Want You More

by Nicole Helm

  “Stop it right now or I’m going to tell Lilly to have you committed.” But Brandon made another lunge and on a laugh Will dodged, but Brandon had faked him out and grabbed him around the waist.

  They fell to the floor, wrestling like seven-year-olds on the playground, and laughing just as hard. Will got an elbow into Brandon’s stomach, but then Brandon secured him in a headlock.

  At a noise, Will and Brandon both paused, looking up at the door. Tori and Lilly stood there, staring at them with cocked heads and wide eyes.

  “They seem to be laughing,” Tori offered. “Though the touching is weird under any circumstances.”

  “It is, indeed.”

  “We were just . . .” Will pushed himself to his feet as Brandon’s grip on his neck loosened. He helped Brandon up. “Talking.”

  “That sounds about as plausible as anything,” Lilly murmured. “We’ve got someone coming tomorrow to look at Tori’s car. I trust you’ve got ample time to play chauffeur, Will?”

  Will grinned at Tori. “Ample.”

  “Good. Bran . . .” Lilly shook her head. “We have some paperwork to go over, but I’m a little afraid of your current mental state.”

  Brandon walked over to his wife and slid his arm around her waist, leading her out of the office. “I’ll tell you all about it,” he said as they disappeared out of the office.

  Leaving Will and Tori alone in it.

  He flashed a grin. “A morning free. Together. With you at my vehicle mercy. I like this.”

  “I think Sarge and I will go for a walk. You’re only invited if I get the scoop on the creepy adult wrestling.”

  “How about a swim instead?”

  Her mouth twitched. “I didn’t bring my bikini.”

  His grin turned sly, and though she firmed her lips together, they curved.

  “Won’t the water be awfully cold?”

  “Afraid?”

  She scowled. “Don’t try to goad me into it.”

  “But it always works.” Copying Brandon’s move, he walked over to her and slid his arm around her waist, leading her out of the office. “Besides, I’ll tell you exactly how Brandon and I ended up wrestling. You can’t resist a good story.”

  “As long as in this version of the story you’re both shirtless.”

  Will recoiled, dropping his hand from her waist. “Gross.”

  Tori laughed, and funny how something as simple as her genuine laugh could wind up in his chest, tight and uncomfortable, a weird longing feeling he didn’t know how to label settling there.

  She whistled for Sarge, and the dog tagged along as they stepped out onto the porch. “If you’re expecting me to skinny-dip, know I won’t be cock blocked again.”

  “I think only guys can be cock blocked, Tori.”

  “You blocked me from your cock. I think that counts.”

  “You’re awfully cavalier about my—” Will nearly tripped over her because apparently she’d stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Well, this is awkward,” Hayley said a little too cheerfully as she stood right in front of Tori, apparently on her way into Mile High.

  And Will had been a little wrapped up in cock talk to notice. Apparently, Tori had too.

  “Um. Well.” Hayley pushed a curl behind her ear, offering a bright smile. “I have an excursion to get ready for. You two have . . . fun.” She scampered past them and inside Mile High.

  Tori didn’t move, and Will didn’t know quite what to offer into the silence. His half sister had heard him talking about cock. His, in particular. And the blocking of it in regard to Tori.

  “Well.”

  “Yeah, well. Hope you weren’t planning on keeping this a secret, because I don’t know Hayley that well, but I don’t think secrets are her strong suit.”

  “Were you?”

  “Was I what?” she returned, starting to stride toward his Jeep, and though she was acting awfully casual about it all, the lightness and ease had gone out of her posture.

  “Hoping to keep it a secret?”

  “I don’t even know what it is.” She looked at him warily. “As far as I’m concerned we’re just fooling around.”

  There was something of a test in those words, and Will decided that if that’s what she wanted to think, it was fine. Maybe she even had to think it to let her guard down a little bit, but he’d sneak under her guard.

  And then, it wouldn’t be fooling around.

  So he smiled. “Then that’s what you can tell whoever asks. Hop in, I already threw some towels and sunscreen in the Jeep earlier.”

  He opened the driver’s door, waved Sarge in, then took his seat. He waited for a minute, and then another. Tori didn’t get in the passenger seat, and he thought briefly of being completely straight with her.

  But the passenger door opened and she slid in, buckling herself as she looked straight ahead.

  He would be straight with her, eventually, he just needed to lay some groundwork first. Last night was a start, and swimming would be another layer. Then . . . Well, then they’d see.

  * * *

  Tori stood on the rocky beach of a secluded lake while Will pulled out a bag of supplies from the back of the Jeep. Pine trees surrounded the entire beach, the impressive peaks of the Rockies reflecting along with the trees in the clear, still water.

  It was beautiful, the late summer sun bright and warm above them. It didn’t mean the water would be warm, but she was no coward.

  Hell, maybe a freezing cold dip would knock some sense into her. She could tell herself Hayley overhearing their silly conversation didn’t bother her, didn’t matter, but of course it did.

  Now, more than even before, everyone at Mile High would be watching. And waiting. Which meant fooling around got a hell of a lot more complicated.

  She hadn’t stuck around before when things had gone bad, but then again she’d been in love before, and she knew better than to do that again.

  So what is this?

  She didn’t know. She only knew it felt inevitable. Like something she had to do to fully excise the past. If that didn’t make sense to the outside world, did it matter? This was her life. Hers was the only opinion that mattered in it.

  Sarge happily bounded across rocks chasing a chipmunk, and Will plopped two beach towels, an extra T-shirt, and a tub of sunscreen on the space next to her feet.

  Without a word, he peeled off his shirt and dropped it to the ground. It didn’t hurt to sigh over that, the way his muscles bunched and moved, the clearly defined lines of six-pack.

  She sighed, too many images of last night flashing in her head. Too much wondering if it would be even better if he was undressed.

  “Gonna skinny-dip?” she asked, maybe a little too hopefully.

  “No, darling, I’ll leave that to you.” He picked up the sunscreen. “But you can rub my back, if you’d like. I’ll return the favor.” He grinned and winked, and she wanted it to be fun.

  But grinning and winking was so patently Will Evans, Charm the Pants Off Anybody, she couldn’t smile back. Getting sucked up into that old charm, into . . . whatever this was . . .

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she muttered, stripping her T-shirt off, then wiggling out of her cargo shorts. Because the only thing worse than Old Will was New Will—the kind who didn’t just notice her mind had gone somewhere else, but called her on it.

  Hard pass.

  She walked to the lake, the rocks cool and smooth under her feet. It wasn’t the perfect swimming place, being so rocky and made up of snowmelt runoff from the mountains, but it was gorgeous. Open and vast, pristine and untouched.

  She felt invincible here, and Lord knew this girl could use some invincible. She stood with her toes barely touching the icy water of the lake, and Will came to stand next to her.

  “You gotta just dive in, right?” she asked, sending him a sideways look.

  “I’m learning that’s the best method,” he said a little too seriously.


  His seriousness drove her in. She took a few quick strides into the lake, then forced herself into a superman leap into the icy water. When she surfaced, teeth chattering and full-body shivering, she searched first for Will.

  Won’t that always be your first instinct?

  Her feet could touch, but she kept her knees bent and treaded water anyway to keep herself from freezing to death. Will surfaced, wet and perfect, right in front of her.

  Water slid down his sharp cheekbones, stuck in his dark eyelashes, dripped off the ends of his beard. Too damn beautiful for his own good.

  “You could talk to me, you know, instead of diving into icy water to avoid it.” His hands clasped around her arms, pulling her farther out.

  The sun was such an odd contrast to the chill of the water, warm and vibrant above, cold and dark below. She didn’t know which to look at, but she knew not to look at him.

  “I know that talking about how we feel can be scary,” he said, his hands rubbing up and down her arms again, much like they had last night. Much like last night she was losing her footing as he drew her deeper into the lake where she had to tread water to stay above it.

  Except he’s holding you. Above the water. Up and safe.

  “But I’m beginning to think it’s the only way you ever get to heal or move forward,” he said in that measured tone that made her think he was exploring all this for the first time. “If instead of running away, we stood firm. We explore. We walk right through the underbrush and if there’s a bear there, you figure out what to do about it.”

  “Sometimes you also shit your pants.”

  “You don’t run away, though,” he said, squeezing her arms, ignoring her joke completely. “Not away to someone else, not into an icy lake. You man up and face it.”

  “How about this?” she said, her temper bubbling that he was comparing him then to her now. Defiance just her natural default, her protection. “You tell me what the hell it is you want from me, and we’ll go from there. Because if you remember a few years ago I told you exactly what I wanted from you and I got jack shit.”

  “That’s the point. I’m deciding that instead of fighting against and running away from things that scare me, I’ll wade into them and figure them out.”

  She stared at him then. “I scared you?”

  “Of course you fucking scared me. Hell, Tori, you were . . . Look, I broke a lot of things in my day. Hurt a lot of people. I didn’t want to do that to you, and it was the scariest damn thing that you’d given me the power to.”

  “So you hurt me . . . preemptively?” She shouldn’t be asking him this. She shouldn’t be delving into the old stuff, not with sex on the table. Not in the middle of a lake, alone.

  She’d scared him? What sense did that make?

  “I know we ran away from each other, and I get I started that domino, but it doesn’t delete all of the things we felt.”

  “We? We felt? I don’t . . . You made it very clear you felt nothing. You made it crystal you never would. I . . .” She didn’t want to go back to those memories, that place, not like this.

  In her anger, she could make it seem like war and power, back when she’d been pushing him for answers because he didn’t want to give them.

  Now he was giving them, but she had no anger, no armor. She only had painful memories, wrapped up in Will’s kisses from last night, the heat his body was currently giving her as he held her in the middle of a perfect lake.

  “Think about it, Tori. For five seconds think about it. Do you really think I didn’t feel anything?”

  She hadn’t at first, but he’d whisked Courtney off to Europe, by way of Las Vegas, and . . . She’d forced herself to believe he was right. Made sure every second of running away from all her friendships and foundations she’d built after leaving home had been with the belief, the knowledge, the certainty he hadn’t felt a thing back.

  He’d married someone else, hadn’t that been proof enough?

  But in this moment, in his words, she saw a truth she never wanted to believe.

  Chapter Twenty

  Tori was gaping at him like he was telling a kid Santa Claus didn’t exist. Instead of an honest truth he figured she’d known, at least a little, underneath all the ways he’d hurt her.

  How could you know how to hurt someone if you didn’t care about them?

  Wasn’t that the appeal of Courtney for so many years? They didn’t even care enough about each other to hurt each other, or at least for a time that had been the case.

  “I need you to let me go,” Tori said carefully. He didn’t know whether to attribute the translucent quality of her skin right now to water or shock or even anger maybe.

  But she didn’t seem angry. She was unnaturally still, so much so that if he did let her go, he was sure she’d sink.

  “Tori.”

  She moved then, wiggling out of his grasp, swimming back toward where her feet could touch without water covering her head. She didn’t stop there though, she kept going all the way up the rocky beach and to their pile of stuff.

  Sarge trotted over to her and she plopped herself onto a towel. After a second there, her pale skin glistening with water droplets in the bright sun, she grabbed one of his shirts from the pile and pulled it over her head, holding her arms around herself as if to get warm.

  He couldn’t help but wonder if warm was what she was really after.

  Slowly, giving her a few seconds of space, Will made his way back to shore. Sarge pranced up to greet him, then back to Tori, clearly enjoying his morning at the beach.

  The sun was warm, as were the rocks under his feet. Still, the wet shorts weren’t exactly comfortable. It was a secluded spot and he wasn’t about to play shy when that wasn’t, long range, what he was after.

  So he walked over to his towel, stripped the wet shorts off, and grinned as Tori studied him. A guy still had an ego, after all.

  “Don’t be ashamed if it keeps you up at night,” he offered, grabbing the extra clothes he’d brought.

  She raised an eyebrow at him, unreadable except in sarcasm. “You think your penis is going to haunt me?”

  “A guy can dream.”

  She shook her head, but her lips curved a little. She could be so . . . impenetrable. The rock you couldn’t get a hand or foothold in to climb. A sheer wall of nothing but hard, stubborn matter.

  It was somehow the most frustrating thing about her, and one of the things he admired most about her, all at the same time.

  He pulled on the dry shorts, a dry shirt, spread out his towel on the least rocky space next to her he could find. He took a seat and let the warmth of the sun chase the cold of the water away.

  It was a good feeling, something like baptism, rebirth and renewal. A new start, not one that erased the past, but accepted it. Forgave it.

  He glanced at the woman it all centered around. She had her eyes closed and her face tipped to the sun. Water droplets clung to the slope of her neck and ends of her braid. She had goose bumps on her arms and legs, and it was impossible not to note her nipples poking at her shirt.

  It was the perfect summer picture, and he couldn’t resist the desire to touch it. He traced the wave of a stray lock of wet hair, grazing his fingers across her cheek as he pushed it behind her ear.

  On a sigh she opened her eyes and turned her head to face him. The blue in her eyes stood out today in the sunlight and the reflection of the smooth rocks. She pulled her knees to her chest, then leaned her cheek against them, still studying him.

  “I don’t know what to do with all that,” she said quietly. “Honestly, there isn’t anything to do with it. It doesn’t change jack shit. What happened still happened.”

  He wasn’t so sure he agreed with that, but arguing with her would only make her more certain. She’d dig in harder, and he needed her to realize, at some point, it didn’t change things, no, but it mattered.

  It would always matter.

  “But now it’s rehashed and we can move on.” Her gaze
dropped from his and she moved her head so her chin rested on her knees and she looked out at the sparkling, reflective lake.

  “Move on to where, exactly?”

  She shrugged. “Friends. Coworkers. Maybe we do the sex thing just to answer any lingering questions, but mostly we’re just going forward.”

  He wanted forward too, but inwardly he wondered if forward in Tori language wasn’t a little too close to running away.

  “Brandon and I were talking about . . . well, I guess you’d call it opening up. Leaning on each other. I mean, I’m pretty sure Brandon would call it ‘family shit or whatever,’ but that’s why we were horsing around like kids.”

  “Because family shit?” She spread out the towel behind her and moved a few of the more jagged rocks before stretching out on her back.

  Will watched her, in nothing but one of his old T-shirts, a ratty, baggy thing on her, the hem of it landing somewhere mid-thigh. She closed her eyes against the sun beating down on them, and he’d give her a few minutes before he dumped sunscreen on her.

  He rearranged his towel too, and the rocks underneath him, lying out on his side so he could still watch her. “There was the threat of a hug. I had to defend my manliness.”

  She laughed, her chest moving with it, and he had to touch her again. If only lightly. He pressed his fingertips to the random droplets of water stubbornly holding on to her arm.

  “I always figured you and Brandon shared all your secrets when the rest of us weren’t around. Or had some weird twin intuition.”

  “If I had any intuition I would never have paid it any mind. As for telling each other everything . . . not so much. Evanses aren’t big on talking.”

  She opened one eye to study him with. “But you always liked each other. Got along.”

  “Mostly. He’s my brother. Even when I want to punch him in the face, I love him. Unreservedly. But it’s a strange thing to grow up in a world where everything is about how you look or are perceived, and nothing about what you actually are.”

  “Because of the town?”

  “Because of Gracely. Because of my father. Because of history and because life is weird and fucked up in the best of circumstances.”

  She laughed a little at that, her eyes drifting closed again. He wanted to touch more of her, know more of her, and she kept it all locked away. It seemed no matter how much he offered over to her, she’d hold more back.