by Nicole Helm
What the hell was he doing standing out here, freezing his balls off, thinking about that? Gabe marched himself across the yard. He was here on something of a business mission really—clear the air so they could work together normally. Without bringing it back up again.
Maybe he needed to prove to himself that he was no coward. Because he could face these types of things. He wasn’t going to skitter away from her the rest of his life. No. His runaway days were over. No one got to intimidate, warp, or threaten him anymore.
He raised his fist and knocked hard on the front door. He could hear the strains of music from behind the door. Christmas music. He grimaced.
The door swung open, and Monica came into view. She’d clearly looked out the window to see who was there, but she still looked shocked at his appearance.
Shocked and too beautiful. Her blond hair was a little wild, her cheeks a little flushed. All that tense anger that had been coiling inside of him loosened somehow.
“White Christmas” blared from somewhere inside, and the smell of cookies was almost overwhelming. Monica had white smudges all over her shirt, and for one blinding, stupid second, all he wanted to do was push her inside and take her mouth with his.
But he was not here for that. He was here to have a conversation that would put them on even, solid ground.
“Hi. What…what are you doing here?” she asked, smiling, but it didn’t hide the nerves.
“I thought we should talk.”
“Oh. Um…” Something beeped from the direction of the kitchen. “Come in.”
He stepped inside, closing the door behind him and trying not to notice the way she clasped her hands together and then released them.
“Just give me a second to get the cookies out. And then…we can, we can…we can talk. Right. Talk.”
He shouldn’t get any pleasure from her stuttering or the way she scurried off to the kitchen clearly trying to find some center of calm, but he liked getting to her.
You are not here to get to anything.
Gabe stepped into the living area. The interior of the cabin was mostly open. The small living room was filled with couch, TV, and fireplace, and the only thing that separated that room from the kitchen was a small counter.
Monica had the fireplace blazing, so Gabe shrugged out of his coat and placed it over the arm of the couch. When he glanced over at Monica, she was bent over the stove.
He attempted to remind himself he could resist anything. Including the desire to have his hands on her ass. Including the way his body tightened at just the sight of her.
“Um, want a cookie? They’re chocolate crinkles.”
“What’s a crinkle?” he found himself asking, moving toward the kitchen even as something in his gut told him not to move. As a man who listened to his gut in all things, it was disconcerting to find how easily and quickly it could be overruled.
“Chocolate. Powdered sugar. If you haven’t had one before, I’m going to have to insist, since that’d be a travesty.” She held out the messy-looking cookie.
Gabe shrugged and took it, lifting it to his lips. He bit into it, and somehow their eyes locked over that, and she watched his mouth as the cookie disappeared into it. She exhaled, a little shuddery and overloud.
Well, this was a mistake, that was for sure.
* * *
Monica turned away quickly, almost knocking over the pan of cookies she’d just taken out and all but burning herself in the process.
Good Lord, get a grip.
But he was here. In her cabin. They were alone, and, oh God, all she could think about was sex. Which was wrong. So, so, so wrong. She was not going to have sex with him. They couldn’t even kiss without getting into a fight. My God, what would they do after sex?
Stop. Thinking. About. Sex.
“What did you want to talk about?” Was that her, sounding high-pitched and panicked? She needed to employ some of her usual office calm. Except that was half the reason they had a problem—she couldn’t seem to learn how to separate things.
“The other night.”
“Oh.” Oh. She focused on scraping the cookies off the pan and lining them up on a cooling rack.
“We should clear the air. We do have to work together after all.”
He sounded so calm and rational, damn him. If they’d been having this conversation anywhere else, she might have had the wherewithal to put those masks she wore so well in place.
But he was here. Where she lived. Where she slept and showered and had maybe had a few inappropriate thoughts about the man standing in her kitchen.
More than a few, if she was honest. She hadn’t exactly done benign imagining either. Oh God, she could not think about that when he was standing right there. In her house. Her house.
“Monica?”
“What?”
He tilted his head, studying her all too closely. “You okay? Your face is all red.”
“Oh, just…the stove. Heat.” She gestured stupidly. “The heat from the stove.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m great. Great.” She shoved a cookie in her mouth. “Great,” she repeated between chewing.
“You’re acting really weird.”
“You’re in my house.”
“So?”
“So? So.” She swallowed her cookie. “I don’t know. It’s weird.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know!”
He grinned at that, and it was not fair. Not fair he could grin like that and her whole stomach would drop and parts of her body she’d thought long since dead would spring to thrumming life.
“I don’t know how you want to clear the air, Gabe. I… You think I’m out to get you or something, and I’m not. But nothing I say can convince you of that because you’ve decided actions speak louder than words. Well, Gabe, words and actions aren’t that simple. People aren’t that simple. Sometimes people say and do things that don’t make sense to someone else, and sometimes…you say and do things to protect yourself, purposefully or just instinctually.”
“What are you protecting yourself from?” he asked, his grin gone, arms crossed over his chest. He looked so intimidating, closed off. Funny, that wasn’t what she was protecting herself from.
But it was a fair question, and in that fair question, she found a little bit of her courage. What was she afraid of? A man? One she might be attracted to? It was silly, but it also made sense.
She took a deep breath and then went ahead and blurted it out. “I haven’t been with anyone since my husband.”
His eyebrows shot up, but that was his only reaction. She swallowed, encouraging herself to keep talking. Clear the air? Well, that was good and healthy. So that’s what she’d do.
“I was twenty when he died. I was basically a child myself, even though I had a child. So, I didn’t…date or anything. At first it was grief and Colin, then it was a time issue, and it just spiraled until… Well, you know, I don’t think I’d had a sexual thought in about five years or something.”
He muttered something that sounded a lot like Jesus, but she kept going.
“I am attracted to you, which is a first since all that. And the thing is…being a therapist has become armor I get to hide behind. I used it when I was still sad about Dex. Told people everything was great because I was going to school and I was going to help people. I used it to talk myself out of my Colin anxiety. Oh, it’s normal after a tragedy to have certain worries, but if I acknowledge them, it’s totally fine. I’m mentally healthy because I am a mental health professional.”
She paused because everything inside of her brain was screaming at her to shut up. Why was she giving up all her secrets? All the things she only allowed herself to think about in the middle of the night? Why was she giving him that kind of power?
But underneath all that fear was
an easing. She didn’t feel like there was the same weight on her chest.
“I’m attracted to you. I didn’t and don’t know what to do with that. It has been knee jerk sometimes to revert to that armor. The role of therapist. I think you’re the only one in my life who noticed or who it bothered, I guess.”
He stood there like a statue. Blank faced and still, so very still. In her kitchen. As though he belonged there.
But he didn’t. Truths didn’t make someone belong. Being vulnerable didn’t change the world. But it was good for the soul and for the mental health, so she’d go with that.
She fixed him with her therapist smile before she realized she was doing it. Then she shook her head. No blank, placid smiles. Though God knew what she was supposed to do with her face. But it didn’t matter. She’d said her piece.
She nodded firmly then. “So, if you want to clear the air, you weren’t wrong. I’m not sure you were one hundred percent right, but you weren’t wrong. I pull out the ‘shrink’ stuff when I need to, when it suits me, when it might create a barrier between what I’m feeling and the person I’m feeling it toward.”
She didn’t know how long they stood there with only the strands of “Blue Christmas” in the background, Gabe not moving, and her a little scared to.
Finally, finally he inhaled with enough force for her to see the action move through his body. He cleared his throat. “I don’t have PTSD,” he said. Firm and clear. Just…said it.
“W-what?”
“I do not suffer from PTSD,” he said, decisive and certain.
She softened a little bit at that. “I know you want to believe that you’re strong enough to—”
“Monica.” He stepped forward, curling his fingers around her upper arms. It wasn’t a tight grip, but it stilled her nonetheless. “Listen to me. I don’t have PTSD. I let the guys think I do because it makes them feel better, but I don’t have any of the symptoms. No nightmares, no shakes. None of the anxiety or depression or difficulty sleeping. There isn’t one symptom that I have with any sort of regularity.”
She tried to work through that. He let the guys think… “You let them think that because you think it makes them feel better?”
He released her arms, turning away. There’d been some flicker of emotion on his face, but he made sure to hide it. “No one wants to be the only guy who’s dealing with something. No one wants to be left out, even if the group is a shitty group to belong to.”
Something inside her chest cracked, hard and painful. She reached out even though his back was to her. She pressed her fingers to his shoulder. “But you are left out. You are the only guy.”
So much crystalized for her in that moment. The things Becca had said about Gabe being the nicest to her, but the one she knew the least about. Gabe kept himself separate, and oh, the man was lonely. But he seemed to think he needed to be. He didn’t seem to know how not to be.
It near broke her heart.
But he stepped away from her hand, and when he faced her again, he was all stoic blankness. “I appreciate you explaining all that to me,” he said, gesturing toward the stove as if all that encompassed all she’d discussed. “So I wanted to make it clear I don’t need that kind of help anyway. Maybe that’s why I’m touchy about it.”
She smiled sadly. “I wish I could believe that, but you don’t build that kind of righteous fury without incident, Gabe. Something else about therapy or therapists eats at you.”
His mouth went hard. She didn’t want to turn this into a fight though, so she didn’t let the smile fade off her face. “But you don’t have to tell me. It’s not pertinent. Hopefully explaining my stuff to you will make it easier for us to navigate each other.”
“Navigate each other,” he echoed, his gaze dropping to her mouth, then lower, as if slowly drinking every last inch of her in.
Suddenly, navigate seemed to take on all new meaning. And, oh, wouldn’t that be nice? She let her gaze take the same tour of Gabe that his was taking of her.
Way more than nice.
“I should go,” he said, his voice sounding suspiciously…strangled.
She swallowed, reminding herself she was an adult. An adult who got to choose. An adult who could, in fact, make a few mistakes here and there, most especially when her son was out of town and she hadn’t had sex in something like a decade.
“Or you could stay,” she squeaked.
Chapter 14
Gabe knew he’d heard her exactly right. No matter that her voice had cracked, no matter that she looked like a panicked bird, he knew exactly what she had said.
Much more than that, he understood that she meant it. It was certainly no secret at this point that they wanted each other. The problem was in the complications. Unfortunately, when it came to complications, he couldn’t let his dick lead.
“Bad idea,” he managed to say, though his voice was still as strangled as it had been when he’d made the first attempt to leave. As though his throat were fighting against everything his brain needed it to do.
“Why? I know you’re not naive enough to misread my invitation. I thought it was against guy code to turn down sex with an unattached, willing woman.”
“Monica, I’m…I’m a bad bet.”
Her eyebrows drew together, and she studied him. Maybe because of everything she’d said earlier, or maybe because he was this close to having all of her, he didn’t see it as he usually did. Not a predatory, under-the-microscope analysis so she could unravel his psyche. Simply a woman trying to understand a man’s cryptic statement.
He was probably losing it.
“I guess that depends on what the bet is,” she said softly.
All that softness was way too tempting. “Look.” He swallowed because he needed a moment to remind himself why he was being noble here. He wasn’t a particularly noble guy. Not like Alex. Not like Jack. If he’d had a noble impulse in him, it had been eradicated long before he’d joined the navy. Though he supposed the military had given him a certain sense of what was right and what was wrong.
Hurting Monica would be wrong and, more, he wasn’t sure he could live with himself if he did hurt her.
“Look,” he repeated, finding his voice again. “Obviously I’m attracted to you and would like to…” Jesus. He’d never had trouble talking frankly. Why was he now? “Stay,” he finished lamely. “But there are a million complications and even if I had the wherewithal to work through them, the bottom line is: I’m not like Jack or Alex. I’m not looking for my happily ever after. I don’t want to settle down. I don’t want to have kids. I don’t want to build some…life. I don’t want those things, and I figure someone like you probably will.”
“I guess I wouldn’t rule it out,” she said slowly, as if mulling that all over very carefully. “But I can’t say I’ve ever spent much time hoping for those things. I did settle down, and I did have kids. I’ve loved and lost, and I can’t say I’m too keen to do it again. But even if I wanted to want those things or started wanting those things, I couldn’t go after them. At least not with you.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to demand what the hell was wrong with him that she wouldn’t, but that was stupid, considering he’d just told her he didn’t want those things.
“In a couple weeks, we are going to have two former soldiers here,” she continued. “My job is to be an on-site therapist. I can’t be in a relationship with you. Do you have any idea how bad that would look? What kind of respect could they possibly have for me if I was sleeping with another former soldier working here? I know how men think. Even if I didn’t… The point is, I’m not looking for something permanent. I’m not looking for settling down. I like my life. I love my job. I haven’t had sex in a decade, and I’m attracted to you, and here you are in my house. So I don’t know why, for the next week or so, we couldn’t…you know, do that.”
“That,” he
repeated.
“Yes, that. In fact, keep your gift card. Sex will be our Christmas gifts to each other.”
It shocked a laugh out of him. Why it did or that she could was beyond him, but he laughed nonetheless, and enjoyed the pleased expression on her face far too much. Which at least sobered him some. “You don’t think it’ll be a little awkward to go back to the way things were after we’ve seen each other naked?”
“Of course it’ll be awkward,” she said with a hand gesture and a pretty pink blush staining her cheeks. “It’ll be painfully awkward in every way. But you already kissed me. Either you’re a much better person than me or you’ve gone ahead and pictured me naked. So, awkward no matter what. Why not get something out of it? It’s been an awful long time since I’ve gotten something for me out of anything.”
“So, you’re suggesting we have sex. No strings attached, temporary sex.”
“Yes. In fact, Christmas can be the cut-off date. We won’t have any physical contact after Christmas. It will be out of our system, and should anything linger, well, there’s always next Christmas.”
“You’re proposing a Christmas sex deal.”
She lifted her chin, and though her expression was serious, there was a certain mocking curve to her mouth. “I am. Are you accepting the Christmas sex deal?”
“On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“We stop saying ‘Christmas sex deal.’”
She laughed, and he’d have been lying to himself if he didn’t admit that sound did something to him. Not a sexual something—a deeper and far more dangerous something. He wanted to make her laugh again and again, and he couldn’t let himself fall for that kind of bullshit fantasy.
She held out her hand between them. “Deal?”
He looked at her outstretched hand. She had long, elegant fingers, but there were bits of flour and dough stuck in the lines of her hand. He wasn’t sure why he noticed it or why that flipped over in his chest like something important. So he denied it. He slipped his hand into hers and then gave her arm a little jerk so that she stumbled forward and into him.
