Why couldn’t he stop thinking about her?
Why wouldn’t she take mercy on him and put him out of his misery?
“I’m emailing the letter right now.” On the other end of the line, one of his real estate lawyers tapped a few buttons on his keyboard. “Give it a second.”
“Great.” Dawson scanned his email on his laptop, but no sign of it yet.
Bored, he leaned back in the chair, propped his legs on the desk and crossed one ankle over the other. It was a pretty day, he realized, not that he’d be able to enjoy it anytime soon what with all the calls he needed to make. On the other side of the French doors, the pool sparkled a deep and inviting blue. Maybe he could take a swim later. That would loosen up some of the tension in his lower back.
“Hi,” Arianna said from the doorway. “Mind if I join you?”
Caught off guard, he swung his legs down, knocking a stack of papers to the floor in the process.
If Arianna noticed his clumsiness, she didn’t let on. “I need a new place to study. I’m sick of the cottage.” She breezed in carrying a massive pile of books, plopped down on the sofa and made herself at home there at the coffee table. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Do you see the email?” his lawyer asked in his ear.
Dawson clicked the phone off and tossed it onto the desk.
Deep in his rib cage, his heartbeat was going wild. This was the most progress he’d made with Arianna since their first night together, and being a cool cat was way beyond him at the moment.
Arianna seeking him out? Oh, yeah. This was progress.
“No. I don’t mind.”
“Good.” Flashing a quick smile, she unzipped her backpack and slid out a laptop. “And I ordered a pizza. I get hungry when I study.”
He eyed the grandfather clock. One-ten. “We just had lunch.”
“Does ham and mushroom work for you? Thin crust?”
The grin began at one corner of his mouth and worked its way across; there was no stopping it. “Yeah. That works for me.”
“And,” she said, holding his gaze and tying his gut into knots that would take the rest of his life to undo, “I’ve decided to call you Joshua. Because that’s who you are, no matter what you call yourself. Does that work for you?”
Dawson took a second to let this sink in.
Arianna wanted to share the room with him, eat pizza with him and call him by his real name. All this bountiful good fortune was on top of reaching detente with both his half brother and his adoptive father.
It wasn’t outright victory yet, but it sure as hell wasn’t going down in flames, either.
She wanted to call him Joshua.
And here was the funny thing: the more time he spent at Heather Hill, the more he felt like Joshua.
He nodded, using most of his energy to keep his butt firmly in the chair rather than climbing onto the desk and doing the Rocky dance on the balls of his feet with his fists in the air.
“Yeah,” he said. “That works for me.”
They developed a routine.
In the mornings, she helped Bishop with the fine motor skills, and Joshua drove him back and forth to his various therapies. When the men got back, they went for a swim, which was good for Bishop. After lunch, when Bishop grudgingly went to bed for a nap and Arnetta, more often than not, headed off for one of her charity committee meetings, Arianna and Joshua met alone in the library.
It was the best time of the day—except for the studying.
From her perch on the sofa, she could look up from her books and watch him pore over his paperwork, a furrow of concentration between his brows, his lips turned down in a frown. She could listen to the thrilling low murmur of his voice as he talked to his lawyers and employees, negotiating and making deals. She could enjoy the sudden surprise of his smile as he laughed at a joke and wonder what was so funny and if she could make him laugh as hard. She could wallow in the electric moments when he glanced up to catch her staring at him, and the want stretched between them, filling up the room.
He never touched her.
One afternoon during the third week, he threw his pen down, pushed away from the desk and stood. “I’m playing hooky.”
Looking up from her torts notes, she frowned. “How are you going to make a million dollars today if you play hooky?”
“I’m not, but I need a break. So do you. Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“For a walk.” Further surprising her, he held out his hand to help her up. “Come on.”
She hesitated, utterly fixated on those long fingers with their blunt tips and trim nails. She knew those fingers, having sucked them into her mouth and felt them glide over every square millimeter of her body. That hand was a lethal weapon against which she had no defense.
Don’t touch him, girl, warned her conscience in its annoying little voice. You know you don’t need to touch him.
Good advice, but you know what? Screw you, conscience.
Reaching out, she slid her palm against his and let him pull her to her feet.
Mistake. Big mistake.
The electricity surged, so powerful it was a miracle she didn’t see a shower of orange sparks. Her hand warmed, her arm tingled, her breath stopped. He stared unsmiling into her eyes, and she wondered what he saw when he watched her so intently and what about her attracted a man like this, because there were plenty of pretty women in the world, and she wasn’t that interesting.
For one glorious second, his hand tightened around hers and he drifted closer, engaging her body in the magnetic pull from his, and she was so sure that this was it, the moment she’d dreaded and craved, the instant when he’d kiss her and get rid of all her uncertainty, once and for all, that her heart skittered and—
He let her go.
Her joyous heart hit the floor with a clanging clatter that felt like a metal trash can lid spinning to a stop on the street. She was so busy absorbing the sickening disappointment that it took her a minute to realize he’d walked to the door and was holding it open for her. His expression was a masterpiece of absolute serenity, like one of Monet’s water lily paintings. If he’d felt anything a minute ago, he damn sure wasn’t feeling it now.
“You ready?”
“Yeah.” God, was her face as red as it felt? “Let’s go.”
Going for a walk, it turned out, was code for…going for a walk. Not saying much, they meandered past the pool and down the path by the cottage where she was staying and on down to the duck pond.
Nothing happened.
“So what are you going to do with Phoenix Legacies?” she asked when they were crossing the little bridge into the Japanese rock garden. “Have you decided what your project will be?”
“Not yet.” He stared off in the distance, toward a quacking mallard that seemed determined to go a round or two with one of the black swans who thought it owned the section of the pond near the cattails. “I’m thinking I might work with the Innocence Program locally. They’ve got so many requests for help that they can’t handle them all.”
“Oh, wow,” she began. “That’s gre—”
Without comment, he took her hand.
One second they were walking, close enough to touch but not touching, their arms swinging together in an easy rhythm, and the next, her fingers were twined with his in that warm grip that made her insides soar. Yet he didn’t make a big deal out of it, didn’t bother even looking around to see if this was okay with her.
Luckily for him, it was so okay that she felt the heightening of all her senses and the subtle but insistent ache between her thighs. Hoping for a quick recovery that wouldn’t clue him into her turmoil, she tried to pick up the threads of their conversation.
“—great. You could do so much good that way. You know what else would be good?”
“What’s that?” he asked, now circling his thumb against her palm.
This was so not fair. How did he expect her to walk and talk when her knees were getting weaker by
the second? “You could, ah, set up a network of employers willing to hire people just out of prison. Because so many—”
“Can’t find jobs, yeah. I know. Hence my short but memorable career at the car wash.”
“It’s so hard for me to picture you working at a car wash. I’m surprised you weren’t fired for insolence or something.”
“I was headed in that direction. Fortunately, Governor Taylor rescued me before that happened. I was washing his car when he hired me.” That thumb kneaded her palm in a rough caress, tapping into some hidden pressure point that turned her joints to warm pudding. “I finished up my shift that day, quit the car wash and never looked back.”
“You made the most of your opportunity.”
“I hope so.”
That would have been the end of it. Still holding her hand and stroking her fingers, he angled off toward the gazebo, but she pulled up short. The muscles in his arm bunched up, registering his resistance, almost as though he knew where things were headed.
The whole time she’d known him, she’d thought of his experiences in the abstract, but now it was hitting her in all its ugliness, like a smack across the face with a dead fish.
The car wash was one thing. At least he’d been honestly employed. No problem. But…prison. Prison.
What horrors had he endured? What daily tortures, abuses and humiliations?
Of course he had anger-management issues—who wouldn’t? Considering his wrongful conviction and excruciating family history, it was a miracle he hadn’t gone to the nearest clock tower with a loaded rifle.
“Joshua.”
She waited patiently until he met her gaze, his expression guarded.
“How did you survive?” she asked. “What saved you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have some secret reserve of strength, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Of course you do.”
He shook his head in a firm and immovable no.
“What did you look forward to? What kept you hanging on? Clearing your name? Getting revenge against your family?”
“Nothing like that. The only thing I can tell you is that I figured that things could only get better, and if I hung on long enough, the good days, when they finally came, would be spectacular. It’s only fair, right?”
“And have they? Been spectacular?”
He laughed. “Well, every day when I can get up when I want to and go outside when I feel like it is a good day.”
“But what about spectacular?” she persisted.
His smile faded. In no particular hurry, he looked down at her hand and massaged it with both of his, a bone-deep caress that seemed to have nothing to do with her hand and everything to do with the emotions that darkened his face.
And then, at last, he kissed her palm, curled her fingers in to hold the kiss and flicked that turbulent gaze up to her eyes. He stared at her so hard and for so long that she wondered if anyone had ever seen her before—if anyone had ever looked. Then the confession came, and it was reluctant, as though he resented having to tell her something so intimate and yet couldn’t wrestle the words into submission.
“Spectacular didn’t start until I met you.”
That was when she came to the fork in her road and faced down the decision she’d been putting off. On the one hand, she could play it safe and turn away from this man. Hell, she could head to New York and finish the exam prep there, spending a little extra time with her brother, Sandro. The bar was in a couple of days, and it wasn’t like she was really needed here anyway, so why not pack up her study guides, hop the next plane and send Joshua a text: CU L8R.
Nice clean break, problem solved.
Except that she’d spend the rest of her life—and she was young, so she had a good long while to suffer—thinking about what they’d already shared and what they might still share, if she had the guts to let go of her fears, have some faith and give him another chance.
Standing there under bright blue skies on a day full of possibilities, staring into his brown eyes, getting lost in him, she took the plunge.
“I’m crazy about you, Joshua—”
He took a sharp breath.
“—you know that, don’t you?”
“I didn’t know.”
Regret came knocking on her door, looking for an opening. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”
“It’s okay,” he said quickly.
“Really?” She raised an eyebrow, pretty sure she’d just performed the emotional equivalent of leaping onto the subway tracks just ahead of the five o’clock train. “And how does it make you feel?”
He thought hard, the corners of his eyes crinkling with one of those internal smiles he did so well. “Happy. Scared.”
“Yeah? Which one do you feel the most?”
This time there was no hesitation. “Happy.”
Now was the time for him to take some of the pressure off, to wrench her into his arms and kiss her until her lips swelled and fell off. But he held back, tension vibrating through him, and she figured he wanted to put any decisions about where they went from here solely into her lap because he was done pressuring her. Too bad she didn’t know what to do other than delay what looked like the inevitable.
“We should talk about this some more when I get back from New York, don’t you think?”
“Hell, yeah,” he said. “I think.”
“Good.”
A delicious moment passed as they stared into each other’s faces.
Then she tugged his hand and they resumed their walk.
“Did something, ah, happen, Sandro?”
Arianna poked her head into her brother’s bedroom, praying she wasn’t taking her life into her hands by coming in here and asking. To her dismay, she saw an overnight bag open on the bed; that couldn’t be good. After finishing up the second day of the bar exam in New York City yesterday, she’d made the trip out here to Sag Harbor and her parents’ estate, where Sandro lived now. They’d intended to spend the weekend together eating lobster, walking on the beach and catching up, but it looked like those plans were about to go up in smoke.
“I heard you talking on the phone,” she continued.
Talking was a bit of an understatement. From her room down the hall, where she’d been thinking about getting up to start her day, she’d heard Sandro yelling the way she imagined he used to yell at his men when they were under fire in Afghanistan. Since she hadn’t heard gunshots and didn’t imagine he’d unleashed that fearsome temper on the housekeeper for, say, not dusting under the bed, she figured the ringing phone she’d heard a few minutes ago had brought some unpleasant news.
“Yeah.” He’d been over at the dresser, finding underwear and socks, but now he swung around and walked to the bed, his back yardstick straight and his bearing as rigid and square-shouldered as if he’d taken a momentary break from the military parade he’d been marching in. “Your nephew got himself kicked out of summer camp. Again. He designed a virus that shut down the computer lab. Nice, huh? I need to go fetch him and listen to the list of his misdeeds.”
“Oh, no.” Deciding to risk it, Arianna came all the way into the room and sat on the edge of the bed, a little too close to the precise line of perfectly folded clothes he’d arranged, judging from the dark glance he threw her. “Sorry,” she said, scooching back and taking care not to unduly wrinkle the gray duvet in the process. “Sorry.”
Sandro was, in her opinion, just a couple of notches away from a full-blown and intransigent case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Take this room, for example: austere enough to qualify as a monastery, with a couple of pieces of boxy modern furniture, a flat-screen TV and not a single plant, photo, lost slipper or particle of dust to warm the place up or indicate that a human being lived here. His years in the military had not helped iron out the neatness issue, no question, but she wasn’t going to point that out to him just now. One major problem at a time was all she could handle, especially when her brain was fried from two d
ays of the bar exam.
“So what are you going to do with him now?” she asked.
“Military camp.”
“What?” If she’d wanted to think of the worst possible answers to her twelve-year-old nephew’s wayward behavior, military camp would be in the top three. “He doesn’t need another camp. He needs to spend time with you and adjust to you being back home. And his mother walking out.”
Sandro, who’d leaned over and begun rolling up his clothes for meticulous insertion into the overnight bag, paused. His head slowly came up and he hit her with a blast of his icy displeasure: lowered brows, thinned lips, the brown flash of anger in his eyes.
Arianna had to fight not to shrink inside her skin, and she was a grown woman. She could just imagine what this fearsome routine did to Sandro’s troubled boy.
“And how many children do you have?” Sandro asked.
“None,” she admitted.
“Then why are you talking?”
“Sandro.”
Throwing caution to the wind, she gripped his wrist with the idea of comforting him and showing him that they both wanted the best thing for the boy. Instead, she got a handful of flesh as unyielding as iron, wound up so tight it was a wonder he could move and breathe at all.
“You can’t send him away forever. One of these days, you and he will have to deal with each other and put your family back together.” Without Samantha, the witch who’d walked out because she couldn’t handle being a military wife, but Arianna didn’t add that.
Sandro yanked his arm free. “What he needs,” he said, zipping his bag closed and picking it up, “is less spoiling and hand-holding, and more discipline.”
With that, he walked out, taking all the air in the room with him.
“Wow.” Flopping over backward on the bed, Arianna stared at the ceiling. “That went well.”
Emptiness hit her in a wave. The house rang with silence, and her thoughts, as they always did, swung back around to Joshua. What was he doing now? What would he say about Sandro and son? Would he tell her not to worry? Would he have suggestions on how to deal with them?
Did he miss her the way she missed him?
Redemption's Touch (Kimani Romance) Page 14
