Sweet Talk Boxed Set (Ten NEW Contemporary Romances by Bestselling Authors to Benefit Diabetes Research plus BONUS Novel) (142 page)

She shoved her feet into her boots, ready to sacrifice her new bra and underwear, her other sock. All in order to get out of there before she made more mistakes.

“I didn’t peg you as the love ‘em and leave ‘em type.”

Dean was awake.

Crap.

And his voice was gruff and warm, with—as usual—a laugh, buried somewhere inside.

“I didn’t want to wake you up.” She looked down at her boots, like getting them perfectly tight was all that mattered.

“Right.”

The tone of his voice made her head snap toward him. Still laughing, but now there was an edge to it. He was sitting up on his mattress, blankets pooled around his waist. His bright blue eyes were lined with dark lashes, and they saw right through her crap.

They always saw right through her crap. From the minute she discovered her own crap—he was seeing through it.

“If you’re going to run away, at least have the guts to say it.”

“I wasn’t—”

He quirked his eyebrow, and there was no point in trying to lie to him.

“Okay, I was running away.”

He leaned back against the wall, shoving his hair off his face. It was long. Longer than she remembered. It made him look like a pirate.

A sexy, sexy cowboy pirate.

“It’s all right,” he said, forgiving her rudeness. “You can go if you want.”

“No,” she sighed. “I…I want to stay. I’m sorry. I just...don't want things to be awkward.”

"I'm not awkward."

"Of course you’re not. But the rest of humanity gets a little awkward the morning after drunk monkey sex with a childhood friend."

"It was pretty hot drunk monkey sex, so I figure there's not much to feel awkward about. But you go right ahead, if it makes you feel better. You want some coffee?”

She couldn’t help but laugh. So much for awkward.

“Sure,” she said. “Where is it?”

But he stood up, shameless and naked. Long and lean and perfect. He pulled on his jeans and the dark long-sleeved henley he’d been wearing last night and stepped over to the little galley kitchen on one wall of the small apartment. The window was still dark and the wind howled outside.

Outside really didn’t seem like a good idea anymore.

“Good God, is that the time?” he asked, staring at the clock on the microwave. “Why are you even awake?”

“Habit,” she said. “I always wake up early.”

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“A little rough. You?”

“I have some experience down at Holly’s,” he joked. “I know my way around a hangover.”

He brought her a glass of water and a couple of aspirin.

“Thank you.”

Dean’s apartment, conveniently located above Holly’s Bar, for all its bareness was cozy. Kind of library-chic meets lumberjack couture. It was basically one large room. The floors were wide planks of pine. A kitchen with white cabinets on one end, a beat-up brown leather couch and TV on the other and a bed right in the middle. He had a bunch of bookshelves crammed with paperbacks.

His old guitar sat on a stand, a beat up Gibson acoustic with the pretty mother-of-pearl inlay. “You still play?” she asked. He'd gotten it for his tenth birthday. She'd been there, wearing a Star Wars party hat, when he opened it.

“When I get a chance. How about you?” he asked, stirring sugar into her mug. The way she liked.

It took a far tougher woman than her not to melt at that.

“No. No time for piano.”

“The party is ruined,” he joked.

It had been years, but the memories were entirely fresh. Like brand new and crisp. That was how this…crush on him had started. Playing music with him. It was, and probably always would be, one of the most intimate things in her life. Timing, breath, that thin layer of expectation from their parents that had sort of trapped them inside a bubble of shared experience. The creation of something beautiful, even if it was only a slightly offbeat “Silent Night”.

Honestly, what did it say about her that those were her best childhood memories?

The mug he handed her said Laramie Tech in yellow letters.

“Last time I saw you was that Christmas Eve,” she said, shoving her thoughts away from those intimate memories. “That party at your apartment in Laramie.”

He winced. “When Dad showed up?”

I have to tell him.
This secret, the longer she spent with him, was feeling like a lie.

He narrowed his eyes. “Has it really been six years since I saw you?”

“Yeah.”

“You look the same, Trina. Exactly the same. Like time doesn’t move for you.”

“Oh, it moves.” She laughed. “And you’re just…bigger. The same but bigger.”
Okay, Trina, you can shut up now.
But of course she didn’t. “You’re like man-sized.”

And beautiful. All that adolescent promise had been fulfilled, and Dean was one of the handsomest men she’d ever seen.

Easily the handsomest one she’d ever seen naked.

Cowboys had way better bodies than accountants. It was fact.

“Anything else you want to say about my size?” He was laughing at her, so she scowled at him.

Still laughing, he crouched down in front of the brick fireplace, laid out some dried cedar and started a fire. His shirt slid up in the back and his pants dipped low, and she saw a small swatch of alabaster skin at the small of his back. She felt like a sixteen-year-old ogling a hot guy’s butt.

She had to look away, or she’d touch him. And she kind of thought that all the touching that was going to happen between them had happened last night.

By getting out of that bed, she’d given up her claim.

“I like your place,” she said.

“Thanks. It’s not much, but Holly let me have it cheap for the winter.”

She wondered why he needed it cheap, but was afraid to ask.

A star hung crooked on one of his cupboards. A dark tree sat on a table in the corner, dressed in tinsel and red bulbs.

“It’s Christmas Eve,” she blurted out. Somehow in the drama and fire of last night she’d forgotten what she’d walked into Holly’s to forget.

His blue eyes moved over her with intensity, as if he were checking her for injury. Blood, maybe from a wound. But all her wounds were internal. And he already knew about those.

“You okay?” he asked. For a moment the weight of the memory, of both their memories, was almost too much to bear.

This is why she’d stayed away for so long. Because it was all too grim. There was nowhere to turn here without running into her failure, the ghost of the scared, trapped kid she’d been. Unloved and left behind.

On the heels of that came the freezing anger. The urge to push herself away from anyone that could potentially hurt her.

“Trina?”

“It’s never a good night.” She turned the mug in her hands, letting the heat seep into her skin. Part of her felt like she’d never thawed from that night. She was still a frozen girl sitting outside in December, waiting for her mom to come home.

“You ever hear from your mom?” he asked.

“Yeah. She called once a few years ago.”

“Once?”

“I wasn’t interested in forgiving her. I mean…my phone rang one day and it was her, and I’m supposed to just forgive her?”

“No. But aren’t you curious?”

“She lives in Denver. She’s married to a dentist, has two step-kids. And she left me. She left me behind like I didn’t matter. So I figure I got all the pertinent details.”

“Oh my God, Trina—”

“It’s fine,” she said. Though it wasn’t. Every other day of the year she barely thought about it, but on Christmas Eve, it stung. Hard. And Christmas Eve back here… God, what had she been thinking?

She stood, unable to sit. The urge to move, to leave, was hard to resist.

It was so, so hard to stay.

“Why are we here?” The question sprang from some dark place. A dark place she’d been able to forget about the last few years. She’d buried it under work, endless work. And distance. Miles of it.

“Well, I live here.” He shot her that cocky grin that made her want to climb inside his lap, his memories, into every joke he had. “And last night you wanted to get laid.”

"No, I mean, how are we both here? In Dusk Falls? We promised, remember? That we'd never come back?”

“I remember.” He shrugged. Set his coffee down. Picked it back up. Odd, he seemed nervous. Dean was never nervous. "I don't know, Trina. But we were kids and I think maybe some places are hard to avoid."

"Right.” The bitterness, the guilt she felt over her choice, it would not be contained and came out as a terrible, rough laugh. "This place shouldn't be one of them. It's nothing but bad memories for both of us."

"Not all bad.” He waggled his eyebrows and tilted his head toward the bed.

She laughed, happy to jump onto the raft of easier thoughts. "Not all bad. A little foggy, maybe."

"You only have yourself to blame. The shots were your idea.”

"No way," she cried. She was not a shot kind of girl. She was a half a white-wine spritzer at a firm party kind of girl.

"Hand to God, you wanted tequila." He leaned back against the counter. "So, what are you doing back here? Last night you didn't say.”

No. Last night she’d avoided the issue.

“New job," she hedged.

“Around here?” His happiness actually made her hurt. “I thought when you left for law school in California, we lost you forever.”

“I couldn’t turn it down.”

Tell him. Tell him. He’s going to find out sooner or later.

“Well, I for one am happy to see you.”

“Yeah.” She smiled at him over the edge of her mug. “You made that clear last night.”

She’d forgotten one of the most adorable things about Dean. He blushed. Bright pink. Big burly man blushing like that, it was enough to make her take her pants off again.

“When did you move back here?” she asked.

“To my palace above a bar?” He spread his arms out wide.

“No, Dusk Falls. Last I heard you were engaged and living near Laramie.”

“We broke it off before the wedding. I think she caught on that I was more interested in pissing off my dad than I was in actually being married. So we split—or rather, she split. And last year I...ah…I got a job offer I couldn’t refuse.”

“Really? You ramrodding somewhere?”

“Yeah.” He said it casually. But she knew that was all he’d ever wanted, and his family had sold much of their herd and acreage years ago. But still, he’d gone to school and graduated top of his class in land management, despite the narrowing field.

He’d gotten what he wanted, what he’d worked hard for, what his father both disdained and never thought he could do. He got it.

And that wasn’t easy in his world. In any world.

She put her mug down on the edge of a bookshelf and crossed the room to him, like he was gravity and she was a stone at the top of a hill.

He turned slightly to face her when she came to stand beside him. Both their hips pressed against the counter. Their bodies cupped the air between them. While the cold wind blew against the window, she was safe and warm. With Dean. The world could fall away around them. As long as she had this moment. This now.

“Hey,” he said, smiling at her.

“Hey.” She smiled back.

He ran a finger down her nose. “I remember you.” The fondness in his voice made her feel so special, so wanted. So cared for.

No person had ever made her feel this way.

It was like taking a first hit of something very addictive.

“You are vaguely familiar to me, too.”

They stood so close that when she took a breath, their bellies touched. Her knee brushed the inside of his leg. His breath in her mouth tasted like coffee.

It was nearly, so very nearly, too much. And she stood there in this wide puddle of longing and desire and melancholy and happiness and pride and she tried to handle it all. She wasn’t good at that and she started erecting sandbag walls and levees, drainage ditches to divert the feelings she didn’t know how to handle.

"You angling for more hot monkey sex?"

"The memories are a bit hazy. They could use some clarification." She ran her hand over his chest, the waffle print of his shirt both rough and soft against her palm. "I'm so glad for you," she whispered. Inexplicably, she felt tears in her throat. "That you're doing exactly what you wanted to do. That you're happy."

"And what about you?" he asked. "Are you doing exactly what you want to do?"

"At this minute?” She got lost in the blue of his eyes. "Yes."

“I missed you, Trina,” he breathed. “A lot. It’s weird going years without a best friend.”

Instead of answering him, she stood on tiptoe to press a kiss to his lips. Chaste, nearly. Friendly, sort of. It was a kiss with a promise, an edge. And they both leaned hard on that edge, as if savoring it.

Because this will never happen again. Not ever.

It was funny how touching Dean, kissing him, felt both entirely new and like she’d been doing it for years. It was a strange kind of magic, the stretch and pull of time. The quality of her fantasies given heft and weight. A wild sense of real.

Tell him. You need to tell him
.

And she would. In a minute. When she'd gotten her fill of this kiss. This moment.

Her hand slid up from the edge of his denim onto the warm bare skin under the hem of his shirt. It was so soft. So tender. He worked day in, day out in the weather, but that little patch of skin, right where his spine curved and dipped, that was hidden skin. Secret skin.

My skin.

His hand brushed her cheek, slid into her hair. His fingers were thick with calluses and her hair got caught and pulled. It stung. Just enough. Just right.

“Last night.” He was looking at her, watching her so hard, she could feel his eyes on her and she didn’t quite have the guts to look at him. To see him. Let him see her. “I never thought I would see you again. And you walked into that bar…”

“I know,” she sighed.

"No," he told her. "You don't. Not really."

His words seemed to imply too much and she didn't want to press him further, or try to figure it out, because they were running out of time.

She pressed her face to his wide chest. Breathing in the scent of him, of sweat and sex, but under that he smelled like warm sheets and cold wind. Winter and fire, all together. And somehow, under that, pencil lead.