Nick’s devotion to his mother was plain to see. Funny, she never thought of him as the family type, and yet what she’d learned first and foremost over the last few days was that he was a fierce and loyal family man. An affectionate and overprotective older brother. A superhero uncle. A longtime best friend. And a loving son. Where had the ogre gone?
Shannon sighed. This was all so nice, she thought. Their conversation had been completely normal, without lingering drama. It felt good, damn good. Everything happens for a reason, her inner voice whispered, and she wondered if this slice of normalcy was meant to remind her of what was missing from her life or show her how it could be again. Either way, both scenarios were inextricably tied together.
“In fact, she’s just returned home, um, yesterday I think.” Nick was still talking and Shannon mentally shook herself to get back up to speed before the contentment from their big meal and the languid way he was stroking and rubbing her foot turned her brain to mush.
“Part of my original plan had been to fly home to be with Mom for a few days in Connecticut where she lives before heading back to the city. I’d like you to meet her, Shannon. I think you two would hit it off…” Before he could say another word, a zip line of panic snapped through Shannon when she realized he was making plans that included her.
Her flinching reflex and quick intake of breath stopped the conversation dead cold as Nick went on high alert and asked, “What’s wrong? Did I say something? Hurt you?”
Thank god he threw in the hurt you because it gave Shannon the perfect duck-and-cover for her unfortunate reaction. She rotated her ankle just a bit and said, “Oh, sorry. It feels good right now, but you must have been touching where the bruising is really bad.” That sounded good, right?
Nick’s eyes narrowed fractionally. The cowboy pirate was back and watchful. She knew he could read her like an open book, so she made an apologetic moue with her mouth, shrugged, and then got very busy removing her foot from his lap and testing it against the floor. He wasn’t fooled, she knew that from his silence, but she had to do something while she corralled her wandering emotions.
They were back to the emotionally charged silence again, but maybe that’s what they both needed at times as this journey of rediscovery moved them along toward a still-uncertain future. Each had quite a bit to think about. And as he purposefully moved her to the outside patio so he could clear up from dinner, that’s what they both in fact did.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Following their conversation over dinner, Shannon had a myriad of thought-provoking new details to ponder in what was fast becoming an entirely new worldview. Nick wasn’t the money-hungry fiend she’d been painting him as, although the anguished strokes of bleakness and anger that had been drawn all around him weren’t entirely off the mark. He’d all but put the brush in her hand and instructed her to portray him as a villain. She couldn’t help but think that if she’d been more mature or perhaps less shaken up by their parting and the events that followed, perhaps she might have tried to bridge the painful gulf he’d placed between them once the dust had settled.
The money, which she’d seen as the root of all evil in the old narrative, had actually empowered Nick to blaze new avenues of earth-friendly technologies and systems. To say she’d been surprised to learn all the ways he had turned the entire Barrett empire on its head and reformed the family business into a forward-thinking concern he was proud to helm was an understatement. She’d all but wept at the sound of pride and excitement she’d heard in his voice when he went off on a rambling explanation of wind farms and renewable energy sources because that was the Nick she remembered. That person, smart, hopeful, driven and completely committed to changing the world one good idea at a time, was the one she’d fallen in love with. That he’d found a way to turn around the business he regarded as a life sentence made her so very proud of him. An image of Nick as a phoenix rising from smoldering ashes warmed her more than it probably should.
All the heavy sighs and head-shaking, though, wasn’t going to change what happened and made Shannon realize that in order to move forward she was going to have to let much of that old paradigm go. He’d certainly been trying to clarify his past behavior using consistent and at times uncomfortable truths and also been damn near on his knees with regret. These things mattered to her, and while she wasn’t entirely at ease with the convoluted way his perceptions and actions combined to create such a perfect storm of broken hearts and dashed dreams, she did have to admit that he was dripping with sincerity now. He’d allowed her to vent years of anger and hurt at him and had taken her responses stoically, as if he knew he deserved her reproach and much, much more.
Lord almighty, but Shannon wanted to trust him. Wanted to simply make all those empty years go away and replace them with something happy and joyful, a brighter future that would see them find their way, together. She’d been so hurt and confused and downright angry for so long, but with his nonstop campaign to right the wrong he’d committed, it was becoming harder and harder for her to keep him at arm’s length.
Their meal, which had been absolutely fabulous, had satisfied one hunger, but it seemed as though with each new reveal Shannon was battling a deeper craving, something raw and primitive that just would not be denied. She wanted him in a way that caught her breath, and not just to assuage a physical desire, although that was a big part of what she was feeling. She needed to feel his unique spirit again, surrounding her, invading her, making her remember the way it had been between them, once upon a time.
Dusk had begun to enfold the hideaway patio where Shannon sat in pensive reflection. Raising her eyes to a long row of framed wood windows bursting with light from inside the house, she could make out Nick’s figure as he moved around her kitchen, dealing with the aftermath of the huge dinner he’d whipped up.
No matter the past, she admitted heavily, because with every glance and gentle touch, with each conversation, whether it be full of heated emotion or quiet deliberation, and with each passing minute, she was falling all over again. And apparently not even trying to stop herself.
She wondered what her expression revealed, for try as she might to stay passive, she was far, far from being unmoved. What would the evening ahead bring, she wondered. Releasing another in a seemingly endless supply of heavy sighs, Shannon sat back to enjoy the remnants of another fading day and waited for whatever came next.
* * *
It hadn’t taken long for Nick to clear the dinner table and tidy up the kitchen, so why he was finding more and more in the way of trivial tasks to keep him busy and away from Shannon’s side wasn’t exactly a mystery. He was nervous, uncharacteristically so. He cared so damn much about what was going on in that pretty little tousled head of hers. Feeling as he did made him a bit unsteady emotionally.
She’d asked smart questions over their meal, and he had answered each one with heartfelt truthfulness that was unusual for him. One advantage of being who he was, was the simple fact that he pretty much answered to no one. The majority of the time, it was entirely the other way around. Others answered to him. Expecting private feelings and emotions to burst forth from someone in his powerful position was almost ridiculous. But with Shannon, he enjoyed sharing himself. That she wanted to know the real him and not just the public persona was deeply satisfying and damn exciting at the same time.
Nick knew he’d been emotionally closed to real human connections beyond his immediate family for a very long time, another example of how profoundly he had cut off his personal needs after having lost the only person who had ever found a way into his heart.
Right now he was all but giddy with years of pent-up reactions and feelings and sensations that he was happily sharing now that Shannon was the one who was listening. It reminded him of how they’d met, the way it had made him feel a hundred feet tall that the sweet girl with the knowing eyes looked upon him with unabashed delight and affection. He really didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought of him or how he
lived his life, but Shannon was the one exception.
He was mindlessly wiping down the already immaculate stove, killing for time, while he paused over that last thought. Yeah, he cared about Jules and his mom and how they felt about things, but in the end, he had also been shutting them off from his private thoughts for far too long. When he had extinguished the bright light of love that he had shared with Shannon, he’d been reluctant to give any more of himself to the life he had left than was absolutely necessary.
All that changed when he’d found himself staring once again into a pair of turquoise eyes that had instantly shattered the ice around his frozen heart and illuminated every nook and cranny of his lonely soul. The relief had been enormous and had shaken him up with insight into how barren and desolate he had been for far too long.
The meal they’d shared had brought them to a middle road, one that, while still bumpy at times, had given them a chance to calm the intense emotional fallout from the past. She was being receptive to him finally and had stopped trying to nail his butt to the wall with daggers of anger and mistrust each time she looked at him.
Glancing around the gleaming stainless steel, marble, and highly polished wood of the immaculately cleaned kitchen, Nick lowered the lighting and bolstered himself for the night ahead. He’d thoroughly enjoyed regaling her with tales of his recent Asian trip and found tremendous satisfaction in the way her remarkable eyes, instead of damning his every word, had gazed at him with admiration and delight when he blathered on about plans to green every single division of Barrett’s massive global holdings and what doing that would mean for his vision of how businesses of the future should be run. She looked at him while he spoke as she had in his dreams and once, a long time ago, in reality.
He wanted more than her smiling eyes, though, and the insistent tightening in the area of his pants zipper each time she looked his way or allowed the simplest of touches was bringing that fact home with regularity. She was fighting it, though, he had to admit, and for good reason. A patient man he was not, having become used to his every thought and order being met without question.
No amount of bravado or supreme self-confidence could negate his past actions, resigning Nick to a slower path, one where she found her footing and called the shots with whatever she was comfortable with while he took mental cold showers and held himself back from seducing her into compliance.
He’d made that mistake once—deciding for her—and he wasn’t fool enough to go at things like that again. Besides, he wanted her back in his life the way she’d been before all the lies and distance, when they’d worked together as partners and life had seemed full of possibilities. Bullying her into acknowledging that she could barely keep her hands to herself was not the way to go. This situation called for some judicious restraint on his part, something his raging libido did not want to hear. He grimaced.
Turning to the open doors leading to the patio, he sought her out like a moth to the flame, something he winced over in acknowledgment. Without her in his life turning him and everything else upside down and inside out, he didn’t know how he’d live if she spurned his attempts at forgiveness and reconciliation.
Grabbing a bowl filled with gourmet chocolate meringue cookies he’d found in the grocery delivery, Nick took a deep breath as he set a course and stepped into the fading light of the day making his way to the swinging loveseat where his heart’s desire sat.
* * *
The scrapes on her palms seemed so much better today, Shannon mused. The rough, red abrasions were healing quickly, and now that every movement of her hands didn’t bring discomfort, it was a lot easier to keep her unruly curls under control. She’d unbound the tight braided plait from earlier as she sat relaxed and swinging on the loveseat.
Shannon enjoyed the feel of her hair tumbling around her shoulders and down her back. It seemed so decadent somehow. But all that hair, lovely as it was, had a tendency to get in the way. Sweeping the long tresses back from her jawline, she quickly wrapped a hair band around the wavy ponytail and smoothed some errant wispy curls behind her ears. She knew the casual hairstyle made her look like a girly teenager, but at least she didn’t resemble the bedraggled helpless patient she’d felt like for the past days.
When Nick sauntered from the kitchen carrying something in his hands, Shannon was shocked by an unexpected longing to find favor in his eyes and hoped that her casual dress and haphazard grooming wasn’t a turn off.
Where had that thought come from, she thought while quietly lamenting the lack of a proper manicure or presence of carefully applied makeup. Damn and double damn, but as he got closer and closer all she could focus on as she watched him approach was how sexy he looked in those well-worn jeans and the provocative way they clung to and framed what the kids these days referred to as his junk.
Exhaling a breath of contempt for the foolish phrase, she wondered how anyone could view this man’s body and dismiss his enthralling virility as junk. He was…well, he was making her mouth water, so she did what any red-blooded female with a pulse would do and silently enjoyed the way he moved and the manner in which he carried his impressive physique.
Oh boy, with each brick that came crashing down in the wall she had built around her heart, Shannon fell deeper and deeper into the throbbing awareness she experienced each time he came into view. Her last thought as he pulled up to a halt right in front of her was how interesting it was that the prominent bulge he carried in his pants was pretty much right in her face when he was standing and she was sitting. Without thinking, her tongue swept out from her mouth where she stroked some much-needed moisture before tugging on those lips with her teeth.
Whatever clever words Nick had planned to say were swept away by the sight of her tongue and lips, which he couldn’t help but notice were conveniently at the same level as the hard-on that had been distracting him all day. He was holding a bowl of something, but in that moment he couldn’t tell what, and though he tried to keep things light and casual, he knew his eyes were blazing with undisguised sexual hunger. For a tiny second, he considered grabbing her up from the loveseat and crushing her into his aroused body while he tasted those delectable lips, plundering her mouth with a kiss that would leave no doubt about how he hoped the night would end.
Whoa, slow down there, he remembered at the last second and, clearing his throat, offered forth the bowl of cookies with a decidedly raspy, “Dessert?” Nick’s head shook fractionally as he castigated himself for sounding so tongue-tied. Smooth, real smooth, he thought.
Realizing she’d been all but licking her lips with erotic fantasies as he stood right in front of her, Shannon tried to recover with an answer that she hoped would sound casual but that, when it came out of her mouth, sounded like a come-on.
“Oooh, whatcha’ got there?” She sighed as she tried peering into the bowl only to realize that by doing so she looked like she was doing an on-site inspection of his groin. Snatching her head back, she quickly lifted her gaze to his face in embarrassment and was stopped dead in her tracks by his expression.
He looked like someone, that cowboy pirate again, fighting a ferocious battle in his body that was clearly etched on his face. His eyes, blazing when he at first approached, had turned slumberous and slightly hooded, giving him the look of a fierce predator sizing up a delectable morsel offered for his dining pleasure. He wanted to eat her alive, and no amount of trying to clean up that thought erased the image of him using that sexy mouth of his on every inch of her body.
The same ferocious battle sprang to life in Shannon’s mind as she struggled to maintain her composure when all she really wanted to do was fling the bowl in his hands aside and reach for the snap of his jeans. She’d show him what she wanted for dessert, she fantasized as a moaning, groaning montage of highly erotic visions invaded her thoughts. Regardless of what he was offering, her appetite for something much more intimate and exciting throbbed to life, deep in her core.
Not missing the slight trembling in his ha
nd as he placed the wooden bowl on the table by her side, she complied when he shooshed her over far enough on the loveseat for him to sit next to her. She liked the way the heat of his body invaded her senses wherever they touched. Her eyes met his and waited.
Nick sat down, because if he didn’t he was going to do something stupid. The hungry way her eyes had moved over his body as he stood before her was causing all the blood normally circulating in his brain to dash southward at an alarming rate. If this kept up he’d be losing brain cells faster than the snap of his fingers since the only part of him that felt vibrantly alive at the moment was his hardened manhood. Get. A. Grip.
Oh shit. And just like that, he remembered what it felt like when Shannon’s feminine hands gripped his hardness and how watching her stroke his length had been burned in his memory to torture him during long years of loneliness. Think, Nick, he castigated himself. Don’t just react.
Swallowing hard, he tried for lighthearted. “That little market down the canyon sent along some of what they said was a favorite treat.” Gesturing to the bowl, he diverted her attention for a heartbeat. “Meringue chocolate cookies.”
He leaned across her then, plucked one of the airy mounds from the bowl, and popped it in his mouth. “Mmmm, these are good!” he exclaimed before reaching again and grabbing a few more.
“Hey, hey, hey!” she laughed, playfully swatting at his retreating hand. “Those are a guilty pleasure, mister! Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to get in the way of a lady and her chocolate?! You’d better watch yourself, sir!”
The obvious delight and laughter that instantly transformed her face brought waves of undiluted joy to Nick’s entire being. Her smile was his guilty pleasure, and he’d be more than happy to steal her treats till the cows came home if it meant she’d keep teasing him that way and laughing with abandon.
Love Redone Page 16
