And Then Forever (5 page)

T
he B-52s closed out
the night again, and Jillian and Darcy began the cleanup process. Darcy should have been relieved, but she was still stressed by seeing Kincaid, knowing he was so close—too close—to the truth. Some insane part of her was glad to see him, still felt thrilled when he made her smile, while the more sensible half wished he was gone. Because she knew the troubled edge she was dancing around just by talking to him.

“So…Kincaid was here again,” Jillian said.

“It’s a free country. He can go where he wants.”

“And he sat at
your
table, I noticed. Coincidence?” Jillian raised a brow. “I think not.”

Darcy knew Jillian didn’t mean a table within Darcy’s assigned bunch—but the table that she and Kincaid had sat at night after night when they were young. In those days, they’d sat on the same side of the booth, giggling and touching and barely tasting their food. He’d carved their initials into the wood one night, a mark that had stayed all this time. Most nights, she managed to swipe off the table without letting her gaze rest on those letters. But she could still see them in her mind, remember the way she’d curled against him as he whittled the four letters into the wooden surface. Had he realized it was the same table when Whit sat him there tonight? Had Kincaid looked at the letters, remembered etching them with his pocket knife?

“It was a busy night,” Darcy said, as if she didn’t care that Kincaid had sat there. “It was probably the only available table.”

“Uh-huh. Then why did you have Amanda bring him his food?” Jillian said, referencing the third waitress. “Avoiding the great and sexy rich boy again?”

“For one, he’s not so great. And I don’t think he’s sexy. At all.” Someone should really deliver that message to her hormones. They’d been buzzing ever since he’d touched her. One touch, one hand on her wrist, and Darcy had been fantasizing about Kincaid for the rest of her shift.

It was because it had been a long time since she’d had sex. That was all. It wasn’t that the sex with Kincaid had been awesome—okay, so yes, it had been the best sex she’d ever had—it was merely that her vagina wasn’t as smart as her head. She needed to think with her brain, not anything south of her neck.

Darcy bent over and started scrubbing the table in furious circles. “I don’t care about Kincaid Foster. All he did was annoy me tonight.”

Jillian put a hand over Darcy’s. “You’re going to wear a hole in that. Let me finish for you. And you go to Pammy’s bonfire.”

“I’ve got Emma—”

“I’ll go over there and let Nona go home. The munchkin is long overdue for a sleepover with Aunt Jillian anyway.”

“Are you sure?”

Jillian put a hand on Darcy’s shoulder. “You deserve to have a good time once in a while. You’re either working or taking care of Emma. You somehow exist on like three hours of a sleep a day. So yes, I’m sure. You go have fun.”

The thought of hanging out with friends, enjoying a few laughs and a couple beers, sounded like heaven. Jillian was right. It had been ages since Darcy had done that. Maybe then she’d stop focusing on Kincaid and wondering where he was—and when he was going to leave. She could feel like she used to in the days before she worried about her daughter and her paycheck, and controlling millionaires hundreds of miles away. “Thanks, Jillian.”

“No problem. Now, shoo.” She waved toward the door.

A minute later, Darcy had hung up her apron, grabbed some leftover chicken wings from the kitchen, then headed down toward the beach. The orange glow of the bonfire and the warm laughter of her friends beckoned her forward. Darcy sped up her steps, and slipped into the circle. “I brought wings!”

There was a resounding cheer, a number of voices calling out Darcy’s name in a mixture of surprise and joy, and then a few shuffling of bodies to make room for Darcy on a long piece of driftwood serving as a bench. She passed off the box of wings, accepted a beer, then raised it in a toast as her gaze skipped around the circle. “Sorry I’m so late, guys.”

“No problem,” Pammy said. “You didn’t miss anything except for Joey making too many fart jokes.”

That let loose a round of laughs. Darcy leaned back and took a long swig from the beer. As she did, she saw Kincaid out of the corner of her eye. Damn it. Pam must have invited him when she was at The Love Shack earlier. He was everywhere Darcy was, as if the Guy Upstairs was forcing her to deal with the past.

In the dark, his eyes were wide and mysterious, but there was no mistaking that they were watching her. He held a beer between two fingers, his elbows propped on his knees. The top two buttons on his shirt were undone, the sleeves rolled up, his hair a little mussed from the breeze off the water. Coupled with the warm light of the fire dancing off his features, he looked sexy as hell, and all her very good reasons for avoiding him seemed to flit away.   

She joked with the others, drank a couple beers, roasted a hot dog, but all the time, she was acutely aware of Kincaid, just a few feet away. She’d send sidelong glances his way, and once, twice, she caught him looking at her, too.

The same quiver that she’d felt the first time she met him rippled through her belly. Her skin tingled with awareness. Paired with the simmering desire of a woman who knew how good sex with Kincaid would be, a wave of desire began to build inside her. She wanted him to move closer, to brush up against her in the dark, then trail kisses down her neck, along the curve of her breasts…

You always make rash decisions, Darcy,
her mother used to say.
Reacting on gut instead of smarts. One of these days, it’s going to get you into trouble.

That pretty much summed up her entire relationship with Kincaid. Operating on guts instead of smarts. There was no way Darcy wanted to make the same mistake twice.

Damn it. This wasn’t the plan. She dumped out the rest of her beer, then got to her feet. “I’m beat, everyone. I better get home.”

She said her goodbyes, to everyone but Kincaid, then tossed the empty bottle in a recycle bin and started heading down the beach, carrying her cowboy boots. The cool sand felt nice against her bare feet, and the soft sound of the water whooshing in and out matched her leisurely pace. She wished the walk home would last forever, so she could go on listening to that soothing ocean song.

“Were you just going to leave without saying goodbye?”

Kincaid’s voice slid through her like melted butter. She told herself to keep walking. To not let the deep timbre of Kincaid’s voice stop her. But he said the words with that little tease at the end, the tease she had never been able to resist, because it came attached to his smile, and oh, how she’d loved his smile. How she had missed that smile, the way it would echo in her heart and lighten everything.

Darcy turned. “I said goodbye.”

“To everyone but me.” He closed the distance between them, until nothing more than a few inches separated them.

She could have reached out and touched his chest, or drawn in a breath and caught the scent of his cologne. She wanted to do all of those things, but instead she held her hands by her side.

“I was hurt,” he said, putting a hand over his heart for a moment. “Rejected.”

Darcy scoffed. “You? Hurt? Rejected? I don’t believe it.”

“I’m human, Darcy. I get hurt.” He shifted closer, and the tease dropped from his features. His eyes were dark, filled with mystery. “What happened between us?”

“What, just now? Nothing. I had to go and I—“

“I meant seven years ago. We were good, I thought, really good. And then…it was over.”

She shrugged, as if it was no big deal, as if breaking up with him all those years ago hadn’t been as painful as severing a limb. As if she hadn’t thought about him a hundred thousand times in the years since, and wondered how things would be different if Kincaid had stayed. If she had told him the truth and taken her chances. “It was a long time ago. We were young and stupid.”

“Now we’re older and presumably smarter.” He moved another step closer and settled his hands on her waist. Her body reacted to the touch in an instant, anticipation coiling inside her like a spring. She drew in a breath, watched him do the same. Her fingers itched to touch his chest, to feel the solidness of him beneath her palm. “What’s stopping us now?”

“Maybe I’m not interested.”

“Maybe you’re not.”

But she was finding it hard to breathe with him so close. Her gaze dropped to his mouth, back to his eyes. She’d never stopped wanting Kincaid. Never stopped thinking about him. She thought she should say something clever now. Something that would make him back away, but her usually quick tongue had nothing. Not a single word.

Kincaid raised a hand to her jaw, and when he touched her, it took every ounce of her willpower not to let out a little sigh. He ran his thumb along the delicate edge of her chin, then along her lower lip, his eyes never leaving hers. Heat built between them, fast, insistent, and Darcy found herself moving imperceptibly closer to him, dropping the cowboy boots onto the sand. Wanting, needing to know, to see if he still had that same power over her as he had years ago.

Kincaid leaned in, brushed his lips against hers, asking without asking for more. She opened her mouth to his, and curved into him, her body remembering, craving. He brought both his hands up to cup her face, and she nearly melted. Their kiss was like an old familiar song, warm and sweet, but then his touch shifted and the song became a new one. Layered with nuances and heat. She pressed into him, into his growing erection. It would be so easy, too easy, to take him into the quiet dark space behind the dunes and—

No. That would be a mistake—a mistake she’d already made before, and look where it had landed her. What had changed in seven years? Nothing. Not a damned thing.

Except she had a child now, a child she could lose if she let Kincaid back into her life. One night behind the dunes wasn’t worth that.

Darcy stumbled back, and drew in a deep breath. “What was that?”

“That was me proving to you that we’re both still interested. That what we had seven years ago never really died.” He cocked his head. “Am I wrong?”

“Yes, you’re wrong, Kincaid. Very wrong.” She picked up her boots and hurried back down the beach, half hoping he’d run after her and half praying he wouldn’t.

*~*~*

A
bby lay in the
old twin oak bed, drawing in a long, deep breath. She had one hand on her stomach, another on her heart, willing the panic to ease. The baby kicked against her palm, as if saying,
hey, you’re keeping me awake
. Abby rubbed against the baby’s foot, and tried again to slow her racing pulse.

Gordon wasn’t here. He wasn’t on the island. He didn’t know where she was, and if there was a God in heaven, he wouldn’t come looking for her. He would just accept what she had written in the note she’d left on the kitchen table and let her go.

Oh, how Abby wanted to believe that. Like the fairy tales the nanny had read to her every night, stories of brave knights on white horses and helpless damsels who found everlasting happiness. But real life was not a fairy tale and Gordon Cochran III was not a man who let anything go.

Especially her.

He would come, and there would be a reckoning. Abby knew that as well as she knew her own name. She could only hope it was after the baby was born.

Abby swung her feet over the side of the bed and slipped into a pair of cheap slippers she’d picked up at a Walmart on the mainland—a stop her father would have been horrified at. Going to the discount superstore had been weirdly liberating as she filled a cart with everything she needed for a new life, not caring one whit about labels or designers or what anyone would think. Abby padded out to the kitchen. Maybe a glass of water would help, or some fresh air, or just a change of scenery.

She poured a glass of water, then slipped out the back door and onto the porch, leaving the light off so she could soak up the night sky, in all its ebony beauty. In the distance, the moon sparkled on the ocean, reflecting a thousand diamonds in the inky water. A bell clanged from somewhere offshore, and the waves whispered their shush-shush song against the sand.

God, how she loved this place. She always had. Her mother had complained, from the minute her Manolos met the dock, that Fortune’s Island was a far cry from the Hamptons. She’d berated the lack of good help, the overabundance of sunny days, pretty much anything that would get her off the island and back to the society world where she bloomed best. Abby’s father seemed like he enjoyed the quiet of Fortune’s Island, the sense of escape from the busy day-to-day of his law firm. But he rarely spent more than a day or two here, leaving his wife and kids to make their own vacation. Their mother would feign a migraine and take to her bed until the stay was over, while Abby and Kincaid explored the island. Abby had found peace here, then. Maybe she would again.

Abby drew in another breath, a second, a third, closing her eyes and concentrating on the ocean’s gentle song. It would all be okay. She would be okay, and so would her baby.

“You all right?”