by Toni Blake
“I’m ready if you are. Maybe I’ll finally get the closure I never got, finally be able to put this behind me.”
At this, she actually gasped. “Oh, you never got closure. You never got closure! That’s rich, Trent.” She crossed her arms beneath her breasts, let out a harrumph, and stared him down. “So go ahead. I would love to hear the reasons you walked away without even having the decency to break our engagement.”
Was she serious? “Um, it was kind of already broken, Allie, so what difference did it make?”
She looked pretty as ever, even angry. “Broken?” She uncrossed her arms, held them open. “How was it broken?”
“First, you announce you’re opening a knitting shop—when I thought we’d be talking about moving, so we could be together while I went to law school. And then—you and Josh.”
Her brown eyes went wide. “I keep telling you, there was no me and Josh.” And she looked so damned earnest every time she made the claim that it was hard to believe she was lying, but…
“That’s just not how I heard it.”
She drew back, squinting in what still appeared to be confusion. “Heard it? From who, pray tell? I mean, other than the mystery woman making the mystery comment,” she added, making it clear that didn’t hold much water for her.
“When I left that fall,” he said, “my mom stayed behind for a couple of weeks to close up the house. And she told me everywhere she went, she saw you and Josh, hanging all over each other. Smiling, laughing.”
“All over each other?” His one-time love lowered her chin, looking unjustly condemned. “That’s just not true.”
He narrowed his gaze on her, breathed in deeply, let it back out. Trying to figure out what was true. Where all the thin lines of reality actually lay. He’d had a hard time believing what his mom had said back then—it hadn’t sounded like Allie. But on the other hand, she had gone into business with this guy out of the blue, without even consulting him, and then he’d seen them together with his own eyes when he’d returned to surprise her two weeks after starting law school back at U of M. It had been like a knife in his heart to find out his mother hadn’t been exaggerating—that his supposed fiancée looked totally wrapped up in another guy. “I saw you, Allie,” he accused. “Did you not hear that part? I saw you myself. Being adorable together.”
Why did she appear so utterly perplexed about that? Could she just not bring herself to admit it? Finally, she said, “Trent, if you saw me hugging Josh—well, we’d just entered into a business venture together. He’d bought the building to start the coffee shop and I’d signed the lease with him and taken out the loan to open the Nook. We were both pretty thrilled—we were each making the other’s dream possible since neither of us could afford to do it on our own. So I don’t know, maybe we shared a few hugs around that time—probably we did. Celebratory hugs.
“And as for the woman you heard—I don’t know, maybe it was Josh’s mom. She was thrilled to see us opening the shops—she’d been encouraging us for a long time. And I don’t remember Josh saying what you claim to have heard, either—but I have a lot of conversations with my lifelong friend, and I haven’t committed all gazillion of them to memory. I’m sure, though, that he was talking about the business, too. Or maybe you completely misheard him, for that matter. You couldn’t have been standing very close to us during all this or I’d have seen you.” She looked him in the eye, her expression deadly serious. “I swear to you that there’s never been the slightest inkling of romance between us. We’re friends and business partners, nothing more.”
Then her expression grew less defensive and more irritated again. “And if you’re telling me that’s the reason you left me, and our engagement, without ever even asking me about it—oh my God. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I’m telling you that between that and starting a business here when you knew I’d committed to being someplace else, you didn’t seem very invested in being with me. I remember sitting down with my parents, talking about it. They said it was a summer romance, first love, but that…maybe it wasn’t real. Law school was real. My life in Charlevoix and Ann Arbor was real. My ambitions were real. And I just wasn’t convinced you truly wanted to be a part of that.”
“My life was real, too, Trent.” She let those warm brown eyes go wide on him. “I mean, did my aspirations not matter? Just because I wasn’t a brainiac and didn’t have money for an expensive education—did that mean the things I wanted to do didn’t matter at all?”
He blew out a sigh. “Of course not. But you never even talked to me about it—you just went out and did it.”
“I thought you’d be proud of me. I wanted to make you proud. Because… I hadn’t accomplished anything the way you had. I didn’t go to college. I didn’t have any big career plans like you. I wanted to do something, be someone, you could be proud of. And I thought… I thought…”
“What?”
She looked sheepish, suddenly shy. Then lowered her gaze and spoke more softly. “I just remember thinking how amazing my life was going to be—marrying a great guy I loved and following my dream of having a shop in town. I’d always wanted that,” she confided. “My whole life. I mean, you grow up here and your world is pretty tiny—so when I was little, it seemed very exciting and important to have a shop on Harbor Street. And it meant a lot to me to achieve that—even if it might not seem very exciting to other people.”
“I never knew that,” he replied gently. Then couldn’t help pointing out, “You never told me.”
“Oh,” she murmured. Clearly she’d not realized that. That she hadn’t told her fiancé her fondest dream. “I guess…maybe I wasn’t sure you’d get it, coming from—well, such a different kind of life.”
He shrugged at her doubt. “We had shops in Charlevoix, too.”
“But you had much bigger goals. Your whole family did.” She bit her lip, appearing pensive. “Maybe I thought it sounded silly as an aspiration, but would be more impressive if I’d already taken the steps to achieving it. Being a small business owner sounds a lot more relevant than hoping to open a yarn shop someday.”
“If you’d have told me, I’d have respected that,” he informed her. “I mean, don’t you remember how I kind of wanted to do something like that, too?”
She smiled wistfully, her voice softening. “Oh yeah, I’d forgotten. The bike shop.”
He’d had this little fantasy—which he’d actually gone to the trouble of sharing with her—about running his own bicycle shop here on the island. He’d thought it sounded like fun work. And he’d enjoyed tinkering with bikes growing up—his dad had ridden long-distance as a hobby for a while, so Trent had been around bikes a lot, long before his family had bought a vacation home on Summer Island, where bicycles were the primary form of transportation.
“So of course I’d have understood you wanting that.” But then he sighed, coming back to a less pleasant reality. “Though what I don’t understand is you committing to a business here if you were serious about marrying me, knowing I was going to law school and that there’s literally no place to practice any kind of law on this island.”
She swallowed, appearing nervous, and finally a little guilty. “I guess I never thought about that. It was shortsighted of me. I was…excited about what I was doing, and maybe I forgot to look at the big picture.”
He said nothing more—feeling vindicated, like he’d made his point.
“But you just disappeared from my life, Trent. I spent the last…” She stopped.
And he said, “What? You spent the last what?”
She raised her gaze, looked vulnerable, more vulnerable than she had since he’d arrived. It made her seem younger, more innocent—like the teenage Allie he’d fallen in love with. “I spent the last ten years,” she confessed quietly, “thinking you just changed your mind, or got bored with me, or just hadn’t been serious about your
proposal. I spent the last ten years having no idea why you abandoned me without ever looking back.”
He should have talked to her back then—he knew that. He should have faced the situation, not behaved so immaturely. But damn, he’d felt humiliated thinking she’d blown him off for some other guy the second he’d left the island. No one likes facing that kind of rejection, but especially not a young kid who’d never really failed at anything before. And… “You never exactly got in touch, either. I figured that meant you were fine with the way things turned out, that it was probably a relief to you.”
She tilted her head. Spoke quietly. “I did get in touch. I called your house three times and left messages with your mom. You never called back.”
He remembered having been between cell phones at the time—and the technology being new enough that it didn’t feel nearly as urgent to replace a broken one as it did now. And he’d still been working out new living arrangements in Ann Arbor for the semester, so he hadn’t yet had a home number to give her before leaving. Still… “You spoke to my mom?” He squinted slightly.
And Allie nodded. “Three times,” she said again.
He didn’t like where this was going. “Um, what did she say?”
“That she’d give you the message the next time she talked to you. So…she didn’t?”
He shook his head.
Damn it. His mother had kept Allie’s phone calls from him? Right up until her death? When she’d known good and well that he’d suffered over the breakup, that he’d believed with his whole heart that his parents’ assessment was true? He could still hear his dad’s voice. “Summer Island is…just that, a summer place. A place for fun. Vacation. But your real life is here, and down in Ann Arbor. It’s best to just put Summer Island and everything and everyone there behind you. We’re thinking of selling the house anyway—so we won’t be going back.” It had made him feel like the island was so utterly idyllic that…maybe it hadn’t actually existed. Like it had just been a dreamy little figment of his imagination popping up out of Lake Michigan, the same as a mirage appearing in the desert. And like nothing that had happened there was real, either.
Part of him had known his love for Allie was real, as real as it gets. But then he’d begun to doubt, to wonder if the relationship had been one-sided and he’d been alone in experiencing deep emotions. Hurt on top of embarrassment—added to some immaturity on his part, and egged on by his parents’ support—had made simply not going back somehow seem like a viable way to handle the situation. Which he regretted now—now that everything seemed so much more gray than black-and-white.
“I’m sorry if it happened that way, Allie,” he told her.
And she balked. “If? So you don’t believe me? You think I’m lying? About all of this?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, trying to backtrack. “It’s just starting to seem kind of impossible to figure out what really happened and what didn’t, that’s all. To say I’m confused right now would be an understatement.”
In fairness to him, Allie could relate to that part—this conversation was rocking her world. In ways both good and bad. He hadn’t stopped loving her back then. That was good. But he’d misconstrued the whole situation, seen things that weren’t there, and made horrible assumptions. That was bad. Really bad. Oh, and his mother had never told him she called. Allie had always suspected the woman didn’t like her, despite a pasted-on plastic smile, but this pretty much sealed it.
Outside, the rain sounded steadier and calmer than before—like the wind was dying down, the thunderstorm along with it. Maybe he could leave soon. Given how overwhelmed she felt, that idea appealed immensely. Partly because she didn’t know what else to say—about any of this. And partly because, at the moment, she just wanted to run away from it all, retreat—as she always had. Only she couldn’t run away from her very own house.
“You know what?” she said. “I don’t know the answers anymore. I don’t even know what’s real and what’s not. But maybe the thing to do is just…see this as water under the bridge. Clearly fate led you here today so we could hash this out. It’s hashed now. The rain’s slowing down. But you’re still soaked. Why don’t I give you a robe and put your clothes in the dryer—and once the rain has stopped, you can leave and we can both move on with our lives.”
“I guess,” he said, sounding more hesitant about the suggestion than she’d expected. “If that’s what you want.”
Their gazes met, held. And those eyes. They’d once held such power over her, and she feared they still might. They made her want to do things with him. Things like kissing and touching. I hate you for still being hot.
And more than that—I still hate you for leaving me that way. No matter why. No matter what your mother did or what you think you saw. I hate you for leaving me.
She dropped her gaze to his bare, damp feet. “It’s what I want.” Then she walked away, to her bedroom, grabbing her roomiest robe, a white terry cloth one her sister had given her for Christmas after a spa vacation with her husband.
Emerging back out into the great room, she found Trent trying to get his T-shirt off. Which maybe could have looked sexy—but the fabric appeared stretchy, and so wet that it clung to him. His arms were tangled up in it, the shirt half on, half off. “Damn thing,” she heard him mutter.
She blew out a sigh. Things weren’t awkward enough here without him being caught up in his shirt like a man trapped in a straitjacket? Dropping the robe over the back of a kitchen chair, she stepped up, grabbed onto the hem—the fabric was stretchy—and tried to yank the T-shirt upward over his head.
That was when she noticed his chest, stomach—the muscles there—but tried like hell not to. Look away. Anywhere else. Only then his elbow brushed her breast so softly that it felt like a touch. A touch that ricocheted straight down into her panties. Even if it was entirely unintentional. “Sorry,” he murmured, his eyes meeting hers just above the edge of the shirt.
Her gaze darted out the window involuntarily; she sensed him looking away, too.
Because she had.
Or because of the awkwardness.
Or because he felt the ping of desire just as much as she did?
Her heart resumed beating too hard. Or maybe it had never slowed down in the first place. But she’d quit feeling so aware of it, and now it became the biggest part of her. Th-thump, th-thump, th-thump.
She realized she was holding her breath, trying not to feel, trying to get this stupid shirt over his head, and regretting to her very core the impulse to help—but it was too late to go back now.
Finally, it came loose—his arms were free, the wet tee off, in her hand.
And he stood shirtless before her.
Clearly, he worked out.
Clearly, he’d matured. This was the body of a man, not a boy.
And yet, still him. Still familiar. The same body she’d once been so intimate with so many times.
When she lifted her eyes back to his, their gazes reconnected and she knew she’d been caught looking, caught admiring—caught wanting. Th-thump, th-thump, th-thump.
She turned away, his shirt still in her grasp. “I’ll put this—”
And his hand clamped down on her other wrist. “Allie.”
Th-thump.
She looked up, back into those eyes—and her throat went tight, her whole body tense with the uncomfortably powerful mix of nervousness and desire.
Th-thump.
When his glance dropped briefly to her lips—making her aware, giving her a chance to do something to change the situation—she sucked in her breath. But she didn’t change the situation.
Th-thump.
And he brought his mouth down on hers.
CHAPTER FOUR
TO BE KISSED by Trent was to live out the fantasy she’d let herself have a thousand times since he’d left her behind. The day had started
out so normal—and now Trent Fordham was standing in her house kissing her like there was no tomorrow.
She kissed him back the same way. It wasn’t a decision, but her body’s response. She knew it was madness, but there was simply no stopping, no pulling away. Only surrender to everything she’d ached for and missed so very long.
They’d both grown confused about what was real and imaginary in their relationship—but this, this was as real as it got. One thing she definitely had not misunderstood or imagined: the heat between them. A chemistry that was almost feral.
He pulled her to him, hard, tight—and her fingertips raked over his damp skin, soon threading back through wet hair. When his tongue snaked into her mouth, it lured her own into the fray. She’d missed the taste of him, the feel of him—and even all these years later, it was easy, easy to touch and explore, because it felt like coming home.
His hands ran the length of her back over the thin summer hoodie she wore, then dropped to her ass to lift her slightly onto the kitchen table. Her legs parted instinctively, allowing him between them, and he pressed into her below as they kissed more. A gasp escaped her as that hard, wonderful, most masculine part of him met with the juncture of her thighs—even through denim, an undeniably delicious sensation. It took her back to make-out sessions when they were teenagers, the grandest temptation even when she’d said no, and the same that had eventually made her say yes.
Her body continued responding, grinding against him, creating a perfect friction—again, not a decision, a reaction. How had she ever said no?
“Where’s your bed, Allie?” It was a deep rasp in her ear, warm and wicked.
Now would be a good time to say no. It would make all the sense in the world. But clearly Trent stole all her senses, because instead of saying anything at all, she simply pointed toward the open door a few steps away.
Their eyes met again, reminding her: This isn’t a fantasy, this isn’t a dream—it’s happening. Real as the rain falling on the roof right now, real as the lighthouse she caught another quick glimpse of as he took her hand and led her into her own bedroom—where another picture window afforded the same idyllic view.
