Lean on Me (8 page)

Chapter Nine

The second night with Cassidy at his house was worse than the first. If someone had told him that could happen, Mitch would have moved her into a hotel. Last night she’d made it clear she wasn’t ready for much other than a warm bed without him in it. Accidentally scaring her at the bottom of the stairs probably had something to do with that.

The way his T-shirt fell to the top of her thighs. He could see everything—everything—she hid under there. No underwear. Just a shadow and bare skin and a hint of blond hair. Man, he’d replayed that part of the scene in his head about a million times during the day, only in his version she skipped slipping on the shirt before coming downstairs to him. He didn’t know if she realized the show she’d given him, but he wouldn’t soon forget it.

And those lean legs, so perfect he’d lost the power of speech. It had taken every ounce of will to keep from running his fingers up her thighs and welcoming her to his house the way he burned to do. Despite the sleepless night and cold shower, he went to work and kept his roommate news quiet, which meant ducking Spence and his questions all day. While he was out, Cassidy cleaned and planted flowers in the boxes on his porch. Every surface shined when he walked in the door that night.

The idea was for her to relax and decompress before hitting the work trail again. Now he knew her idea of resting differed from his. But having food on the table when he opened the front door? Yeah, he could get used to that. No wonder Austin enjoyed married life so much. Of course, Carrie didn’t cook, so there might be another reason.

Mitch had never viewed himself as a traditional guy but this was one aspect from his parents’ marriage he could get used to. The seething hatred and quiet wish to be somewhere else were the parts he didn’t want.

Two hours after sharing dish duties he sat on the couch and stared at the television for the second night, this time pretending to watch the football game. The crowd cheered and the announcer’s voice rose in excitement, but Mitch missed it all. None of it went in.

“Do you miss it?” she asked.

He stopped fighting the refusal to look at her. “College?”

She sat curled in a ball in his oversized chair in a crunched-up position only women could manage. The pair of too-big sweatpants and long-sleeved tee swamped her. The ponytail and shiny clean face made her look younger than twenty-seven.

Not that his body got lost on those details. To his way of thinking she was all woman.

He held a pillow on his lap to keep from scaring the shit out of her. His attraction burned through him. He hadn’t even tasted the food she put in front of him at dinner tonight. The relaxed chatter and pretty face had him at two cold showers a day, and it was only day two. By the end of the weekend he’d be begging for mercy and babbling like a fool.

“Football,” she said. “I remember you were going to be a star.”

Part of him was surprised she knew about his athletic career at all. He’d never seen her as a school-spirit type. “I had some talent but I blew out my knee as a sophomore in college. Lost my scholarship for the last two years and had to scramble to get loans to stay in.”

“I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

“You were busy with other things.”

“Still, I’m surprised my mom didn’t say something. She was always a big fan of yours. Of football, in general.” Cassidy leaned her head against the back of the chair. “I think I disappointed her when I skipped cheerleading in favor of climbing. She said she wanted a reason to go to the games without looking like a dirty old woman.”

“It’s not something I talk about.” Ever. His career ended and so did the dream. Rather than obsess, he mentally packed it away and stepped back.

Football had given him a bond with his dad, provided a reason for his parents to cheer for something together. They were good people, and pretty good parents, but a terrible couple. In public they laughed and gushed about their kids. They talked about places they might go some day and smiled with friends. In private, the house creaked from the silence. Dissatisfaction oozed out of mom for not having taken a different road and their dad had long ago hid behind a wealth of guy weekends to escape the house.

Whatever love they once shared, if at all, when they had to get married to cover his mom’s pregnancy with him had long ago burned out. By the time Mitch and Carrie were old enough to pick up the cues, the deep divide was too obvious to ignore. Even now people would talk about their parents and their solid marriage and he had to keep his response to a nod.

“Why?” Cassidy asked.

Lost in his thoughts, he dropped the thread of the conversation. “What?”

Cassidy laced her fingers through the fringe of the pillow his sister Carrie bought for him last Christmas. She called it a throw pillow. The fancy name sounded stupid to him. He called it the perfect size to wedge beneath his shoulders when lying down to watch television.

“Why won’t you talk about it?”

Mitch didn’t pretend confusion. He knew what Cassidy was asking. “Being injured sucked. It ended my football career, and I really wanted one. I wasn’t exactly an academic scholar but I graduated because I wanted to have a job someday.”

“Did you get a hero’s welcome when you came back to Holloway?” She smiled as she said the words.

“Hardly.”

“Really?”

“Trust me. I was there.”

Her fingers froze and her head lifted until her gaze met his. “What are you not saying?”

He shouldn’t be saying anything. None of this shit mattered now. He was a grown man who refused to live through victories of the past. He’d seen friends from school do that, never letting go. It struck him as pathetic. More than anything, he didn’t want to be that guy.

Still, she asked and it festered, so he let it out. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but the town only had enough energy to cheer for one person. The people here put all their hopes on you. My career and future prospects at West Virginia didn’t hit the radar screen.”

She sat straight up. “How is that possible? This town bleeds Mountaineer blood.”

He had to smile at the memory of the university mascot. “Everyone followed along on your climbs. Except me. I stopped listening because the idea of you making your goal when I tanked mine ticked me off.” He shook his head at the memory of what an ass he’d been. “I was a hormonal moron back then, so I apologize.”

In a gentle glide, her stocking feet hit the floor one after the other. “I’m thinking you’ve been holding onto that anger for some time now.”

“I’m not angry.”

“Mitch, come on. At least be honest about it.” She leaned forward with her hands joined in a knot so tight that the blood drained from her fingers. “You have a right to feel cheated. You
were
cheated. The question is if any of that bitterness is aimed at me.”

“Of course not.” It had taken him longer than he wanted to admit, until well after graduation, to realize his frustration revolved around her but had never been aimed at her. “Back then I blamed the coach and the kid on the other team who hit me and the injury that ended my career.”

“That’s probably normal.”

“I doubt it.” He shook his head. “Told you I was a dick. But I got over it. I figured out shit happens and you move on.”

“If I were you, I’d be pissed.”

After thinking about all the ways they were different and throwing them up as excuses not to touch her, he circled around to the one way in which they were very much alike. “I’m not the only one who lost everything to injury. You didn’t stop climbing because you got lazy.”

She sighed. “I didn’t really stop climbing at all.”

“But I thought—”

She got up and moved to the seat next to him on the couch. Their bodies touched from legs to arms as she turned to face him. “The acute altitude sickness came on during the ascent of Broad Peak, my third mountain. I had to come down, wait it out, take meds. I eventually conquered it, but I was so sick. Crazed with a headache and dizziness. Going back up was stupid and unsafe, but I had these sponsors to satisfy.”

He read about the costs associated with climbing. “Money obligations.”

“Exactly. The doctors I saw after assured me it was an aberration. I’d never had any trouble before and had been climbing since I was a teen. Everest was my first of the fourteen-mountain odyssey and had gone okay except for the horrible weather conditions on the descent and the death of two climbers on other teams due to an avalanche. Lhotse was strangely uneventful. Broad Peak came next. Then I tried Annapurna and I thought my lungs would explode.”

“High Altitude Pulmonary Edema.”

She sent him one of those sexy female smiles. “I see you’ve been checking up on me.”

He’d read so much about her he’d started to feel like a stalker. With every new article he mentally insisted it was smart to be armed with information, but the truth was he got sucked in. Her life was this unending feat of endurance and the happiness beaming off her in those photos when she made it back down the climbs unharmed sent a surge of pride through him.

Strong, determined and beautiful. As a female combination, it proved deadly to his self-control.

“The article talked about an increased rate of recurrence and that, coupled with your previous problems, made climbing impossible,” he said, skipping over all the other information he’d filed away about her and all the technical medical stuff.

“Risky, but not impossible.” She ran her fingers through her long hair.

This close he could smell the shampoo and soap on her skin. “Isn’t all climbing risky?”

“Not like this. HAPE can be fatal. I almost died the first time and I couldn’t run that risk again.” She put her hand on his thigh. “Contrary to popular belief, I don’t have a death wish or some need for an adrenaline fix.”

Her touch burned through to his skin. It was as if the jeans weren’t even there. Sexual need punched at him with a hot and hungry need to devour, but so did something else—the strange rightness of sitting there talking with her. Sure, he wanted to crawl all over her, strip her naked and do some of those naughty things the townspeople had accused them of doing, but the buildup, this extended foreplay, wasn’t a bad way to start.

“Then why go up there?” he asked, surprised his voice held steady in light of the thoughts zipping through his mind.

“The need to conquer. The desire to go where so few people go, to do what almost no one can do and to do so with as much control as possible.”

“For that I like my feet on the ground.” That was a huge understatement. Heights scared the piss out of him. He rarely ventured into the loft because of the shaking ladder leading up to it. That was probably the only reason he hadn’t tried to crawl into bed with her already.

“For the record, my feet rarely leave the ground while climbing.” She knocked her shoulder into his as if they were friends sharing a secret. “It’s just that sometimes the ground is at a ninety degree angle to other ground.”

He blocked that image from his head. “But you can’t climb now.”

“I have to be careful of how I go, but I can climb. The condition isn’t much of a risk under eight thousand feet. As for above it, I can climb but choose not to. It’s not an acceptable risk to me because I can’t have a member of my team be responsible for getting me off a mountain.”

He stretched a hand along the back of the couch and let his fingers brush against her soft hair. “Gotta be honest. The whole sport doesn’t make much sense to me. I actually never viewed it as a sport, because to me sports require scoring, but from what I’ve read it’s more intense than anything else. Certainly one of the most dangerous things out there.”

“Football was risky. I’ve seen you drive that tractor and I’m telling you that’s risky. You’re scary behind the wheel.”

He decided not to clue her in about the tractor races he’d engaged in with Austin or how they hadn’t happened all that long ago. What was the good of having all that acreage at the nursery if you couldn’t open it up to a race now and then?

“I’m a simple guy. I like work, friends, women and football.”

Her hand shifted higher on his thigh. “In that order?”

The heat level in the room soared. The game faded into the background as a new energy pinged around them. “Women come first. Always.”

“So I’m cramping your style.”

“You are the only woman on my mind right now. Believe me.” Thinking about getting her into bed and keeping her there took up way more of his day than it should.

“I warned you it would be tough to live together.”

A warning he ignored and intended to continue to ignore. “I remain hopeful you’ll come to your senses and seduce me.”

Her finger danced along a faded crease on his jeans. “Only in my dreams.”

The touch felt so right, so…His fingers slipped behind her neck. “What did you say?”

“You think you’re the only one who thinks about it?”

Her smile made a promise that spun straight to his lower half. “I’m obsessed with it.”

She leaned in, her mouth just inches from his. “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a woman.”

“Are you saying we’re going to bring that dream of yours to life?”

“Yes.” She whispered the word against his lips.

* * *

One minute they were talking about unsexy things like altitude sickness and the next his mouth crossed over hers. The kiss scorched through her. She felt steam rise up and circle around them. His groan intensified with the touch of her fingers against the bulge in his jeans.

This was about need and want and nothing but that moment.

For so long her life had been about meeting goals. She pushed out intimacy, lost the simple joy of touching and being touched. Mitch sparked all of that to life again, gave her something she didn’t know she had missed.

If they didn’t move, he’d take her right there. That was fine for later, but the first time she wanted to be spread out on his sheets and unrestrained by furniture or clothing.

When his mouth moved to her neck, she regained the ability to speak. “Let’s go to the bedroom.”

“Mine.”

She wasn’t quite sure what claim he was making as the word vibrated over her collarbone, but she agreed. “Yes.”