by Linda Seed
“If?” Orin wanted to know.
“I’ll be getting an inspection, Dad, and if something’s really wrong, I can back out. But I have a good feeling about this.”
“Well …” Orin rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess the location’s going to be okay.”
“If you like an ocean view and having your feet in the sand thirty seconds after you leave your front door, I guess it’ll do,” Sandra said, rolling her eyes at her husband.
“God. This is so exciting.” Breanna did that bouncing-on-her-toes thing again. “I’m going to need a renovation guy.”
“I can help out some,” Liam said. “But, yeah, I guess you’re gonna need someone who knows what he’s doing.”
“You ask your brother. He’ll get you some names.” Everyone in the room knew Sandra meant Colin, even though she hadn’t said his name. Colin had supervised so many property developments up and down the coast that he knew a stunning array of people in the business.
“Well, I hope you’re not making a mistake,” Orin said, looking pained.
“I’m not. And if I am, it’s my mistake,” Breanna said. She kissed her father on the cheek and went upstairs to check on the boys.
“I still think you should have talked her out of it,” Orin said to Liam.
Sandra grunted. “You just don’t want the little birds to leave the nest,” she told Orin. “But when they don’t leave the damned nest, it’s usually because they don’t know how to fly.”
The comment had been a casual one, but it still hit Liam hard. When Breanna was gone, Liam would be the only one of his siblings living at home. True, he’d been off in Montana for a few years, but now he was right back in the room he’d slept in when he was a boy.
He’d always thought he’d moved back into the house to be close to his work on the ranch. But was there more to it? Had he never learned to fly?
Maybe Breanna wasn’t the only one who needed to think about making a change. Maybe Liam needed to jump out of the damned nest too, to see whether his wings would catch the air, or if he would fall flat on his ass.
Aria had never had the option of staying in the nest, as she’d never had much of a nest to begin with.
She’d had no choice but to fly. Though sometimes, rough weather made it a little hard to stay in the air.
Maybe that was why she was building the yurt—a nest of items discarded the way she’d been discarded so long ago, and so many times since then.
She tried not to think of these things too often, and she kept right on not thinking about them as she worked to assemble the basic frame of the yurt. The various pieces of plastic flatware, water bottles, soda cans, discarded chopsticks from Chinese takeout restaurants, broken sand toys, and other random items were finally taking shape into something identifiable.
She was building the yurt in such a way that it could be disassembled for transport and then reassembled wherever she ended up showing the piece. After some consideration, she’d decided to create the floor as three pieces, and the shell of the thing as two parts that could be clipped together at its destination.
Creating two halves of the main yurt structure was more of a challenge than making it as one whole, but if she’d done it as one piece, moving the thing would be too much of a hassle.
And the yurt wasn’t going to do her much good from a career standpoint if it stood here in the Delaney barn forever.
She was thinking all of this on a rainy Saturday partly because the work needed to be done, and partly to keep her from thinking about Liam.
She’d shooed him away the last time he’d come to see her, more than a week ago. At the time, that had felt like a necessary thing to do. But now, with the rain pattering on the roof and the gray light of the morning coming in through the open barn doors, she couldn’t help feeling lonely and thinking how nice it would be to have someone here with her—particularly someone who might hold her and kiss her and make her, if just for a moment, feel whole.
It would feel nice—but that was the problem. It would feel too nice. So nice, maybe, that he would get to her, get under her skin in a way that would make it hard to extricate herself.
Still.
What harm would there be in a little pleasure? What harm could possibly come of continuing their casual fling with the understanding that it would never be more than that?
She thought about the rain and wondered if she might use that as an excuse to bring him here. It would help if the skylight were still leaking—which it wasn’t.
She looked up at the skylight, speckled with rain. Then she looked down at the barn’s dirt floor, which was completely dry.
It didn’t have to be.
Aria retrieved a water bottle from her worktable, considered it, and then opened it and poured the contents onto the dirt beneath the skylight. Then she picked up her cell phone and dialed Liam.
When he answered, she said, “Liam. Hi. It’s Aria. I’m sorry to bother you, but … I’m in the barn, and there’s some water on the floor under the skylight. I wondered if you could come and take a look.”
It wasn’t a lie, after all.
Liam made his way to the old barn with his male pride wounded. How the hell had he screwed up a simple job like fixing the skylight? A man didn’t have much in life if he didn’t have his sense of competence at basic tasks.
Add to that the double insult that Aria had rejected him the last time he’d seen her, and his mood was all storm clouds and thunder as he walked into the barn and got out of the rain.
“What the hell? I thought I fixed the goddamned thing,” he said, not so much to Aria as to the room itself, as he peered down at the puddle underneath the offending skylight.
“Mmm. I thought you did, too,” Aria said. She’d been standing at her worktable doing some damned thing, but when he came in, she stopped doing whatever it was and turned to face him.
She was wearing those tight jeans again—the ones that hugged her curves so closely it made him dizzy—and some kind of loose sweater with a low neckline that gave him a dazzling view of her cleavage. Her hair was up in a messy bun, and the slight chill in the air made her cheeks pink in a way that made him want to kiss her.
Not that he was going to—not until she asked him to.
He craned his neck to look up at the skylight.
“Well, that’s weird.”
“What is?” she asked.
“It’s still raining, but there’s no leak right now.” He’d expected to find water dripping from the roof of the barn, but there wasn’t any—just the standing puddle of water where the leak should have been.
“Huh,” she said. “I didn’t see any actual leak. There’s just water on the floor.”
A hint of a grin tugged at her lips, as though she knew something he didn’t. Which she probably did. The vast depth and breadth of the things Liam didn’t seem to know these days was staggering.
“Well …” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I can’t get up there again now, with the rain. But I can take a look again as soon as it clears up and the roof dries out a little.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
Standing here looking at Aria, Liam felt his insides grow warm and soft in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
“I guess I ought to apologize,” he told her, for lack of anything else to say. “I should have fixed it right the first time.”
“Hmm.” She walked over to him, stood well inside his usual bubble of personal space, and looked up at him with her big, amazing eyes. “It’s nice to see you.”
Was she coming on to him? It sure seemed like it.
At that moment, there was a kind of electric storm in Liam’s brain that short-circuited any rational thought. If he’d been thinking clearly, he might have remembered the way she’d turned him away before. He might have considered the possibility they wanted different things out of anything that might happen between them. He might have thought to worry about what it meant when a woman wanted you, then didn’t
want you, then wanted you again.
But as it was, he wasn’t thinking about any of those things. Instead, he was just focused on her nearness, and the smoothness of her skin, and the way she smelled like lavender and fresh rain.
He did, however, remember one snippet of thought he’d been having before she’d come so close to him.
“I’m not going to kiss you,” he said, his voice rough.
“You’re not?” She looked at him with eyebrows raised.
“No. Not unless you tell me you want it.”
They were both quiet for a moment, standing so close they could feel each other’s body heat in the coolness of the barn.
“I want you to kiss me,” she said.
After that, his rational brain shut off entirely, replaced by a caveman brain that only knew the sensations of hunger and need.
He grabbed handfuls of her hair and took her mouth with a ferocity even he hadn’t seen coming.
A groan came from deep within her throat as she responded to him, pressing her body against his and wrapping her arms around him.
His reaction to her was so strong and so immediate that there was no question of going to the guesthouse, or to his house, or to anywhere other than where they were at this moment. The delay simply would not have been tolerable.
He pushed her backward until her back slammed into the barn wall. Just for a second, he was conscious of what was happening, and of the fact that his sudden burst of aggression might be too much. Pressed up against her, he stopped and looked at her in question, the air between them hot and charged. When she grabbed his face and pulled him to her for a kiss, he had the answer he needed.
He thrust his work-roughened hands under her sweater, ran them up her body, and then took hold of her breasts over the fabric of her bra.
“Liam.” It was a whisper, a prayer.
His name on her lips made him want her even more. He brought his hands down to her ass and lifted her so she could wrap her legs around him, her back pressed up against the rough wood of the barn wall.
The big worktable was a couple of feet away, and he reached out with one arm to sweep away the various bits and pieces—glue pots and trash and sketch pads that went crashing to the floor in the seconds before Liam lay her on the table, his body on top of hers.
It didn’t occur to her to protest his manhandling of her work. In fact, it was ridiculously hot. She tore at his wet jacket and then his shirt. She couldn’t get down to his bare skin fast enough.
After what seemed like a moment and also like forever, he was naked from the waist up, her sweater was pushed up to her neck, and he was raking her jeans down her body. She wasn’t aware of the rain on the barn roof, or the open door where anyone could come in, or the morning chill. She was only aware of what her body felt, and what Liam was doing to her.
She reached for his jeans the best she could, lying on her back with him halfway on top of her, and that was the last bit of permission he needed. He unbuckled his belt, unsnapped and unzipped, and then fumbled for the condom he’d tucked into his back pocket before he’d come out here—a rash bit of optimism that was now paying off better than he could have hoped.
He ripped open the package with his teeth, rolled on the condom, and then thrust into her so hard and fast that it made her gasp.
The rough tabletop scratched at her back as she clutched at him, holding on to him, her fingernails digging into his biceps. She wrapped her legs around his body and he grabbed onto the sides of the table with his hands, his face buried in the hollow between her shoulder and her neck.
The raw power of him took her breath away.
She felt the orgasm coming, first from a distance and then closer, closer, until it slammed into her like a bolt of lightning. She cried out and clutched at him, and later she thought that she might even have blacked out for a moment. Her overwhelming, noisy pleasure pushed him over the edge, and his body stiffened and shuddered over hers.
When it was over, they both struggled to recover. It was a big table, so there was room for Liam to lie down next to her, breathing hard, the two of them gathering themselves with fragments of beach trash under their backs.
“That’s not why I came out here,” Liam said after a while, his voice raspy.
“Well, it’s why I brought you out here,” Aria admitted.
“It’s … what? What do you mean?”
She grinned, her eyes closed in remembered bliss. “There’s no leak. You said it yourself. It’s still raining, but there’s no water coming in through that skylight.”
“Wait. But the water …”
“I poured a bottle of Evian on the floor.”
For a moment, he didn’t know what to say. The idea of her scheming like that, coming up with a fake leak to get him out here, was both surprising and flattering. He couldn’t say whether a woman had ever used false pretenses to get him into bed—or in this case, onto a table—before.
“Well, you’re just full of damned surprises,” he said, not at all displeased with the situation.
After a while, they both became aware of the fact that they were half-dressed with the barn door wide open to the world, creating a potentially embarrassing situation for themselves if anyone should come by.
Aria was the first one to get up. As she rose, Liam tried to pull her into his arms, but she playfully smacked him away. “We’re in public—sort of—and I’ve got no pants on,” she pointed out.
“You look good with no pants on,” he told her.
“I’m not sure your sister-in-law is going to think that.”
“What’s Gen got to do with anything?” Liam asked.
“Nothing, except that she comes around sometimes to check in and see how I’m doing.”
Liam rose up on one elbow to watch her pull her jeans on, grinning. “Well, if she comes in now, she’ll think you’re doing just fine.”
“Or she’ll think I’m slacking off on the work I came here to do.”
Liam noticed Aria gradually turning distant, as though he’d done or said something to offend her, though he didn’t know what it might be. Unless his advances had been less welcome than he’d thought.
He got up off the table, fastened his jeans, and picked up his shirt off the floor.
“Hey. Aria?” He pulled on the shirt and started to button up against the cool air.
She was pretty much put back together now, and she’d begun picking up the stuff he’d swept off of the table and onto the floor.
“Are you … I mean, is everything okay?” he said.
She stopped, a pot of glue in one hand and an empty soda can in the other. “Fine. Why?”
“Well, you just … a minute ago, you seemed pretty damned happy, and now I’m starting to wonder if maybe I overstepped.”
She looked at him blankly. “Liam. What are you talking about?”
Frustrated, he ran a hand through his hair. “I’m talking about the fact that I was kind of rough with you, and I’m wondering … Jesus, what I mean is …”
She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. “Liam, I wanted that. I lured you out here. You can relax. You’re guilt-free.”
Somehow, her reassurance on that point wasn’t as comforting as it should have been.
“Then what’s wrong?”
She began putting items from the floor back onto the table, not looking at him. “I need to get back to work, that’s all.”
He stood there, confused and hurt. He wondered if this was what high school girls felt like after their date screwed them in the back seat of a car and then never called again.
Not knowing what else to do, he went over to where she was and started picking art supplies and random bits of trash off of the floor.
“You don’t have to help,” she told him.
“That’s all right. I did it, I should help clean it up.”
She fixed that pale gray gaze on him. “I said you don’t have to help.”
Whatever this was, he didn’t know how to f
ix it or what he’d done to cause it.
“Well, all right, then.” He picked up his jacket off the floor, shrugged into it, and walked out into the rain.
Chapter Eleven
When Liam was gone, Aria picked up a few more things off the floor and placed them back onto the table. Then she stopped what she was doing, threw the items she was holding onto the table with enough force that they bounced, and said, “Damn it. Goddamn it.”
She raked her hands through her hair and stood there, going over what had just happened.
Why had she acted like that? Why had she been so rude to him? She’d made him think that she was somehow upset or traumatized by what had happened—that he had somehow taken advantage of her.
Well, she was upset and maybe even traumatized by what had happened, but not in the way he thought.
The upset? That was because she hadn’t wanted him to leave. The trauma? Well, that happened a long time before she’d even met Liam Delaney, and now he was the one who was suffering for it.
Damn it.
Aria had things she couldn’t tell him, things she had no desire to tell anyone, ever. Those things made it impossible for her to sustain a meaningful relationship, not because she couldn’t, but because she was never going to let anyone have the kind of power over her that Liam would have if she decided to let him in.
She wanted the fun and excitement and physical closeness that sex represented. She wanted that release, that joy. But she did not want anyone claiming a piece of her, because once that happened, she might come to depend on it.
And people didn’t stay. That was one thing you could count on: people never stayed.
She’d learned over time that it was better to be the one who made that decision to cut things off. It was better to be the one in control of the goodbye. That way it would never take her by surprise, never leave her shocked and wounded in a way she might not recover from.
So far, imposing that distance between herself and the men who had come into her life had kept her safe.
But this time it was harder. This time, pushing him out felt wrong. It felt counterintuitive. Showing him the door had hurt—it had maybe hurt her more than it had him.
