To Have and to Hold (10 page)

She was cleaning up the girls’ breakfast dishes Wednesday morning when he stepped into the kitchen.

He was wearing men’s cotton pajama pants and a gray T-shirt, and her pulse leapt at her throat. Not just because the fabric of both articles was well worn and clung everywhere his body bulged with muscle or otherwise. Although it was a thing of beauty, the soft way that T-shirt knit hugged his pecs and biceps. She wanted to stroke him through the shirt so she could feel both the give of the knit and the immovable strength underneath. And that was leaving aside entirely how very much she wanted to lay hands on those pj pants and what he was packing underneath.

No, her heart was pounding because this was the first time he’d come into the kitchen in the morning without showering and getting dressed first.

It was like
before
.

He was getting comfortable with her. He wasn’t putting so much distance between them.

But it didn’t matter, did it? Because she was leaving Saturday.

“Granola?” she asked, to get her head on straight, pouring him a bowl.

As she was about to add milk, he shook his head.

“You like it,” she said. “The first time I tried to serve it to you, you called it rabbit food, but then I said that you were setting a bad example for the girls, not even trying it, so you did, and you couldn’t resist. It’s my own recipe: mostly oats, maple syrup, and a little bit of coconut.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Well, then, how can I say no? Bring it on. But wait a sec, and I’ll make some scrambled eggs, too.” Then a shadow crossed his face and he tilted his head quizzically.

“I love your scrambled eggs,” she reassured him.

He looked like he wanted to ask her something else.

She shrugged, not because she was actually feeling nonchalant, but because she wished she were. “I stayed over a couple times.”

Was it her imagination or did his gaze darken at that?

He ducked before she could say for sure. He came up, forehead wrinkled, hands empty. “Did you move the skillet?”

“In the cabinet next to the stove.”

She didn’t say,
You put it there. Right before you left. You said it made way more sense for it to be next to the stove.

He didn’t need to be reminded constantly that pieces were missing.

He crossed to the fridge and pulled out the eggs. Broke them into a bowl, added some milk.

He rustled in one of the cabinets and she saw his shoulders rise in tension and fall in defeat.

“Salt and pepper’s on the other side,” she said quietly.

He shot her a look of gratitude. She wasn’t sure if it was purely for the information or for something in the way she’d delivered it.

She’d stayed over twice when the girls were at a sleepover party. And once or twice when they were in the house, because the four of them had been out late or up late here playing board games. And they’d always made sure she woke up in the guest room and he woke up in his room. Which had not always been easy. Once Hunter had snuck upstairs at six a.m. and almost bumped into Clara going to the bathroom.

By that point, she hadn’t cared if the girls caught on. She might even have preferred it, because it would have put an end to the sneaking around. But she wouldn’t have said that. Maybe she’d sensed some lingering reticence in him.

She wondered: If he hadn’t lost his memory, would he have come back 100 percent gung ho? Or had there always been a little part of him not completely sure of her, of them?

The thought chilled her.

“How would you feel about the four of us going to Lakeshore Park today?”

She must have startled or made a small noise, because he said, “What?”

“You asked me that.
Before
. We did that. The four of us. That was—it was the first time the four of us all did something together. You texted just like that. ‘How would you feel about the four of us going to Lakeshore Park today?’ ”

“Huh,” he said. He cut a pat of butter and let it skate around the bottom of the skillet on the stove.

“I just figured you were feeling nervous about Clara staying with me. At that point, we didn’t know each other very well. I mean, you knew Clara spent about half her life at my house, and that Dee and Linda both trusted me enough to have left Clara with me for a couple of days at a time. But I figured you were doubting yourself.”

“I guess I might have been.”

He hadn’t been, though. He’d told her after the fact that the outing was his first attempt to spend time with her, even though he wasn’t admitting it to himself yet. She didn’t want to tell him that, though. It would be too
leading
. She didn’t want him to think she was trying for a do-over.

She wasn’t.

She
really, really
wasn’t.

Even if she was dying to touch him.

She should say no. There was no way she could go to Lakeshore Park and not think of how it had been the last time around. Tension shimmering in the air between them, nearly from the moment she’d taken off her cover-up and his eyes had looked everywhere except at her skimpy bathing suit.

“I think it would be fun.”

Those were not the words she was supposed to have said. Nor was she supposed to be beaming at him. But he was smiling back at her, and God, he hadn’t smiled like that since—before. All white teeth and eye crinkles and that almost-dimple and just the sheer ridiculous
glow
of him.

She remembered the first time he’d smiled at her like that. The day they’d gone to Lakeshore.

Even though she knew what mistakes she wasn’t supposed to make again, she kept wanting to make them.

“Do you want to go somewhere other than Lakeshore? Because we’ve already done that?”

She shook her head. Apparently she was going to undermine all her own best intentions today.

“It’s a little frustrating,” he admitted. “I have a brilliant idea, and it’s already old and busted.” He wet his hand under the tap and flicked a few drops of water into the skillet, where they sizzled. He poured the eggs in and didn’t make eye contact.

“It’s different this time, anyway,” she said. “Everything’s different.”

And she didn’t just mean in the bad ways. She didn’t just mean what he’d forgotten and what she’d lost. She meant it in good ways, too. After spending five days working with him on the tree house, she didn’t see him quite the same way anymore. He wasn’t just the same Hunter she’d left behind, only minus his memories of her. He was—he was different. Harder, with something defensive in the set of his jaw. But also softer. The builder, the creator, a different, more vulnerable man than he’d let her see before.

The man who’d given himself up so thoroughly in those moments in the dark…

No, this visit to Lakeshore would in many ways bear no resemblance to their first. It was impossible, now, for her to look at him and see the same remote, self-contained man—Clara’s father—she’d once seen. She knew him too well, knew all the soft and tender spots under his strong and leathery surface.

It was harder for her to protect herself from this man.

It didn’t occur to him immediately that this outing would involve Trina in a bathing suit. He’d asked her totally spontaneously, because he needed a day’s break from tree-house work, because the sun was shining brightly outside, because he didn’t want his and Clara’s time with her to just end, without fanfare. He wanted to create an experience they’d remember distinctly.

If he were honest with himself, he’d say he wanted to create an experience Trina would remember, too.

But the bathing suit wasn’t on his mind.

They’d finished eating the scrambled eggs and fucking awesome granola and were doing the dishes, bumping elbows and accidentally twining soapy fingers under the water, when he suddenly realized that he’d just arranged for himself to spend an entire day in the presence of her mostly naked abundance. And that it might be a form of beautiful torture.

Not an hour went by that he didn’t think about the night he’d woken in the middle of kissing her, or that other encounter, the one he might or might not have dreamt. And working side by side with her this week, leaning closer to show her a technique, or squatting beside her to examine one of the treasures she’d scavenged, it had been increasingly difficult to keep his hands off her. But he’d successfully suffocated his cravings in hard work. He’d kept his hands to himself and the thoughts in the dark quiet of his own mind. Because he would
not
do to her what he’d done to Dee. He wouldn’t let lust lead them both into a trap. If there was no way, now, to fix what had gone wrong with Dee, he would make sure Trina didn’t make the same mistake with him.

After breakfast, he’d gone upstairs to shower and change, and it had been then, standing under the water, running his soapy palm across his chest, that it occurred to him to wonder where his bathing suit was.

They would wear bathing suits, of course.

She
would wear a bathing suit.

Trina. Bathing suit.

Damn.

His skin buzzed with a low-level anticipation that wouldn’t rinse away.

He wondered if this was old territory. If after he’d texted her and invited her to the base’s lakefront park the first time, he’d pondered—with a little too much anticipation and a suspicious dryness of the mouth—just exactly what she’d look like, blond hair streaming and shining in the sun, skin bared.

He had the sharpest urge to burnish the shine off that fantasy image of her with the grip of fist over flesh.

He reminded his body that all they were doing was driving to a pretty spot for a picnic and some swimming, but that didn’t seem to help with how tight he was strung.

So he made himself think of a fight he’d had once with Dee. She’d had a new bathing suit and he hadn’t even noticed. She’d cried and said he didn’t see her anymore, not like
that
. And he’d denied and soothed, but when she’d stopped crying and they’d moved on to other things, he’d felt dirty, like he’d lied. Because the truth was, he knew exactly what she meant and
she was right.
He
didn’t
see her anymore, not like that.

That was the flip side of this moment. If he let his mind run away with fantasies about Trina—if he acted on his impulses where she was concerned—they would end up like that. Hurt. Bitter. Dirty.

His head and chest ached. But the truth was, using thoughts of Dee to push away his feelings for Trina just wasn’t working as well as it had.

Sometimes it felt like the old Hunter, the one who’d been reckless enough to let himself go with Trina, was trying to break free, and the new Hunter, the cautious, sensible one who wanted to keep her out of harm’s way, was losing the battle.

He flung the curtain aside, toweled himself off hard, and rushed himself through dressing, so the fantasies wouldn’t have time to re-gather.

Or the memories, if that’s what they were.

In the car, the girls were chatty and lighthearted, Trina laughing at their jokes, and it was impossible not to be drawn in. The girls helped, without being asked, to trek the chairs and towels and inflatables they’d picked up at Walmart en route to the beach, and then they flung their cover-ups off and ran pell-mell for the sparkle of the lake.

He tried not to watch out of the corner of his eye as Trina shed her flirty pink cover-up. That stupid barely-there garment had really only made things worse by clinging to her curves and hinting at everything underneath it. Or—well, that was what he’d thought until she took it off.

“Race you to the middle!”

She took off on the inflatable raft, paddling with her hands, and he launched his raft and followed.

Sure. Good idea. You paddle, and I’ll try not to ogle you.
It took superhuman effort. When he was behind her, he couldn’t keep his eyes off the dimples at the base of her spine, or the beginnings of the thoroughly squeezable ass that disappeared into her bikini bottom. And it only got worse when he paddled harder and caught up, because then he had to try really hard to drag his eyes away from the juicy fullness of her breasts spilling over the not-even-particularly-tiny bikini top.

Now here they were, floating in the middle of the lake, and he kept sneaking looks at her in that red bikini and then wishing he hadn’t. The long, smooth slope of her belly, the dip of her navel, the porcelain of her skin. The squeezable, edible, oh-so-fucking-soft-looking thighs…His swim trunks were doing a lousy job of masking his interest.

Not for you, dude.

His body didn’t give a shit about that kind of logic.

He cast another sideways look at her, her eyes closed against the brilliant sun overhead. She looked—peaceful. Happy. For the first time since he’d come home.

And the thirteen-year-old boy in him—or maybe the old Hunter—just had to do it. Had to grab the edge of her float, tip her up, and dump her in the water.

She emerged choking and sputtering from the water, her hair plastered to her face. “Bastard!”

She threw herself on him—which of course must have been his subconscious intention all along. He recognized that as soon as her skin—cool on the surface, but he could feel the heat underneath—slipped along his, satiny and wet. Her breasts were alluringly close to his face; if he sat up and dipped his head, he could have that smooth, wet skin against his lips.

But suddenly he was frozen by a question.

“Did I tip you? Last time we came here?”

He said it low, close to her ear. He didn’t want the girls to hear, because even though they’d paddled off a good distance now, the water carried sound across its surface. They’d taken the news of his lost memory pretty well in stride.
You don’t remember anything?
they’d demanded, and
Will it come back?
but even Clara hadn’t freaked out too badly. He’d never reveal to her how scared
he
was by the crevasses in his mind.

Trina paused in her efforts. “No. You were apparently far less of an asshole before.”

But she was grinning, and she resumed her project of trying to get more of her body on his raft, more of her weight onto him, and it felt so unfuckingbelievably hot, the contact with her skin, the slip and slide of it, the jiggle and bounce of her, that when she called out, “Girls! I need some help here!” he had to flip himself off the raft and into the water before they could come to her aid, because he wasn’t decent viewing with his trunks waving at the sky.