by Jill Shalvis
And he no longer wanted to.
Hours later, after the fire had been put out, after all the questions had been answered, after Amy and Callie had both been checked out by the paramedics, Amy let Tucker into her cabin. It was the first time she’d done so, and she stood by her little couch looking at him as he shut the door behind him.
In another place and time his doing so would have panicked her, put her into full defense mode, but at the moment she was either too tired or…or she’d come to trust him.
He turned to her, weariness and lingering fear etched in the lines of his face as he slid his hands into his pockets. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, but Callie—” Her voice cracked a little at that. She’d never forget the sight of Callie trying to crawl away from Michael. “She’s hurt far worse—”
“Jake’ll take care of her.”
She knew a little about the tension between the brothers. “Is that okay with you?”
“Yeah.” He rubbed a weary hand over his face. “I was wrong about Jake. And if he and Callie have found any happiness together, more power to them.”
“But where will she sleep? I should have told her to come here—”
“I gave them my cabin for tonight, though surprisingly, Callie’s cabin isn’t that bad off.”
“Where will you sleep?”
“I’ll find a spot.” He shrugged. “It’s you I’m worried about right now.” He walked toward her slowly, with his crooked, rather endearing smile in place, clearly not wanting to frighten her.
For some reason, she felt like bawling. “I’m okay.”
He shook his head. “I’m not. I want to just look at you. God, I could look at you forever.” He lifted a hand, and she stared at him unflinchingly. He let out a breath and ran a finger gently, so very gently, over the cut on her head. The paramedic had closed it with Steri-strips. He’d thought she could be mildly concussed and should go to the hospital.
But having a healthy fear of hospitals, she’d refused.
Now Tucker made a low, rough sound in his throat while he touched her. “When Jake put you in my arms, I just about died. You were so still—”
“Just knocked out for a second. I hit the corner of the coffee table.”
He nodded, and his gaze dropped to hers. “You have got to have a helluva headache. They said no aspirin. Can I get you some Tylenol?”
She’d been through so much worse than this in her life, she nearly laughed, but he was still touching her, and her whole body was on alert. “I’m okay,” she whispered.
“Yeah.” His finger trailed down her temple, along her jaw.
“I’m so glad for all of us,” she babbled quickly. “Stone, Lou. Me.”
“None of us ever believed you’d done anything wrong. Amy—”
She caught his hand in hers, then closed her eyes. “I want you to know something.” She opened her eyes and brought their joined hands to her chest. Still watching him, she spread his fingers over her heart. “I unpacked.”
His smile was slow and heart-melting. “That’s good. That’s real good.”
“Yeah. Tucker, I’ve not spent much of my life feeling wanted or even particularly liked. Certainly never cherished.”
His smile faded, a tortured look crossing his face. “Amy—”
“No, listen. Please. I have to get this out. The way you try to be so careful with me makes me feel those things.” Her heart had started pounding hard and fast as she spoke, and she knew he could feel it. “I’ve never done this before, never opened up like this, but life is too short.” She drew a deep breath. “Tucker, I really like you. I just wanted you to know that.”
“I like you, too, Amy. So much I can hardly stand it.” His other hand skimmed up her back, lightly, not pulling or pawing, just touching, just holding, and slowly, so painfully slowly that her entire body tingled and melted in anticipation, he leaned in. “I’m going to kiss you now.”
“Um.”
“Say yes. Please say yes.”
She wasn’t going to let an old fear, one that couldn’t hurt her now, ruin this, and as she stared up into the face so close to hers, waiting patiently, with warmth and affection and hot, hot need in his eyes, she thought, Oh my God, he’s beautiful. “Okay,” she whispered.
His mouth touched hers. An electric shock seemed to bolt through her, but his hand, light and sure and easy skimming up and down her back, grounded her. She sighed, in relief, in pleasure, and shyly touched her tongue to his.
He groaned, low and rough, and danced his tongue to hers for one glorious moment before pulling back. Not breathing all that steadily anymore, he backed to the door, fumbled for the handle behind him.
“You’re leaving?”
He closed his eyes, then opened them. “This is new for you, this opening up thing.”
“Yes.”
His entire heart was in his eyes when he smiled. “It’s new for me, too. So for the first time in my entire life, I’m not going to rush a good thing. A great thing. Possibly the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” He opened the door, swore, then came back, and cupping her face, kissed her one more time. Then he let out a long breath. “Leaving now.”
She stared at him. He was really going to go. He wasn’t going to pressure her to sleep with him.
He opened the door, started to step out.
“Tucker?”
“Yeah?”
“I have both a couch and a cot.” Her heart started to pound again, because she couldn’t believe she was offering this to him. “You could, you know, use one. For tonight. Not the one I’m on, but—I mean—”
He came back to her, and very lightly stroked a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Are you sure?”
Unable to trust her voice, she reached for the extra blanket on the foot of her cot and offered it to him. He took it and smiled. “It’ll be much nicer than the hay barn.”
She didn’t quite smile back, and his faded. “You know I can do this, right? I can sleep waaaay over here”—he stretched out on the couch, leaned back and closed his eyes—“without attacking you.”
“Logically, yes.” She stayed where she was and swallowed hard. “I’m working on everything else.”
“Go to sleep,” he whispered. “I’m going to check on you in a little while, don’t be scared. I’ll just say your name and you just answer. Okay?”
“Okay.” She climbed onto the cot and laid down. She immediately popped back up to look at him.
He hadn’t moved.
He wasn’t going to. He’d promised.
She lay back, but once again popped up. He was still there, still not moving. She repeated this two more times, with the same result.
He never even twitched, though surely he had to hear her every time she jumped up like a lunatic. Then, for the first time in her entire life, she curled up and fell asleep…
With a smile on her lips.
After all the craziness, all Callie wanted was a shower. She used the one in Tucker and Jake’s cabin, and Jake waited for her, knowing she was concentrating on the feel of the water, the scent of the soap, the sting of it on her various cuts and bruises, so that she could keep her mind blank of the evening’s events—such as Michael’s overwhelming betrayal.
When she stepped out of the shower, he held out a towel for her, which she walked into. He held out another towel for her hair, which she silently took.
Then she tipped her head up and looked at him.
At the misery, pain, and lingering fear in her gaze, his heart broke. She let him dry her off, another sign of how bad off she was.
“I’m okay, you know,” she said quietly.
“Yeah.” But the image of her lying on the floor, locked in battle with a man she’d loved and trusted, while fire rained down all around her, would haunt him for a long time to come, so he could only imagine what it was doing to her.
“Look, I should have seen it coming, okay?”
He put his hands on her shoulders and w
aited until she looked at him. “Tell me you know this was not your fault.”
“Wasn’t it?” Her eyes were shiny and far too bright. “My God, Jake, I brought danger to everyone here by letting him come around, by letting him be near—” She broke off and shuddered, then covered her face.
He took her hands and forced her to look at him. “No one is responsible for what happened tonight except Michael.”
“He’s sick, Jake.”
“Don’t defend him.”
“I’m not. He’s gone to jail. He’s going to have to pay.”
“Yes,” Jake said grimly, thinking of what could have happened to her tonight. “He is.”
Her hands, still in his, spread wide. She looked so exhausted a small breeze could have knocked her over. “I just can’t believe it.”
“I know. Bed,” he decided when she wobbled on her feet. He led her to his cot. “Want one of my T-shirts?”
“Please.”
She dropped the towel as he settled a shirt over her head, smoothing it down her body. Having his hands on her would have been a pleasure if tonight’s fire and the weight of the offer he’d received on the ranch hadn’t combined to make him as exhausted as she. He pulled the blankets over her and stepped back but she grabbed his wrist. “Where are you going?”
“You need sleep.”
“I need you.” She lifted the blankets. “Please,” she whispered, her eyes and voice so hollow it broke his heart. He stripped down and slid in, carefully pulling her against him. Her bare legs tangled with his. He tunneled his fingers through her hair, his other hand drifting up and down her back in a gesture he hoped was soothing her, but was having the opposite effect on him. The T-shirt had bundled up around her waist. Panty-free, he palmed her extremely palmable ass and snuggled her in closer so that the heat of her cupped his groin.
“Mmm,” she mumbled when she realized he was hard, and cuddled in closer. “Nice.”
He rocked his hips to hers, then forced himself to stop. “Callie?”
She tucked her face into the hollow of his neck and sighed shakily. “Hmm-mmm…”
He kept running his fingers up and down her back, waiting for her to look at him. “With all that’s happened, maybe it’ll be easier for us to talk about the offer I got on the ranch.”
She said nothing, but she didn’t pull away, either, which he considered a good sign. “I’m sorry, Callie. So damned sorry, but I have to make a decision, and I really wanted to talk to you first.”
Nothing.
“Callie?”
A soft snore shuddered out of her, warming his neck. He pulled away and looked down into her face.
She was fast asleep.
23
When Jake woke up, Callie was gone and he was alone. “Damn it.” He got up, dressed, and went outside.
Callie’s cabin looked shockingly normal, though the scent of burning wood still permeated the air. He took the extra few minutes to peek inside the front door to make sure everything was okay, and that there were no hot spots, but the firefighters had done their job well.
He looked at the burnt floor, couch, and coffee table, remembering the utter horror of seeing Callie and Amy in the middle of it all, and felt tense all over again.
He crossed the grass without thinking, and Goose came running, eyes fierce as she honked her alarm. He tried Callie’s method and reached out to pat her on the head.
She nearly took off his fingers.
“Thanksgiving,” he muttered to her, and jogged up the porch steps. He went straight to Callie’s office and found her sitting behind her desk, propping her head up with one hand, the other on a steaming mug of coffee, staring glumly at an open checkbook. “Hi,” she said, and wearily pushed away the paperwork.
“Hi yourself. How are you?”
She shrugged.
In her eyes was a sadness that broke his heart. She was cut and bruised, and yet here he was, about to make it worse. “I need to talk to you.”
“You took the offer,” she guessed.
“No,” he said, and watched her sag with relief. “Not yet anyway.”
Her eyes flew back to his, and he sank to a chair. “Hell, Callie, I don’t know what to do.”
“The offer is good.”
“Yes.”
She let out a long breath. “Well. We all knew it was only a matter of time.”
“They’ll keep all the employees on through the end of the year minimum. That gives everyone lots of time to figure out what they want to do.”
“And you’ll go back to San Diego.”
“My new job starts in one week.”
“Okay, then.” Callie got to her feet and moved to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I want to buy this ranch, Jake. I’ve wanted that forever, but I have no collateral for a loan and no credible financial history to speak of. Any real bank would laugh me right out of their building.”
“Trust me, there’s no one I’d rather give it to. But I need to recoup the money I’ve sunk into it—”
“I know.”
“And I was hoping to set Tucker up with a fund from the profit, and—”
“Jake, I know. I know you have to get rid of it. Look, I’ll be back. I need to ride. Alone,” she said when he got up. “Please, Jake. Just let me go.”
The door shut after her and he let out a shaky breath. Let her go? How the hell was he supposed to do that?
He was still standing there when Tucker poked his head in the door. “How is she?”
“Gone for a ride. I need to talk to you.”
“Ah, fuck. You’re taking the offer.”
“It’s a good one, and I’d be stupid to turn it down. With the profit, I can get out of debt and have enough left over for the both of us to be comfortable—”
Tucker’s eyes flashed. “I don’t want your money.”
“I want you to have—”
“What I want, Jake, is this job.”
“You’ve got it. The jobs are guaranteed until the end of this year.”
“And then?”
“And then you’ll have a nice nest egg, you can take your time finding another ranch—”
“I told you, I don’t want another ranch.”
Jake winced when the door slammed. “Well, that went well.” Feeling more alone than he had when he’d first gotten here, he sank back to the chair and rubbed his tired eyes.
Callie flew down the front steps of the big house. She’d told Jake she wanted to take a ride, and that she wanted to be alone, and she’d meant both, but she didn’t get on Sierra. She got into her Jeep and drove to town.
She went straight to the offices of Lowell and Dawson and toward the receptionist, her sights set on seeing Matt. She should have gone to her ex-husband first instead of Michael, but she’d thought, mistakenly, that dealing with Michael would have been better for all the concerned parties.
She’d never been more wrong, but she could try to repair that error now. She had to repair that error now, because Jake was selling the ranch to someone else if she didn’t.
The receptionist, a pretty, perky little blonde, stood up, quivering indignantly as Callie walked right past her. “Hey, you can’t just—”
Callie didn’t stop.
“You’re supposed to stop and sign in, right here in my little book! Hello, he’s on the phone with his ten o’clock meeting!”
Callie opened Matt’s door. He was on the phone, and looked up at her, executing a comic double take.
She assumed this was because after she’d divorced him, she’d stood outside the courtroom and warned him to stay out of her path for the rest of his life or she’d make him a eunuch. Clearly he’d taken her seriously, as he’d made sure to never run into her.
He’d known that she and Michael were close—something deep inside her pinged at the thought of Michael—but Matt had respected that closeness—and his penis—and had steered clear of any mutual gatherings.
Still talki
ng on the phone, he lifted a finger to indicate she should wait a moment. Callie took a seat and studied him. He was still way too gorgeous, with that dark, bed-tousled hair and those sleepy bedroom eyes that could seduce a nun from across the room. At five foot ten, he wasn’t overly tall, or even gym buffed out, but his body looked damn fine in clothes, and he knew how to dress. Women still fell all over him, she was quite certain, but inside that beautiful exterior beat a fickle heart.
He hung up the phone but didn’t look directly at her. “You wouldn’t believe the shit Michael got me into. It’s all falling down around me. The business is screwed. I’m screwed.”
“Yeah, he only tried to kill me. I’m fine though, thanks for asking.”
“Uh…yeah.” Matt winced and met her gaze, with apology in his. “Are you really fine? Because you look like shit.”
“I’m going to live. Look, I’m sorry about Michael, and the business.”
He sighed. “Yeah. Me too. You didn’t come here to tell me you’re sorry I got hosed.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“You hosed me once, remember?”
“That was a long time ago—”
“You hosed me bad.”
“Not that bad—”
“On our wedding night I went out to get us pizza because you begged me to, you said you were too tired to drive. I came back and you were banging the desk clerk. In our honeymoon suite.”
“Yeah.” He grimaced. “Uh, this isn’t a great day for a trip down memory lane—”
“And then the next day, I came home—”
“Unexpectedly,” he pointed out.
“—And you had the mail lady in our bed!”
“Do we really need to talk about this?”
She crossed her arms. “You owe me. You know you do.”
“All right!” He tossed up his hands. “I made a terrible husband. I knew I would, it’s just that you were so different from the others, I really thought I could—” He shook his head. “I was sorry then, and I’m sorry now. But, Callie, how long do I have to be sorry?”
