by Linda Seed
“Yes. I do.”
“Well … you’re right. I might have set you up.” As they walked, he put his hand on her back in a way that was protective and comforting. She knew she should shake him off, but instead, she wanted to lean into his touch, close her eyes, and lose herself in him.
“Why didn’t you just ask me out instead of scheming like this?”
“Because you’d have said no,” he said simply.
“You don’t know that.”
“Sure.”
“Okay, I might have,” she admitted. “But, Liam, it’s not you. It’s just that I don’t—”
“You don’t date,” he supplied.
“That’s right.”
“But why?” He stopped halfway down the pier and turned to her. A couple of kids with a dog ran past them, and Aria could smell the aroma of some ill-fated fish that had been caught and gutted.
“It’s not something I particularly want to talk about.”
“Yeah. I get that.” He ran a hand through his hair and looked down at her, frustration lining his features. “You’ve made that clear. But you know what? It’s bullshit.”
She opened her mouth to reply—some retort about his arrogance, maybe, or about his lack of respect for her personal autonomy—but he cut her off.
“You have to let people in, Aria. I get that you’ve got things in your past that you don’t want to talk about. But you know what? We all have shit in our pasts. I’ve got mine, you’ve got yours. You work it out by forming relationships with people. By relying on people. You can’t just go on shutting down the conversation whenever it gets too close to what’s real.”
“I don’t do that.”
“The hell you don’t. You’re the most closed-off, secretive—”
“What if I am?” Anger pulsed in her chest, and she glared at him. “Who are you to tell me that’s wrong? It’s gotten me this far. It’s helped me to survive, which is more than I ever thought I’d manage to do.”
She’d said too much, and she knew it. They stood in the middle of the pier in the thin winter sunlight, gulls cawing overhead. She couldn’t take back what she’d just told him; there was nothing to do but own it. She glared at him, her chin tilted up in defiance.
“What the hell happened to you?” he said after a while.
She’d wanted to stay angry—anger was the required response here—but she was mortified to feel fresh tears stinging her eyes.
“I can’t do this,” she said.
“Do what?”
“I can’t have this conversation. I can’t … I can’t relive it just to prove that I’m sensitive, and … and open … and whatever it is you need me to be. I can’t do it, Liam.”
Angry that she’d given in to her emotions, she wiped tears from her cheeks with a fist. She turned and started to walk away from him, and he reached out and caught her hand.
“I don’t need you to be anything,” he said, his voice soft now. “I just want you to be happy, and you’re not. I’m not the most perceptive guy in the world, but even I can see that.”
“I don’t know how to be happy.” It was the most true thing she’d ever said to him.
“I could help you figure it out.” He reached out and touched her face, ran a gentle thumb over her cheek.
God, how she wanted to believe he could.
They came to a kind of compromise. She promised to let him be with her—just be with her without expectations on one beautiful, clear day—and he promised not to pry.
It was working well enough as they walked hand in hand on the beach.
Despite the cold, surfers in wetsuits rode waves toward the shore or plunged into the water, their boards flying into the air. Kids in jeans and sweatshirts dug in the sand with buckets and shovels, and a few parents sat by in beach chairs, reading or watching the waves.
They walked from the pier south past shops and expensive oceanfront houses. Aria occasionally bent down to pick up a shell, a smooth rock, or a piece of refuse she thought would work with her piece.
“So, how’d you get the idea for the yurt? The trash part of it, I mean.” Liam asked.
“I was looking around my apartment one day, and I realized how many things in it are meant to be disposable. Food wrappers, junk mail, magazines and newspapers, napkins—all of that stuff. That seemed so odd—the huge, unmanageable amounts of trash—but also very familiar. If we were to eliminate everything in our homes that’s destined to become trash, there would barely be anything left.”
“So you decided to build a home out of trash,” he said.
“Yes. Because we all already do that, every day.” She was warming to her topic now, gesturing emphatically with her hands. “I’m not going to lecture people about pollution or global warming or any of that—even though it’s important—because they wouldn’t listen. They hear it all already, and they’re closed off to it. But the hope is that a visual representation of the trash in our lives—the pervasiveness of it—will communicate the idea more clearly than words would.”
Liam smiled, and she read it as condescension. She stopped walking and scowled at him.
“You think it’s dumb,” she said. It was not a question. “You think art is a waste of time unless it’s, what, a painting of fruit and flowers you can hang on your wall. Well, it’s more than that. It’s—”
“I never said it was dumb.”
“You were thinking it.”
“No. I really wasn’t. I was thinking it’s nice to see you all fired up about it, that’s all.” He kept his tone mild, his pace easy as they made their way down the beach.
“Oh. I thought—”
“I know what you thought. You thought that a guy like me couldn’t appreciate what you do. You thought, hey, all he knows how to do is shovel cow shit. Don’t worry about it. You’re not the first to come to that conclusion.”
His tone was casual, no different than it had been when they’d talked about the weather or the quality of the fish and chips. But she’d touched a nerve.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I made an assumption. I shouldn’t have.”
“Yeah, well.” He took her hand again, as though it simply belonged in his. “I don’t know if you have brothers or sisters. And I’m not going to ask,” he put in quickly, when she shot him a look. “But if you do, you might know how it is. One of my brothers is this nice guy who everybody loves, and the other one is a goddamned genius. And then there’s me.”
“What does that mean?” she asked tentatively.
“Well …” He shrugged. “My parents are great. They loved all of us. But I was never going to be as much of a good guy as Ryan—I’m just not built the way he is. And I was never going to be as smart as Colin. But I had to be something.”
She could see it. He’d had to stake his claim in the family in some area that wasn’t already dominated by someone else, so he’d become this: quick to anger with a tough exterior that said nothing could ever really hurt him. That’s just what it was, though—an exterior. Beneath that, he was as much a mass of seething insecurity as anyone else.
She noticed his limp as they walked on the sand. It didn’t slow him down much, but it was there, all the same.
“Your injury must have been hard on you.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, and it wasn’t just that. It was a lot of things. My uncle died, and I didn’t take that too well. And then my girlfriend … Did I tell you that she dumped me right after I broke the leg? I mean, right after. I was still in the hospital.”
She blinked at him in surprise. “That’s awful.”
“Yeah. It was. Hell, it wasn’t all her fault, though. Probably not even mostly.” He ran his free hand through his hair. “I didn’t mean to go off like this. Things are pretty much okay now. I’m surviving.”
“And you wouldn’t let anyone know if you weren’t. Would you?” She stopped walking and faced him.
“I guess you’d know something about that,” he said.
“I guess I woul
d.” It was the closest she’d come to admitting to him that there were things troubling her, things she couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about.
“Well, it’s good to know we’ve got something in common.” He gave her a slow half grin. “People have built relationships on less. Especially when you add good sex into the mix.”
That word—relationship—could have made her shut down and back off, and it still might. She couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t. But right now, with him looking at her the way he was, she just wanted to kiss him.
“The sex wasn’t good.” She went up on tiptoes and pressed a soft kiss to his lips. “The sex was incredible.”
His hands moved to her hips and rested there, and his eyes slid closed at the touch of her mouth to his.
“Well, then, I definitely think we should include that in the tour.” His voice was a low, sexy murmur.
“Whatever you say. You’re the guide.”
The scheme he’d worked out with Gen had worked better than expected, he thought as he snuggled in with Aria in the guesthouse bed. They’d come back here and had proven that their previous encounters hadn’t been flukes. Two great sexual experiences might be put down to luck or circumstance. But three? That pretty much sealed it: they really were good at this.
They were spooning, with his long, lean body pressed against her back, his hand caressing her arm. He stretched his leg out on top of hers, and she let her hand run down its length.
She paused when she got to the scar from his surgery, then let her fingers continue their lazy trip toward his foot.
“How did it happen?” she said.
He told her about it: How he’d been thrown from his horse, and the horse had reared and come down on top of him. How he’d heard the bones break. How he’d thought, for a moment, that if the big Arabian came down on him a second time, it might kill him. And finally, how he’d thought for just an instant that he would welcome that.
She turned in his arms to face him. “Liam …”
“I wasn’t suicidal,” he told her. “Nothing as dramatic as that. It’s just … I’d been having a hard time since my uncle died. And I knew Megan had a thing for my cousin. I knew it. I was on borrowed time. And the thing about dying—well, it wasn’t even a thought, really. It was just a flash, for one second. This one, clear instant of knowing how much easier it would be.”
He’d never told anyone that, and had never thought he would. It had just come out. It wasn’t just that he’d never articulated it to anyone. He’d never even acknowledged it to himself until he told Aria about it.
She brushed a lock of hair from his forehead with her fingers and let her thumb trail down along his temple.
“I didn’t have a childhood like yours,” she whispered to him. “I don’t know if I have any brothers or sisters. My mother …” She trailed off and didn’t continue.
“It’s okay.” He pulled her in tight. “You don’t have to.”
It was something, and it was a start. If she didn’t tell it all today, that was all right. He could wait until she was ready. He could wait as long as he needed to.
Liam had been having such a good time with Aria that he hadn’t checked his phone for most of the day. Around midafternoon, he’d seen that he had a call from Ryan, but he figured that could wait. He’d silenced the phone and shoved it back into his pocket, forgetting about it.
Now that he was back in his truck and ready to head home, he pulled the phone out of his pocket to find out what he’d missed.
There were two more calls from Ryan and one from his mother, along with a couple of texts urging him to call.
With worry beginning to stir in his gut, he started up the truck and headed back toward the ranch, calling Ryan through his Bluetooth on the way.
When it went straight to voice mail, he called his mother’s cell phone. She picked up on the first ring.
“Mom.”
“Well, it’s about time you called, boy. All hell’s been breaking loose around here, and you about missed the whole damned thing.”
The buoyant tone of her voice made him sag in relief. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t bad. She sounded as close to giddy as he’d ever heard her.
“Okay. So what whole damned thing did I miss?”
“You missed your new nephew coming into the world, boy. Genevieve had her baby.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Aria was losing her grip on the situation with Liam, and now that he’d left and she was alone, no longer immersed in the hormonal bliss of recent sex, she was cursing herself for her stupidity.
They hadn’t just had sex. They’d made love, and then they’d talked in each other’s arms, and that was exactly what she hadn’t wanted. That was exactly the kind of thing that led to heartache and misery.
“God, I’m an idiot.” She berated herself for her weakness, for her lack of resolve, as she poured a glass of wine at the counter in the little kitchen. She knew better than this. She did. And yet, she’d not only had let it happen, she’d thrown herself into it with inexcusable abandon.
Just because he was ridiculously sexy with the whole bad-boy cowboy thing, just because he was kind, and sweet, and unexpectedly complex, it didn’t mean she had to give in to him, and it certainly didn’t mean she was in love.
Love. How had it happened that she was even thinking that word? When, exactly, had she lost her goddamned mind?
“This is not okay,” she told herself. “This is definitely not okay.”
She plopped down onto the sofa with her wine, her anxiety mounting. She knew what happened when you started to feel an attachment to someone. And it wasn’t anything good.
After a few minutes, she decided that she wasn’t going to be able to relax—she had to get out of the house and do something with her pent-up energy. She thought about going to her studio to get some more work done, but instead, she got her coat, grabbed her purse and keys, poured her glass of wine into the sink, and got into her car.
She needed people, noise, distraction. She drove down the dirt road to Highway 1 and headed south toward town.
When Aria had visited Ted’s before, it had seemed festive and friendly. But then, she’d been accompanied by Gen, as well as Liam and his brother. Now, coming into the bar alone, it seemed seedy, as though the scent that permeated the place wasn’t spilled beer, but failure and despair.
Still, a little failure and despair didn’t seem so bad right now. She entered tentatively, found a seat at the bar, and settled into it, her purse strap slung across her body to protect her bag from drunks, pickpockets, or both.
“You’re Liam’s friend, right?” Ted, the owner, was looking at her expectantly from the other side of the bar.
How could she answer that? Was she Liam’s friend? Was she more? Right now, she didn’t want to be his anything.
“I … yes. I was in here with him and his brother and sister-in-law.”
“Surprised Liam’s not here with you,” Ted went on. “He loves a good beer, can’t imagine him passing up the chance.” He chuckled.
“Um … Ted? Could I maybe get a shot of tequila?”
She knew it didn’t look good—a single woman here alone, drinking tequila. But at the moment she didn’t really give a damn.
When she had the drink in front of her, she ignored the lime and salt that Ted had placed on the bar for her and slammed back the shot, wincing as it burned its way down her throat.
“Get you some water with that?” Ted asked, looking at her with a little concern.
“Yes, please. And a refill.” She gestured toward the shot glass.
Ted tilted his head to look at her. “Ma’am? You doing okay?”
“I will be, once I get the refill.” She shoved the glass toward him.
As soon as Ted had finished pouring, she slammed that one, too. The warmth of it spread through her, and the world was already beginning to get a little soft around the edges.
She might have been feeling a little self-destructive, but tha
t didn’t mean she was entirely stupid. She stopped after the second shot and switched to the water. Aerosmith was playing on the sound system, accompanied by the murmur of bar patrons talking and laughing. It was the middle of the week, so the place wasn’t full. A few guys in their twenties sat at a table in the middle of the room, a couple more were at the other end of the bar, and three guys were gathered around one of the pool tables. She was the only woman in the room.
The lights were dim, and the music was loud. She thought she smelled the faint aroma of pot, as though someone had sneaked a toke in the men’s room.
Later, she would tell herself that she hadn’t come here looking for trouble. She’d simply come to be among people, to get out of the confines of the Delaney guesthouse. But she knew that wasn’t true.
She’d come here to do something so stupid it would burn her budding relationship with Liam to the ground, saving her from all of the danger and risk love would bring.
That was why, when one of the twentysomethings from the table in the middle of the room came over and asked if he could sit next to her, she said yes.
She could have blamed it on the tequila, but that would have been a lie. She wanted disaster and ruin. She wanted to do something to push Liam Delaney out of her life for good.
They did the little things people do. They exchanged names, small talk, the questions of what she was doing here alone, and what she was drinking, and whether she wanted another one. He was younger than she was, and he hadn’t shaved that day. He smelled like beer and sweat.
When he asked her to dance, she slid off the barstool and followed him into the middle of the room, and they swayed to “Crying” by Roy Orbison with the guy’s hands on her ass.
He started kissing her halfway through the song. Hands grabbing her, sour breath, his tongue in her mouth, making her want to gag.
All she could think of was Liam.
The guy cupped her breast in his hand, and she heard some of his friends whooping and cheering.
And she couldn’t—she just couldn’t.
She pushed him away and headed back toward the bar. But he grabbed her hand and wouldn’t let go.
