Once More With Feeling (25 page)

‘Do you need a nightlight?’ he asked, his voice that sexy drawl. ‘I think my sister left one in the attic room upstairs.’

‘I think I’m good,’ I replied, with far more bluster than I felt, as if that could banish all my inappropriate thoughts. He was so close, all that lean muscle arrayed before me, hanging there on display …

‘Okay, then,’ he murmured, his voice much too low. It reverberated in me. Through me. It made me …
ache
.

‘Okay.’ I could barely speak.

‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

I could hear the smirk in his voice, even if it wasn’t on his face.

‘You will,’ I said. Stupidly. I wanted to put myself out of my own misery. I wanted … God, the things I wanted. I was punch-drunk on them all, so inebriated with his closeness that I was tempted to pretend I didn’t remember why this was a bad idea. Why
he
was a bad idea.

The reason why I’d left him in the first place – which hadn’t changed in all this time. And never would.

He reached down and brushed my hair back from my face with one hand, his eyes so intent, his mouth so serious, all of that focus and attention that made him so formidable riveted on me. I caught my breath. I could hardly do anything else.

For a long moment there was nothing but the wind outside … and this. Him. This winding coil of tension.
The sweetness of it, the heaviness. I could feel it shaking me, rattling my bones and making my skin seem to prickle in response. Would he kiss me again? Would I kiss him? Did I want either one of those things to happen? Both? More?

‘It’s so easy to forget,’ he said, his voice so low it was barely a ribbon of sound, almost carried away by the wind against the windows.

But I heard it. I felt it like heat.

‘Forget what?’ Did I move towards him then? Or was he simply bigger, somehow, looming over me in that tiny hall, all smooth muscles and that concentrated power that was pure Alec? I felt hectic and out of control, as I always did around him. As if anything could happen. And might.

‘All the things I should remember,’ he said, something dark and almost sorrowful in his voice then, and he drew his hand away, and I wasn’t the only one of us who felt bereft when he broke that connection. I knew I wasn’t. I could see the echo of it on his lean perfect face.

I wanted to throw the stupid towels on the floor, reach for him, and wrap myself around him until there was no question any more of remembering or forgetting. Until there was nothing at all but the fire I could feel crackling and building between us, in us, around us, consuming all the air in the house, making all these decisions for us.

But I didn’t. I would make my decisions for myself now. I wouldn’t hide behind anything. Not even him.

‘Goodnight, Alec,’ I said instead.

And impossibly, I stepped back into the room, smiled, and closed the door in his face.

Then spent the rest of the long lonely night lying wide awake in that cosy little room with Alec only a few feet across the hall, within reach if I wanted him, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.

The next morning, I felt as awkward and oddly vulnerable as if we’d actually had the wild one-night stand that I’d cleverly averted the night before. I woke entirely too early from the restless sleep I’d fallen into shortly before dawn, and found myself staring around the happy little room in hollow-eyed confusion, as too-vivid images chased each other through my head.

‘Dreams,’ I whispered to myself, my whisper seeming to fill up the little room and clash with the pale-yellow wallpaper. ‘Those are nothing but dreams.’

And then I had a small panic attack. Well, maybe not so small. It was a heart-pounding, head-spinning, high-octane
panic
that made me believe that I really might pass out, or, worse, vomit all over Alec’s guest room, a prospect which panicked me even more. Which really didn’t help.

When I could breathe again, I seriously considered getting up and sneaking out of the house to make my escape, in the time-honoured Walk of Shame style that I
hadn’t employed in more years than I could count. Since I was all dressed up to kill in one of Brooke’s photo albums, in fact. I plotted exactly what I would do, up to and including putting my car in neutral and letting it roll out of Alec’s driveway on the off chance he was up early communing with nature. Why I thought I required spy-like manoeuvres to avoid him was another issue altogether, and one I didn’t feel up to confronting while my heart was still beating too fast in my chest and I was lying there in the foetal position in a tiny twin-bed that made me feel like a child again. I left so many times in my head that it was almost a surprise to discover that I hadn’t moved from the bed at all. And only the fact that I was pretty sure that there was some kind of alarm on the front door that I wouldn’t know how to disarm kept me from actually getting up and launching myself into action.

I lay there for a long time, caught somewhere between fuming and worrying. It was becoming my natural state.

In the cold light of morning, my actions from the day before seemed completely incomprehensible to me. As, no doubt, they would to anyone. To everyone, in fact. A quick glance at my phone showed a whole list of texts from Lianne and Brooke, and I was too ashamed of myself to read through them. What would I say? Lianne would not be impressed that I’d driven all the way up here and thrown myself on a man’s doorstep. Brooke would not be impressed that, having done so, I’d failed to sleep with him.

Meanwhile, I kind of thought I needed to start thinking about my life less in these crazy Goldilocks terms and more in
my
terms. What did
I
want? What life did
I
want to build for myself? Good questions, I thought – and not ones that could be answered while I was taking an extended tour of my past. It had to stop.
I
had to stop. Tim and Carolyn had slept together because they’d wanted to sleep together. I hadn’t done anything to make that happen. I hadn’t set all of it in motion all those years ago by making choices that had nothing to do with either one of them. There were no clues here, and I knew it. I wasn’t going to find some kind of secret treasure lying on the side of Memory Lane – at least none that would give me any clarity on what was happening, right now, in the life I kept trying to leave behind in Rivermark.

This had all been part of my breakdown, when I thought about it like that. My necessary end-of-marriage crisis period, which surely every woman was entitled to experience. This had been a productive breakdown, sure, but still. It was my little personal pageant of craziness. And the truth was, I was tired unto my very soul of being broken.

I swung out of the bed and picked up one of the towels Alec had given me the night before. I pulled my jeans back on, because this wasn’t a sorority movie and I was not the sort to scamper about random houses in my underwear. I thought about putting my bra back on under the longsleeved T-shirt I’d slept in, but decided I could forgo it if I was only going to the bathroom. I eased my door
open, and then froze there in the significantly chillier hallway, listening.

There was nothing but quiet. The usual sounds of an old house in winter; creaks here and there and the faroff sounds of old radiators doing their work. But nothing else. Alec’s bedroom door was closed. For a moment, I found myself lost in one of those dreams again, tangled limbs and that serious, talented mouth hot on my body …

Not helpful
, I barked at myself. Just as I had the night before, and with about as much success. Annoyed at myself, I charged down the hallway and wrenched open the bathroom door, determined to shower and say my goodbyes like the mature adult I’d thought I was before all this and then get the hell—

‘Oh, shit.’

I didn’t realize I had said that out loud – squeaked it, really, in a pitch only dolphins might consider appropriate – until Alec’s eyebrows crooked upward in a lazily amused sort of response.

But who cared about his eyebrows?

He was in the process of wrapping a towel around his waist, and that meant there was nothing in front of me in the little farmhouse bathroom but skin. Glistening, hot, tanned and perfect male skin, wrapped around that mouthwateringly lean and athletic body of his.

Oh my God.

All of the carnal images that had haunted me since I’d
laid eyes on him again taunted me now, and I could
feel
him as if he were touching me, as if he’d moved, as if he was doing every one of the things I could see him promise with that dark gaze of his.

‘Careful,’ he said in that low, knowing way of his that echoed through me and seemed to
hum
beneath my skin. ‘You’re getting drool on the floor.’

‘I’m not drooling,’ I shot back at him, even though I felt winded. Or was that dizzy? ‘I’m disgusted.’

‘Yes.’ Was that a smirk? It was. ‘I can see that.’

He stepped toward me and I decided it was absolutely crucial that I betray no sign that he might be intimidating me in any way. That I stand up for myself. Just because something was tempting didn’t mean I had to sample it. Just because my breasts seemed to swell and I could
feel
him between my legs in an insistent pulse, well, there were worse things.

There had to be. I just couldn’t think of any of them right now.

‘Sleep well?’ he asked. He’d brought all of that absurdly hard-packed male flesh so close now that I literally lost the will to drag my gaze from his naked chest up to his face, and when I finally did, his eyes were laughing at me.

‘Like a baby,’ I said, with a good deal more bravado than was strictly necessary.

‘So up every five minutes, then, frantic and wailing,’ he said, still in that amused sort of drawl. He leaned down and stopped my heart when he put his hands on my cheeks,
one on each side, holding me there. Killing me. ‘In other words, you didn’t sleep at all. You spent the entire night tossing and turning and remembering. Or was that just me?’

‘Alec.’ I was all heat and heartbeat, and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. Or care. Last night’s determination had slid into this wildfire of need, and I thought I might die from it. And it sounded like a great idea. ‘Please shut up.’

His mouth curved slightly and his dark eyes gleamed, and I wanted him so much it actually hurt.

‘Why don’t you just kiss me,’ I ordered him, because I thought I might die if he didn’t.

And Alec, ever the gentleman, obeyed.

Everything got crazy.

White-hot and wild.

He hauled me into his arms, and then up, so he could hold me pinned against the door frame as he angled his mouth against mine again and again. Tasting. Drowning. Pouring fire on fire and then burning alive.

I wrapped my legs around his waist and wished I hadn’t put on any clothes before I’d left the room because if I hadn’t, he could have dropped that towel and slid inside me and
that
, I thought in a frantic haze of need and lust, would have made everything perfect.

But it was close enough.

I tasted his warm skin, reacquainted myself with the
span of his chest, the width of his shoulders, the artistry that was that lean torso of his. I felt how hard he was against me, how soft I was in turn. He caught my mouth with his, and I believed him. I believed that he’d been up all night, as cranky and thwarted as I’d been. I believed that he wanted me as much as I wanted him, even now, even all these years later, even though this fire should have sputtered out whole lifetimes ago.

God, how he tasted. And the things he could do with that grave mouth of his, the way he could light me up. I couldn’t get close enough. I couldn’t taste enough, touch enough. I felt greedy and desperate and
more
.

He shifted back, leaning against his side of the door frame so he could slowly pull my shirt up and then over my head, baring my breasts to him. His face tightened; his eyes glittered, and then he lifted me higher so he could fasten that hot mouth of his to my nipple. I made a soft little noise I didn’t recognize, but he did. He laughed, and then moved to the other breast, and then I was out of my mind, I was insane with this wild heat, I wanted him more than I could handle – when he froze.

He went completely, utterly still.

‘What?’ I asked, completely dazed, as he let my legs slide back down to the floor. He cocked his head as if he were listening to something, which made no sense to me, and anyway, I couldn’t hear anything over the racing of my heart and my own laboured breathing. He held up a hand, urging me to be quiet.

‘Alec?’ came the voice. The female voice, sing-songing up from what sounded like the bottom of the stairs directly below us. ‘Are you up?’

‘Yeah,’ he called, his gaze on mine, dark and frustrated. ‘I’ll be right there. Why don’t you make yourself useful and start the coffee?’

‘Up yours!’ came the breezy voice, almost making me smile, had I been capable of something like that at a moment like this, and I heard footsteps retreat toward the kitchen.

‘My sister.’ He sounded so close to mournful that I nearly laughed.

‘Oh,’ I said, keeping my voice low. ‘Well.’

‘Shit,’ he muttered. He rested his hands against the wall on either side of my head and looked down at me for a long moment, and then he repeated himself. And I couldn’t help but agree.
Shit
. And then he pushed away.

I grabbed my shirt from where it had landed, almost in the toilet, and pulled it over my head. When I looked around again, Alec was across the tiny hall in the doorway of his room, pulling on those old jeans and shrugging into one of those button-down shirts that made him look like a particularly edible lumberjack. He didn’t bother to button the shirt, he just fastened the jeans and ran a hand through the thick wet mess of his hair, that dark hot look eating me up from across the small hall.

‘This is probably for the best,’ I said piously.

For a moment he didn’t react, and then he rolled his eyes.

‘Of course you would say that,’ he said, sounding somewhere between disgusted and amused. ‘That’s just perfect.’

‘It really is,’ I continued, darting a glance toward the stairwell and trying to keep my voice low and under any sisterly radar from below. ‘There’s no need to confuse the issue.’