I fought to speak. To explain my presence somehow, in a way that played down the obvious crazy and possibly made some kind of sense out of it. But my mind was a blank.
He stopped right in front of me, and I had to tilt my head back to look at him. He was still tall enough to make my heart beat a little faster, and he looked down at me as if I was a ghost. But not the kind of ghost I’d thought I was before, in Rivermark. Not like that at all. He looked at me as if I were something he’d gone to the trouble to conjure up himself, just him and perhaps his Ouija board, and now here I was, like a spell that had finally worked the way it was supposed to.
Hours could have passed. Ages. I was aware only of him, and my pulse racketing through my body, and the way his dark eyes seemed to kick up fires inside me that I didn’t want to admit could still burn at all, much less so hot. So high and bright.
Say something! I ordered myself desperately. Anything!
But his serious mouth crooked up in the corner, and his dark eyes gleamed. And I could no more have spoken then than I could have leapt straight into the air and flown around the moon that was visible despite the daylight, high up over the nearest tree. I didn’t even want to speak, suddenly. I didn’t want to do anything but this, this drinking him in as if I were so terribly thirsty, unaware that there was a world around us.
‘Took you long enough,’ Alec said, in the voice I remembered, rough and soft all at once, that always hit me in places that made me blush.
Which I did. I couldn’t seem to help it. Or, to be honest, care too much that I was turning red beneath his scrutiny.
And then he reached over, slid his hand over my jaw and into my hair with a gentle intent, tugged me closer, and kissed me.
12
It was as if no time had passed at all.
He kissed me as if we were both drowning and he was air, and I fell into him, against him, and didn’t even try to swim.
I just fell.
He tasted the way he always had, so male and right and Alec. My hands looped around his neck, skin touching skin, and it was a revelation. I moved closer to him without knowing I meant to do it. But I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t stop. He angled his mouth against mine, making it all that much hotter. Deeper.
And I felt it again. The way the world rocked and tilted, knocking me off-balance. Right off my feet, even as he held me against him with such ease. As if I belonged there.
It had always been like this. Heat. Fire. All that impossible light. And no hope at all of balance.
Finally, I pulled away, appalled at myself. I couldn’t lie to myself, either, though I wanted to – I hadn’t stood there passively, allowing him to kiss me. Nor had I pushed him away. I’d been in it. Too in it, really. I’d kissed him back as if I wasn’t, in fact, married to someone else. Who cared what the extenuating circumstances were? I’d ceded the moral high ground, and I hadn’t even paused for the scantest second to consider the ramifications of that.
Even so, it was harder than it should have been to pull my hands away from the heat of his skin. He didn’t pretend it was easy either; his thumb traced a pattern across my cheek, then grazed along the curve of my lip, before he dropped his hand to his side.
‘Well,’ I said. My voice sounded absurd against the quiet, in the wake of all that wild, roaring passion that still hummed through me. Too high. Too foolish. ‘Um. Hi.’
He let out a breath that became a kind of laugh, and his eyes crinkled up in the corners, though he didn’t quite smile. Not serious, dedicated Alec. Not even now. He scraped his mess of hair back from his face with one hand, and looked at me from those clever eyes of his that saw far more than their share. I felt my face redden. Again. Still. I felt my whole body react to him, so predictably, as if that damned gaze of his was hotwired directly into my flesh and could turn me on like a gas fire. I could feel it in my breasts. My sex. My heart as it knocked hard against my chest.
‘Come on,’ he said, indicating the farmhouse on the rise above us with a tilt of his head, with no hint that he was as affected as I was. And with that familiar air of command and the expectation of obedience that was so much a part of the big, bad, Dr Frasier I remembered. ‘It’s cold.’
I stared at him, nonplussed. And off-balance, again. As usual. As ever. I’d always told myself that if I kept being knocked off-balance like this, that eventually he’d knock me back into balance, surely. But it had never happened.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?’ I demanded. ‘Aren’t you going to point out that it’s bat-shit crazy to show up at your parents’ house, a couple of days before Christmas, after more than seven years of radio silence?’
‘I could,’ he said, his voice that lazy, amused drawl that had always had this same effect on me – that had always made my limbs a bit too heavy and my breath a bit too shallow. ‘But you just did it for me.’
It should have felt like a slap. But instead, I smiled. Almost in spite of myself.
We walked back up the road together. I felt … too big. As if my clothes didn’t fit. As if I was bloated up, expanded, and everything might just burst from the pressure. It was uncomfortable. It made me feel panicky. It made me want to forget about all of this. It made me want to climb back in the car and run away from here, from him, before I really made a mistake. A bigger one.
But the only thing crazier than driving for five hours on the twenty-third of December to see an ex-boyfriend you hadn’t so much as spoken to in over seven years was, I was all too aware, seeing that ex-boyfriend, kissing him like he was my long-lost love, and then leaping back in my car and driving off like a madwoman ten minutes later.
So I followed him into the house instead. He pulled off his boots and coat in the little entryway, and I followed suit. Then, our feet clad only in socks, we made our way across the honey-coloured wooden floors in the friendly family room to the huge kitchen. Something about being in my socks made me feel vulnerable, somehow. As if my shoes were defensive weapons I’d handed over without adequately considering the ways in which I might need them. As if my toes being visible in the middle of winter would tell him things I didn’t want him to know.
He moved around the kitchen with that efficiency and grace that I discovered I still found entirely too attractive. I settled myself gingerly on one of the stools next to the granite counter at the kitchen island. He poured me a big mug of coffee and then slapped down a carton of hazelnut creamer beside it, without asking or even really looking at me. When he brought over his own mug and leaned against the counter across from me, he also slid a packet of sweetener and a spoon over my way.
I stared at all this evidence that he remembered exactly how I liked my coffee, and that he was as sure of himself as ever, and I wanted nothing to do with the strange set of internal explosions that detonated in response. I pressed my lips together, as if I were bracing myself, or afraid of what I might say without meaning to speak, and then went about adding the creamer and sweetener.
‘Where are your parents?’ I asked. There was so much of a ruckus inside me that I’d forgotten it was completely silent in the house, and my voice sounded much too loud. Almost brash. I let my spoon clank against the side of my mug as if that could divert attention from the echo of my question.
‘Florida.’ He cupped his own mug in his hands, but he still looked at me with those dark, knowing eyes. He’d never been much for small talk, as I recalled. Too busy being brilliant and focused and completely impossible. I should have hated that. I never had.
‘And what about your sister?’ I realized as I asked it that I probably shouldn’t have. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was open the conversation with sisters. It could only lead to Carolyn and her numerous trespasses against me, which was not a subject I wanted to dive right into with anyone. Much less Alec.
‘Still lives here in the village. Happily, as far as I can tell.’
He looked at me. He waited. He was, I could see, not at all fooled by this little sidebar i
nto the pleasantries. I told myself I found that irritating.
‘And saving the world?’ I asked, aware that my voice was a little strained, then. ‘How’s that going?’
He smirked then, in his smart-assed way. It was an edgy sort of curve of his mouth that did things to my equilibrium. Dangerous things.
‘Brooke told me you were married a few years back,’ he said, instead of answering my question. Cutting to the chase, I supposed, and who could blame him? ‘I guess I forgot that when I saw you. I’m sorry if I overstepped any boundaries.’
He couldn’t have sounded less sorry if he’d tried. Or more arrogant. Two things which should have made me find him wholly unattractive, yet did not. And I was fairly sure he knew it.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said dryly. ‘I assumed you greet everyone that way these days, since you’re so warm and fuzzy. The postman, the guy who bags your groceries …’
‘I’m a popular guy,’ he agreed, his eyes gleaming, his tone sardonic.
The moment pulled taut between us. I could feel the tension of it, shimmering between us and resonating deep within me. I didn’t want to feel this. This wasn’t why I’d come here. I’d wanted to talk to him, remember him. Not relive him. Didn’t I?
‘My marriage is in a tricky place,’ I blurted out, succumbing to Alec’s kind of kamikaze truth-telling within minutes, like an amateur. ‘I’m kind of investigating how I made the choices I did, how I came to this particular point in my life, and how it all ended up this way. Where it is now, I mean.’
‘Is that like following breadcrumbs through the woods?’ he asked in a mild tone that didn’t fool me at all. ‘Doesn’t that usually end up with someone’s head in the oven?’
‘Happily, you’re a doctor,’ I said, smiling thinly at him. ‘I’m sure we’ll both be safe.’
‘Depends on your definition of safe,’ he replied. But I must have given him a look, because he shifted, his dark eyes flashing and his mouth taking on that sardonic cast. ‘What clues did you follow to my particular gingerbread house? Or is this a different fairy tale altogether?’
‘I’m trying to answer a few questions for myself, that’s all,’ I assured him. ‘Like, why did I choose the kind of law I practise? Why did I choose to live in one place rather than another? No trolls under the bridge to worry about.’
‘Not for me, anyway.’
The way he looked at me then made me wish there was more space between us – more room to breathe. I tried to keep my expression smooth, but it wasn’t easy when he looked at me like that, so darkly arrogant and amused in some way I imagined I wouldn’t like.
‘Why did you choose to work in a corporate law firm rather than come with me to Africa?’ he asked. I stared at him. He stared back, giving no quarter, his dark gaze like a weapon, and then his brows arched. ‘For example.’
‘For example,’ I agreed. My throat felt scraped dry.
I took a sip of the perfect coffee, exactly how I loved it, and wondered if he could see how hard my pulse was pounding, how close to dizzy I felt, that I was simply throwing all these things on the table in front of him as if they didn’t mean anything to me. As if it didn’t mortally wound me, on some level, to admit to Alec of all people that the man who I’d decided was much better for me than he was maybe wasn’t so great after all. As if this really were a deposition and I the cool, calm, collected lawyer I wished I’d ever been around him.
‘I think if I could answer that question in particular,’ he said, his eyes never leaving mine, daring me to look away from him, a note of steel in his voice, ‘if I’d ever been able to answer it, you wouldn’t have to be asking it now.’
That went through me hard, leaving marks. I sat back on the stool, as far back as I could without falling off onto the floor, and wondered what the hell I’d been smoking when I’d decided this was a good idea. But I hadn’t decided so much as reacted, had I? Carolyn had made me angry again – the scene I’d inadvertently interrupted had simply hurt more than I’d been able to handle – and I’d leapt headlong into this. Maybe someday I would learn the value of calm, cool reflection before action where this man was concerned. I could only dream.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he said instead of elaborating on anything. Instead of following any of the unspoken pieces of our old relationship that hovered around us now down into their various dark places. Another man might have sounded sweetly nostalgic when he said something like that. But not Alec. He sounded entirely too sure of himself, as ever. And with that crack of temper beneath it. His eyes gleamed, as if he could read my mind. ‘I mean that.’
The chaos inside me reached some kind of boiling point then, and I couldn’t take it. I slid off the stool and onto my feet, wincing slightly when they slapped against the floor with far more force than I’d intended.
‘This is so crazy,’ I said, shaking my head as if I could shrug this all off. Or rewind, somehow, until I was sitting quietly in my house and had never leapt in the car to come here. ‘I’ve gone completely nuts, haven’t I?’ As if this was some silly whim, some funny story I could tell my friends later while howling with laughter about the wackiness of the adventure, the madcap hilarity. Instead of what it really was, which was a colossal and potentially very painful mistake. ‘I think maybe I need to seek out some psychiatric help, not an ex-boyfriend. Wrong kind of doctor, ha ha … I am so sorry. I should never have come up here and tried to force you into this—’
‘Sarah.’
And I stopped talking.
Because oh, the way he said my name. The way it sounded in his mouth.
It had always been like this. He had always managed to make such a simple, ordinary name sound like some kind of complicated melody, even when he said it like he did then. Like an order he expected me to obey.
‘You didn’t drive all the way up here to run out the door the moment things get a little tense.’ He shrugged in that supremely unconcerned, masculine way of his that simultaneously annoyed me and made me wish … all kinds of things I refused to acknowledge. ‘Did you?’
So challenging. With a hint of impatience, too. Like he was a little bit bored and had to be in surgery five minutes ago and how dare I hold him up with my waffling? There was clearly something wrong with me that I found that kind of endearing.
‘Maybe I did,’ I said.
‘Then you should have done it years ago,’ he said in that same offhand, just this side of openly mocking way, ‘so we could be past this shit by now.’
Because Alec never cared if things got too intense, too dark, too anything. In fact, he encouraged it. He only insisted that it all be honest. If that sounded easy, it wasn’t. It was easy to be honest about whether or not you liked white chocolate – that was a yes or no question. It was more complicated when the kind of honesty he wanted was the kind you hid from inside yourself. But I’d known that, hadn’t I?
I breathed in. Out. I let the riot inside settle. I blinked back the heat threatening to spill from the backs of my eyes.
‘I couldn’t have come years ago, unfortunately,’ I heard myself say, in such a matter-of-fact, scarily precise sort of way. ‘Years ago, I thought I was happily married. Years ago, I had yet to walk in on my husband having sex with my sister. So.’
Alec looked at me for what felt like a long time. I stared back, not at all comfortable with the things I worried he could see, but what was the point of hiding them? I’d already showed my hand. There was no appearing out of nowhere all these years later and then trying to be cagey.
He straightened from the counter eventually, and wordlessly motioned for me to precede him into the big family room. I did, happy to have a little break from all of that intense scrutiny. I took in the high, exposed beams and the large fireplace dominating the far wall. The happy art, the warm colours. I set my coffee on the nearest table and sat down in one of the comfortable-looking armchairs, curling my legs up beneath me. I watched as he threw some logs into the fire and quickly, competently, got a blaze going
. The man was still so very good with his hands. When he was done, he dusted those capable hands of his off on his jeans and threw himself down on the couch near my chair.
‘Are you going to stop staring at me in all this ponderous silence?’ I asked. His mouth didn’t move, but those dark eyes filled with laughter.
‘I’m adjusting my ego,’ he said, in a tone that suggested he was doing nothing of the kind. And besides, I knew his ego all too well. It was far too impressive and extensive to suffer any minor dents. ‘My fantasies tended to feature you appearing before me because you’d seen the error of your ways, not because you’d seen the error of someone else’s and thought I’d make a good consolation prize.’
‘I take it back.’ I met his gaze and managed to keep from rolling my eyes. ‘I think I prefer the ponderous silence, thank you.’
‘I’m glad you felt you could come here,’ he said after a moment, and it was the kindness threaded into his usually darker tone that killed me.
I knew he meant it. I knew that even if he was taking some measure of satisfaction in the state of my marriage, as anyone would, he also meant what he said or he wouldn’t have said it at all. That was Alec in a nutshell. I’d never known him to lie. About anything. Not to be polite and not even when it might have helped him out of a tough spot. Not ever.
And for some reason, the fact that he was still so completely and unassailably him, so ornery and beautiful and arrogant and kind, just as he’d been all those years ago, when I wasn’t at all sure what was left of me, made that great sadness I’d been so determined to deny well up inside of me. It was like a flash flood of sensation, washing through me and over me until, to my absolute horror, I started to cry. And cry.