‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll burn out?’ I asked. I was drinking coffee now, in a desperate attempt to combat my dizzy head, but it didn’t help. And I was perfectly aware that it was not the wine that had gotten to me this way; it was Alec.
His expression then was something close to sad. Or was it merely fatalistic?
‘I burn out at least three times a month,’ he said, his low voice gruffer than before. ‘Burn-out isn’t relevant. It can’t be. You keep going, because no matter what state you might be in, you’re some of these people’s only hope.’
I looked at my coffee, and my bare fingers clutched around the mug.
‘That sounds terrible.’
‘It’s not.’ He was sitting on the couch opposite me, his arms stretched out along the back. ‘It’s really not. It’s … worth it. Hard and demanding, but no one ever said it would be anything but that. Challenging. But not everyone can do it, and I can. And I think the rewards of that make up for the rest, however hard it is to see them sometimes.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess that when that changes, I’ll stop.’
The fire danced against the grate, and outside, the dark night had grown windy. It bumped against the old house, making the windows jump.
‘How do you recharge in between burn-outs?’ I asked softly, wondering what he saw then, his dark eyes focused on something so far away. Distant. On continents I could hardly imagine. When I thought of Africa I thought of a great big sky, safaris, the cliffs of Cape Town. I had a sense of immensity. I doubted that was what he saw.
‘There’s a beach I like in Namibia,’ he said after a moment. ‘Sometimes I camp there for a few days. Just me and the waves and the occasional seabird.’
‘I hope you’re not responsible for any promotional materials for your clinic.’ I shook my head at him. ‘You’re not exactly selling it.’
He laughed at that, and rubbed his hands over his face, as if scrubbing it clean of whatever dark things lurked within him. If only it were that easy, I thought.
‘It’s been a tough few months,’ he said. His mouth moved into something a little bit too self-deprecating to be a smile. ‘I’m feeling a little more down about things than I usually do, I guess. You’re catching me at a bad time.’
‘Well,’ I said, meeting his gaze and finding it too raw, too much. I looked down again. ‘That’s going around.’
The conversation twisted and turned, from books to politics to war and then back again. Alec told me what it was like to stand in a supermarket for the first time after living in a tiny village in Africa – how that always seemed to be where he felt the culture shock the most. All those options! All that food! We talked our way from food to wine to what it was like to defend idiots like Benjy Stratton from the consequences of their own behaviour.
‘But he deserves to lose his licence,’ Alec argued, as if baffled that there could be another side. Which there wasn’t, really. Except in the technical sense.
‘How I ended up defending drunk drivers is one of life’s great mysteries,’ I told him, as if I were confiding a great secret. ‘I guess it turns out I’m good at it.’
But was it enough to be good at it? Shouldn’t I want more from my career, too? At the moment, tucked up in a Vermont farmhouse a lifetime away from Benjy Stratton and the rest of my over-entitled Rivermark clients, I didn’t want to think about what I should do instead. Something better than DWI cases, I told myself. Which means anything besides DWI cases.
We had moved on to talking about some old friends of ours that neither one of us had seen in years when I let out a huge yawn, surprising myself. Alec sat up and looked over at the clock, and I did too. It was just before midnight. I had to blink and look again, not believing what I saw the first time.
‘Shit,’ I said, completely taken back. ‘I didn’t even notice how late it was. I have to get out of here.’
Alec looked at me for a long moment, and I felt the heat between us swell again, brighter and hotter, like some kind of crescendo. I put my mug down on the coffee table in front of me, very carefully.
‘I have to go,’ I said again. Maybe a little bit desperately.
‘How long is the drive?’ he asked in that quiet, intent way of his that made my stomach clench. ‘Four hours?’
‘Five.’
‘Come on.’ He smiled slightly, and it was like throwing gas on an open flame. ‘Stay.’
Stay.
What a host of images that simple syllable conjured up in my head. Memories mixed with fantasies mixed with entirely too much longing. I felt his mouth against mine again, so hot and hard, and his hands against my face. I remembered the slick thrust of him inside me years ago, the taste of his skin, the way he pinned my hands over my head, grinned down at me, and dared me to match him. And I always had. I sighed, and shifted in my seat, pretending I didn’t know why I suddenly felt so restless. So close to undone.
‘Alec …’ But I couldn’t seem to continue. I didn’t know what I wanted to say.
That was a lie.
But I wasn’t going to say it.
‘I will, of course, make every effort to protect your virtue, Sarah,’ he said, all that laughter in his voice and in his eyes, though he didn’t smile. ‘I’m not a teenage boy.’
He hadn’t been a teenage boy the last time I’d stayed here either, as I recalled, and that hadn’t prevented him from taking me in hot, breathless, heart-stopping silence with my back against the wall and my legs wrapped tight around his waist, his parents sleeping peacefully down the hall as we both managed, somehow, not to scream.
Good lord. Where had that come from?
I could only describe the way he was looking at me then as wolfish, very much as if he was accessing the same memory. Which, I told myself, he wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t. I felt slightly feverish, and told myself I was acting like an idiot. Alec was many things. Annoyingly argumentative. Intense. Dedicated to his pet causes in ways I didn’t believe he would ever be devoted to people. He was endlessly fascinating to me, still. But that didn’t make him psychic.
‘Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve,’ I pointed out. As if that were either relevant or necessary for us to note. That crook of his mouth only deepened.
‘Which is why you shouldn’t drive off in the middle of the night, fall asleep at the wheel, and splatter yourself all over I-91,’ he said.
He got to his feet then and stretched, which was really just unfair. It was late and he was gorgeous. Too lean, and far too tanned in the swathes of skin I could see when he raised his arms up over his head like that. He lowered them, bringing my temperature down slightly, and then raked his hands through that wild mess of his hair. It stood about in spikes and looked ridiculous and I wondered how it was possible to want anyone this much.
‘Okay,’ I said, feeling hushed. Reverent. Even scared. But I didn’t want to leave him yet. I knew that was true, if nothing else. ‘I’ll stay. If only to keep myself from becoming roadkill.’
And Alec smiled.
I helped him clean up in the kitchen, and then stood around feeling awkward and somehow obvious while he shut down the house, putting out the fire and locking doors. I crossed my arms over my chest, then stuck my hands in my pockets. I felt like the teenager he’d assured me he wasn’t. He led me up the stairs to the bedrooms, and I was sure I could hear my heart pounding like a kettledrum as we walked – so loud that I thought he could probably hear it too. If he did, he was polite enough not to mention it.
The upstairs of the farmhouse retained its original flavour – the rooms weren’t huge, but cosy, and the halls were uneven and tight. It was hard to remind myself why all of this was a bad idea when the cold wind howled outside and I was standing in a tiny, breathless space with Alec, who seemed to be entirely focused on acting like the perfect host. I stood in the doorway of the cheerful yellow guest room and he handed me a small stack of sage-green towels from the nearby linen closet that squealed in protest when he opened and closed the door. Which was pretty much how I felt. I gri
pped onto the soft towels as if they were life rafts and I’d suddenly found myself adrift on the high seas.
For absolutely no reason at all, except maybe to torture me, he lifted his hands high over my head and braced them on the doorjamb above me. So he could look down at me from that delicious and inappropriate angle. So he could mess with my head. So he could make it all that much worse.
I could have stepped back, further into the room.
I didn’t.
‘I don’t know if you remember the bathroom’s down there,’ he said, nodding toward the other side of the small hallway. ‘And I’m in there.’
This time he indicated the doorway that was catty-corner to mine. Through it, I could see the pile of his bags at the foot of his bed, the unmistakable reminder that he was not a man who stayed put. I stared down at the stack of towels in my hands.
‘Um,’ I said. I couldn’t seem to banish all the images in my head, of Alec spread out across a bed like a pagan sacrifice for which I would very much like to be the reigning priestess, naked of course, tossing and turning with all of that golden skin on display … Not helpful, I snapped at myself. ‘Thanks,’ I said inadequately and when I looked up at him again, those dark eyes of his were gleaming. With far too much knowledge and wicked delight.
‘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.
14
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 und
erwear. 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.’