Can't Help Falling (19 page)

She sent a silent prayer of thanks up for their old-fashioned no-sleepovers thing. At least she wouldn't have to deal with loud make-up sex on top of everything else.

“What's the everything else?”

Pure reflexes kicked in and she spun around, her leg lashing out and sweeping the person behind her off their feet.

They went down with an oomph. A streak of orange streamed across her vision, confirming the voice she'd identified a split second after she'd kicked him. Peter hit the recycling bin Emelia had put down earlier, halfway through taking it outside. Cans and bottles rolled everywhere.

“Are you an actual ninja?” Peter offered up his question from where he lay splayed on the wooden floor.

“Oh my gosh.” Emelia put her palm to her thundering chest and sucked in a couple of gulps of air. “Do you want to give me a heart attack?” Oh, wow. This was not good. “Your shoulder! Did you land on it? Is it okay?

She was going to be the girl who'd destroyed whatever big
comeback dreams he still had. She had to remember Oxford wasn't LA. And she was just a charity fund-raiser. Not a tabloid reporter who regularly received death threats.

“It's fine.” He sucked in a breath as he rotated it. “Well, no worse than it was before you floored me anyway.”

Well, at least there was that. To buy herself a few seconds, Emelia crouched down. Righting the bin, she picked up a couple of cans and bottles, tossing them back in.

“I'm sorry.” He at least had the decency to look sheepish. He pushed his torso up off the floor, then levered himself onto his feet so he was crouching. “Jackson left his wallet in my car. I was going to just put it on the table and text him, but then you came out . . . well, more like backed out . . . and I didn't want you to turn around and just find me standing here.”

“Yeah, because that would've been so much less terrifying than what you did.” She reached for a bottle just as he did, both of their hands grasping it. She let go, her gaze moving up his broad chest.

“Sorry.” His mouth quirked, like he was struggling to contain laughter, which made her review the last few minutes.

She felt the burn starting at the end of her feet and working up her body. “I said my last thought aloud, didn't I?” She must've. Because she distinctly recalled his asking what the everything else was.

The quirk broke into a grin as he stood. “You did.”

Wow. That wasn't embarrassing at all. And now they were both staring at each other thinking about make-up sex. Awkward.

“So . . .” She cleared her throat. She tried to work out where to go from here. Then busied herself trying to pick up the nearest pieces of trash.

“What happened?”
Emelia glanced over her shoulder to see that the commotion had even jolted the lovebirds out of their canoodling.

Peter stood. “I made the mistake of giving Emelia a fright. Didn't realize she was a ninja.”

Emelia put her hands up. “Just a few self-defense classes.” She preferred to keep her martial arts abilities to herself.

Jackson let out a low whistle as Allie picked up the last couple of bottles by her feet and added them to the bin. “Those must've been some classes.”

Peter held out Jackson's wallet. “Don't say I've never put my body on the line for you. You forgot this.”

Jackson took it and stuffed it in his jeans pocket. “Thanks. We were just going to head out and grab something to eat. We'll see you guys later.” The front door opened, then shut, and they were gone, leaving her and Peter alone.

Emelia went for the first thing she thought of to fill the silence. “Would you like coffee? Or tea?” She had no idea what it was with the British and their tea. Almost everyone she'd met drank so much of the stuff, it might as well have been in an IV line.

Then she blinked, realizing she'd just asked a guy she was crazy attracted to to stay. Late at night. With no one else there. She never would have done that back home. Not in a second. “So, um, how about we talk about the cricket?”

O
ne second he'd been mesmerized by the sight of Emelia backing out of the living area muttering under her breath. The next he'd been on his back, winded. Thank goodness he'd
managed to instinctively twist himself to cushion his shoulder from the worst of the blow. He'd only just liberated it from the sling.

Put on his butt by a girl. Not that he necessarily had an issue with that. Rowing, he'd met a lot of girls who could beat most guys arm wrestling just using their pinkies. But it was like she hadn't even tried. The words were barely out of his mouth before he'd been staring at the ceiling. And he wasn't a small guy.

He watched the ninja out of the corner of his eye as she put something in the microwave, then turned and poured tea into one cup and hot water into a second. Self-defense classes. Huh. There was no chance she'd learned that move from a course at the Y.

There was more to this girl than met the eye. And his eyes already liked what they saw. A lot. Peter blew out a puff of air. What was he thinking?

“Milk?” From the way Emelia said it, it wasn't the first time she'd asked.

“Um, yes, thanks. Just a little.”

“Sugar?”

Did he take sugar? With her staring expectantly at him like that, he couldn't remember. “No. Thanks.”

She doctored his cup and then carried them over. “Sorry if it's no good. I know how seriously your country takes your tea.” She placed her cup on the coffee table, leaned over and put his in front of him, then stepped back and settled into the other end of the couch. If he reached out and moved over slightly, he could run his fingers through her gorgeous wavy hair. It was loose, spilling over her shoulders. The last few times he'd
seen her, it had been in a ponytail. He liked it this way a whole lot more.

He reined himself in, kept his hands busy picking up his cup and taking a sip. It was bad. Too weak. How long had she steeped it for, like thirty seconds? And not enough milk.

“Okay?” Emelia was watching him over the rim of her cup.

“Great. Thanks.” He put the cup down. Hoped he could avoid having to drink all of it. “So, how would next Sunday work for you to go and look at this potential ball venue? We could go around lunchtime. I've got church in the morning.” He watched her closely to see what her reaction was to his use of the C-word again. A small foolish part of him hoped that she might want to join him.

“Okay. Sounds good. What time does church finish?” There wasn't any interest, but it also wasn't the allergic reaction he'd gotten the first time, so he'd take it.

“About eleven. I'll pick you up at twelve.” He lifted his tea up again, gave it another try. Still horrid.

“Why doesn't Jackson stay over?” Emelia took a tentative sip of her drink.

Tea sloshed over the rim of his cup, searing the top side of his finger. He'd expected the question about as much as he'd anticipated her sweeping kick. “Um, I think they're waiting until they're married.”

“To . . . ?”

Was she really going to make him say it?

Then it connected. “Oh. Wow. Really? That's, um, different.” Her mouth said “different.” Her face said “weird.” “Crazy.” “Unbelievable.” “But they're so . . . so . . .”

“All over each other.”

She grinned. “Understatement of the year.” He watched
thoughts shift her expression as she pondered it. “But they're so . . . he's so . . . okay, sorry, this is a weird conversation. I just didn't realize people like them existed. Especially . . .”

He could practically see what she was thinking. People who were smart. Normal. Ridiculously good-looking. In her world, the only people who saved themselves for marriage were probably losers who didn't have any other choice.

“Are you like them too?” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Sorry. Don't answer that. Right. I'm going to stop talking now.” She leaned over and took a huge gulp of her drink.

Peter started laughing. He couldn't help it. The girl looked like a paleontologist who'd just stumbled over a living dinosaur. Then the scent of singed air made him pause. Something was burning. He put his drink down and stood up. “What's that smell?”

“Smell?” Emelia looked around, then wrinkled her nose as well. Her hand flew to her mouth. “The popcorn!”

Slamming her cup onto the coffee table, she jumped off the couch and sprinted toward the kitchen. Peter strode after her, almost colliding into her when she stopped in front of the microwave. “Fire!”

Sure enough, inside the microwave a fireball rotated, the flames devouring what had once been a popcorn bag. Wow. The little boy inside who had once aspired to work in pyrotechnics was momentarily entranced.

The black smoke coming out the side was a bit concerning though.

The next thing he knew, Emelia had thrown the back door open, ripped the microwave's cord out of the socket, and picked it up off the counter.

“Wait . . . no—”
But he was too late, she was already running with it out the back door. He ran after her, just in time to see her somehow launch the white box so it flew through the air before landing with a loud crack on the cobblestones outside, flipping over once and coming to rest on its back.

They both just stood there, watching the remaining flames flicker behind the now-cracked door.

Emelia peeked up at him from under long lashes, a nearby streetlight casting a dim halo over her. “So, um, maybe a little overdramatic?”

Peter couldn't help but grin back. “Well, I was just going to turn it off so the fan stopped feeding the fire, but that worked too. How long did you put it on for, Smoky?”

Emelia wrinkled her nose. “I meant to set it for three minutes but I must've set it for thirty by mistake. Guess I'm going to have to go buy Allie a new microwave.”

In the sad, rectangular box, the last of the flames had dimmed to embers. Even outside in the almost dark, it was clear there was no resuscitating it. The smell of smoke still lingered in the air. “At least it went out in style. Not many microwaves can claim an ending like that.” He walked toward it and started to pick it up, but the moment he attempted to lift it off the ground, his shoulder told him to think again.

“What's the prognosis?”

Emelia spoke from behind him as he let it go and stood back up.

“Unclear. No more rowing for a while, that's for sure.” When he'd been forced to confess to Kevin what he'd done he'd thought his physio was going to clock him. And he didn't
blame him. Months of rehab work out the window. He wanted to clock himself.

“Well, for what it's worth, the few seconds I did see of you on that erg were pretty impressive.” Emelia stepped around him and scooped the appliance off the ground. Turning around, she carried it a few feet and set it against the side of the house next to the rubbish bin. He felt so useless not being able to even perform a simple task like that.

He blew out a breath. Not wanting to remember how, for a few minutes, it had felt like somehow the miraculous had happened. Maybe his shoulder had completely healed. A blissful few hundred seconds of feeling the burn again in his legs, lungs, and arms.

“Sabine mentioned you want to make a comeback.” It wasn't a question.

Peter started at the unexpected mention of his ex. “Yes.”

“Is it possible? With your shoulder?” The question was tentative, as if she knew how much just hearing the words hurt.

“It has to be.” He rubbed his hand along the bristles that covered his jawline. His shoulder couldn't even manage a decent shave at the moment. “I need to do it for my cousin. She was my biggest cheerleader. Even on the worst day, she never stopped believing that I would be able to row again at an elite level.”

“What happened to her?” Emelia dusted her hands off as she approached him. Somehow she'd gotten a smudge of dirt across her cheekbone.

“What do you mean?” Peter shuffled on his feet.

“You said ‘never stopped.' Past tense.”

Nothing got past this girl. “She died. Last year.”

“I'm sorry.”

Peter tried to shove the guilt down. He hadn't been there for Anita, but maybe he could be there for this feisty, independent girl with professional deflection skills. Something in his gut told him she'd spent a lot of her life having to fend for herself. “What about you? What brought you to Oxford?”

Emelia shrugged and wrapped her arms around herself. “I'm not nearly as interesting as you. No Olympic aspirations for me.” She gestured to the door. “It's cold out here. We should go back inside.”

Peter reached out, catching her elbow as she started to move past him. “Any girl who can put me on my backside when I don't even see it coming is pretty much the most interesting one I've ever met. Besides, you were right. I don't know much about you that matters. And I would really like to.” Even in the darkness, he could see the wariness in her eyes. “Please.”

She studied him for a second, as if weighing something. “Starting over.”

What? “Sorry?”

“That's what brought me to Oxford. I made a huge mistake. I came here to try to start over. But then that's never really possible, is it? Because wherever you go, you're still there. You can never escape yourself.”

Her voice was tinged with resignation and hurt. She looked at him as if hoping he would be able to tell her she was wrong, but knowing he couldn't. Especially not when that pretty much captured how he'd felt ever since Anita died.

Some days it took everything he had not to just knock back
another Oxy to try to escape the condemnation ringing in his own head. And that was while clinging to the knowledge that God still had a plan. Even if he couldn't see any of it. Emelia didn't even have that to hang on to.

He didn't know what to say, but he had to say something. He could already see her expression starting to close, as if she'd realized she'd said too much. “Em—”