, he’d be complaining about how Aria hadn’t wanted to cuddle. And if it came to that, well, the humiliation would be such that he’d have to move to New Zealand without a forwarding address.

  “Let’s get in there and take care of that damned calf, since you can’t seem to handle it yourself,” Liam said, feeling as though their brotherly equilibrium had been restored nicely.

  Aria spent the rest of the day working on the yurt, trying to keep her mind on her work and not on Liam Delaney.

  After their encounter in the guesthouse, Liam had come back to the barn and had finished his work on the skylight. Which meant he had no reason to come back out here, unless it was to see Aria.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Part of her was glad that what had happened between them might be a one-time thing, because that made things so much neater, so much less complicated.

  But another part of her knew that if he did keep his distance now, she’d be disappointed. And that was a problem, because she didn’t want to have feelings about him, or about the sex, or about any of it. She simply wanted to chalk up their time together as a pleasant diversion that didn’t require anything further from either one of them.

  But, God, the man had made her body sing. Really great sex tended to confuse a person about what they did and didn’t want.

  The thing about assembling pieces of trash into a yurt was that after the plans were drawn, it was largely a physical exercise rather than a mental one. That meant she had plenty of time to think while she worked. And what she was thinking about was Liam. And that wasn’t a desirable state of affairs at all.

  She was just wrapping up for the day, cleaning up her materials and assessing the work she’d completed, when she heard a knock on the doorframe of the big barn.

  Aria looked up to see Gen peering into the barn. She was wearing her black gallery dress, and her curly red hair was up in a loose bun.

  “Hey there,” Gen greeted Aria, making her way into the barn. She’d finally exchanged her pointy heels for more sensible flats now that giving birth was imminent.

  “Hey.” Aria was tired and dirty from a day of work, and she pushed her dark hair away from her forehead, letting out a sigh.

  “I just thought I’d check in on my way home,” Gen said. It was just after five p.m., and the daylight was fading, creating long shadows inside the barn. “I wanted to see how the yurt is coming along.”

  “Oh. It’s good. Slow, but good.”

  Gen craned her neck to look up at the roof. “Did Liam get the skylight fixed?”

  “He did.”

  There must have been something in the way she said those two words—he did—that pinged Gen’s radar. She looked at Aria with more interest, her eyebrows rising as she focused on her.

  “And …?” Gen asked.

  “And what?”

  “I don’t know. It just seemed like there might be an and.”

  Aria let out a sigh, and her shoulders fell. “There is, but I’m not sure I want to talk about it.”

  “Uh oh.” Gen peered a
t her with concern. “Did something happen? Something bad?”

  “No, no. Not bad. Not bad at all. Just … private.”

  Gen looked thoughtful. “All right. I respect that.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course. Especially since I can just get it out of Liam.”

  “Gen—”

  “I’m kidding,” Gen said. “Mostly.” And then she gave Aria a little toodle-oo sort of wave and walked out of the barn.

  Aria watched her go, one hand propped on her hip.

  The story was going to be all over the ranch by morning. Not that it was a very long story. Of course, stories that centered around sex didn’t have to be long to catch people’s interest.

  “Damn it,” she said to the empty barn.

  As it happened, Gen didn’t have to get it out of Liam. She got it out of Ryan.

  The three of them were gathered on the back porch at the main house, Liam and Ryan with bottles of beer in their hands and Gen sipping from a glass of sparkling water, when Gen started poking around.

  “So. How are things going with you and Aria?” Gen asked Liam, waggling her eyebrows much the way Ryan had earlier.

  “There’s no me and Aria.” Liam scowled and looked at his beer bottle so he wouldn’t have to look Gen in the eye and lie to her.

  “Really? I got the idea there was.” She was leaning against the porch railing with her glass in her hand.

  “Well, I don’t know where you got that idea,” Liam said. “Because it’s not true.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Ryan said mildly.

  “Ry …” Liam started to protest.

  “Just can it with the ‘Ry’ business,” Ryan said. “I’m not going to let you stand here and lie to my wife.”

  “Ooh,” Gen said. “So there is something.”

  “Well … maybe,” Liam allowed. “But I’m not telling you what, because it’s none of your damned business.”

  Gen just smiled. “That’s fair,” she said. “But I have to give you some sisterly advice.”

  “You really don’t,” he said.