Never Too Hot (19 page)

Thirty years she’d spent telling herself she was over him. But now … now she knew the truth. Knew it as well as she knew her own face in the mirror. As well as she knew the shape of Josh’s head beneath her hand as she’d stroked his hair as a child so that he could fall back to sleep in the middle of the night after a bad dream.

She’d never gotten over Andrew MacKenzie. And now, here he was, standing on her beach, staring at her as if he’d seen a ghost.

Her hands went to her throat as she tried to remember how to breathe, a thousand insecurities popping up to the surface at once. The ten pounds she’d put on, mostly from her stomach down after having Josh. The lines on her forehead, beside her eyes, around her mouth and on her neck. The gray hairs that had been waging a war with the blond ones and winning without a fight. The wrinkled jeans and old T-shirt she wore in the kitchen, stained from the farmer’s market pesto and tomato sauces she’d made early that morning.

She was tempted to jump into the lake and swim away, but she was going to have to deal with Andrew sometime. Better just to get it over with.

She didn’t hurry down the dock, didn’t put a smile on her face, didn’t have the will for anything so false. But she wouldn’t let herself scowl either, opting for no expression whatsoever, a blank face that she hoped told the man on her beach he meant nothing more to her than any stranger.

Just as slowly, he came toward her, his expensive pressed button-down shirt and slacks suiting him to a T, even as they looked ridiculously out of place on the shore.

Thirty years had taken their toll on him too. His light brown hair was mostly gray and he looked like he hadn’t slept a full night in a decade, but that was all surface stuff. As much as she wished otherwise, Isabel could see the magnificent young man he’d once been. Clearly, he was still in good shape and she guessed he put in the hours in the gym to keep up his physique. His hands were still big, his shoulders still broad.

“Isabel.”

Hearing her name from his lips again made her feet falter beneath her and she had to dig down deep to keep moving.

She lifted her chin, met his gaze straight on. “Andrew.”

“My God, you’re still so beautiful.”

Her breath left her lungs in shock, her mouth opening, closing with the shock of his words.

“You look exactly the same, Isabel.”

“Stop.” She held up both hands, saw they were shaking, shoved them into her pockets. “Don’t.”

She needed to cut him off at the pass before he said anything else, needed to make it clear where the boundaries were.

And that he had no right to any part of her heart.

“I take it you’re here to get Poplar Cove ready for your son’s wedding.”

He didn’t answer for a long moment, his gaze growing even more intense. Finally, he nodded. “Yes. And to help Connor too.” He cleared his throat. “He’s going through a rough patch right now. I need to be here for him.”

Listening to Andrew talk about his son with such love mucked around with her insides. He was too close, close enough to set off a thousand butterflies from their cocoons. And, stupidly, she couldn’t help but note the absence of a wedding ring on his left hand. As if it mattered whether or not he was married.

“But Sam and Connor aren’t the only reason I came back, Izzy.”

She hadn’t heard that nickname in thirty years. Wouldn’t have dreamed of letting anyone call her Izzy. Her ears started ringing, a high-pitched whine. She couldn’t listen to any more of this, not now, not on the dock in front of her house, not in the very place he’d told her he loved her for the very first time.

“Don’t call me that,” she said, but the clouds were drawing a curtain on the sun, turning daylight to night. She felt herself falling, wanted it to be anywhere but into his arms.

ANDREW LIFTED Isabel up and rushed up the beach to her house. Seeing her black out like that had scared him and even though her eyelids were already blinking open, her eyes working to focus on his face, he was still shaken.

“I’m fine,” she tried, but the words sounded weak, utterly unlike her.

“Shh,” he said, instinctively pressing his lips against her forehead. “I’ve got you,” he said as he took the steps up to where he remembered the old master bedroom being as a kid. Pushing the door open with one knee, he saw that Isabel had indeed taken over the room from her parents, had transformed it as her own.

Gently laying her down on the bed, he moved across the room, picked up a blanket from a chest in the corner. He took it back to the bed, covered her with it, sat down on the edge of the mattress and stroked her hair. A thousand emotions rushed through him as he took her in, lying on the bed, her blond hair fanned out on the pillow. There was no point wishing he could have woken up to her like this a thousand times in the past thirty years. But he wished it anyway.

And then she was shifting beneath the blanket, kicking it off to push away from him and sit up against the thick wood headboard, holding her head in her hands.

“What do you want, Andrew?”

He remembered now, she’d never been a shrinking violet, had never been scared to tell him exactly what she thought. But he was worried about the way she’d dropped on the beach, had to make sure she wasn’t ill.

“Are you sick?”

“No.” The word was a sharp bullet from her lips.

“You fainted.”

She massaged her temples. “I have a headache. I didn’t sleep well.” She dropped her hands, glared at him. “Why the hell are you here?”

“Izzy—”

“I already told you not to call me that.”

He took a breath, found his lungs didn’t want to take in—or give—any air.

“I came to say I’m sorry.”

She blinked once, twice, almost as if she were trying to figure out just what game he was playing. “Okay.”

He was stunned by her response. There had to be more there, didn’t there?

But she was already swinging her legs around the opposite side of the bed. He reached out a hand to stop her from leaving.

“No, wait.”

He looked down at where they were touching, felt the same strong surge of electricity that had always been between them. He knew he should pull his hand away, but he just couldn’t let go of her. Not when he’d waited so long to touch her again.

“Please. I need to say these things.”

Her chest was rising and falling fast as she shook off his hand.

“Fine.” She shifted farther from him on the bed. “Go ahead.”

He hadn’t had time to rehearse this, hated trying to win her over without a plan.

“I screwed up, Isabel. I know you already know that, but I’ve wanted you to hear me say it for so long. I don’t know what happened thirty years ago, why I got drunk that night and …”

“And slept with someone else,” she said, quickly finishing his sentence. “Knocked her up and got married.”

He went completely rigid. “You were the one I loved. Always.”

“You should have thought of that before you had sex with her.”

“I was a stupid kid. Full of hormones. I didn’t know what to do with them.”

“Really?” she challenged. “You couldn’t find any new excuses in the past thirty years? Couldn’t think of anything more interesting than how hard up you were because I wouldn’t put out? That’s sad, Andrew. Really sad.”

“I swear to you, if I had known the way it was going to turn our lives upside down, if I could have seen how it was all going to turn out, I never would have done it.”

“You still don’t get it, do you? You think we ended because you got her pregnant, don’t you? Because you had to do the right thing and marry her? You think if it had just been that one night with no consequences, then I would have eventually forgiven you.”

She was up on her knees now on the bed, in the heat of her fury.

“Well you were wrong. You broke my trust, Andrew. I could never have forgiven you, even if there hadn’t been a baby involved.”

He watched helplessly as she got off the bed, went into her closet and came back with a handful of papers. Shoved them into his chest.

“Here. These are yours.” She pointed to the door. “Now get out.”

He looked down, realized he was holding the letters she’d written him, the ones he’d kept in the dresser at Poplar Cove. Desperation tore at him. He couldn’t let her go so easily. Not now that he was finally with her again.

“Don’t you remember how it was for us, Izzy? Don’t you remember that we were going to leave everything behind and sail around the world in a boat that I built? Can’t you remember how much you loved me?”

“Me, me, me!”

She was yelling now, coming at him from across the room, her fists beating his chest. He had to put his hands on her shoulders to hold them both steady.

“I, I, I! Every single thing you’ve said so far has been about you. About how much pain you’re in. About how badly you need forgiveness. About how much you’ve changed. About how I should look at the letters as proof of how much I loved you.”

“Izzy, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“No! No more!” She whirled away from him. “I don’t want to hear anything else. Do you think I should be impressed that you always loved me more than your wife?”

“She’s my ex-wife now.”

“Of course she is.” She sneered. “Don’t you get it that a real man would have accepted the mess he’d made for himself and made the most of it? Don’t you see that a real man would have given every ounce of himself to his wife and kids and made damn sure that he forgot all about some girl he left behind?”

Her words were a hundred-mile-an-hour pitch straight to his gut. He’d tried to be that man, to give himself to his wife and kids, but every year it got harder until one day he just couldn’t do it anymore.

“How about you and I leave our impromptu little reunion at this: You were a cheating bastard. You screwed up. We moved on with our lives. So if it’ll make you feel better, and get you the hell out my life, then I’ll say what you so desperately need to hear. I forgive you. In fact, I simply don’t care about you at all, about whatever midlife crisis you’re having. I’ve got a great life here in Blue Mountain. A life that I’ve built entirely by myself, and I don’t need you coming to town trying to get in the middle of it all.”

She paused, took a couple of shaky breaths, then clasped her hands together in front of her.

“Now if we’re completely done here, I’d very much appreciate if you left.”

“I’ll go,” he said softly, despite the raging drumbeat of his heart at the knowledge of how much she still hated him. “I’ll leave you alone. But first I need to say one more thing.”

Her eyes were stone cold as he said, “I really am sorry for what I did. If I could change the past, I would. But you’re right, I never got over you. And even though I know you think it makes me less of a man, I’ve spent thirty years missing you, Isabel. Thirty years loving you. And regardless of how you feel about me, I’m going to spend the next thirty feeling exactly the same way.”

He walked away, his eyes watering now, a perfect picture of a broken, middle-aged man, as he made his way down the stairs. Ginger came in through Isabel’s front door, exclaiming in surprise when she saw him.

“Oh, I didn’t expect you to be here. I just came to check on—”

She stopped and he knew she must have read everything he was feeling on his face. Must have seen the embarrassing wetness around the edges of his eyes.

She put her hand on his arm. “Is this the first time you’ve seen Isabel since—?”

Jesus, even Connor’s girlfriend knew what a prick his father was.

“She’s upstairs,” was all he could say. “Take care of her. For me.”

“What just happened?”

Isabel looked up from where she was still standing, frozen, as Ginger rushed through the doorway.

“Why was Andrew here?” Ginger asked. “Why was he on the verge of tears?”

“He was about to cry?”

“Yes.”

Isabel was shocked by how close rage was to sorrow. It would be so much easier if she could hold on to to her fury, wrap herself in it like armor.

Time was supposed to heal everything.

Not make it worse.

AFTER TUCKING Isabel into bed with a couple of migraine pills, Ginger walked back to Poplar Cove, incredibly shaken by what she’d just seen.

Andrew and Isabel had obviously loved each other deeply, once upon a time. And then someone had made a mistake, big enough to tear them apart. Before today, Ginger would have assumed thirty years was enough to get over lost love. Now she knew just how wrong she was.

Ginger’s thoughts swung back around to Connor, to loving him. To not knowing where that love would go, if he could ever accept it. If he could ever love her back. And how she’d feel in thirty years if he couldn’t.

Would she be broken like Isabel and Andrew?

Connor was inside the cabin sanding down the logs by hand when she walked in. Her heart skipped a beat as she watched him work for a few quiet moments, the ch-ch-ch of the gritty paper grinding down the old to uncover the new, fresh life hiding beneath.

She made a beeline toward him, pulled him away from the logs to draw his mouth down to hers, kissed him like it had been weeks instead of hours since she’d seen him. Every moment with him was so precious. She wouldn’t take a single second for granted. Not when she’d just seen proof of how quickly it could disappear.

That it could all be gone in an instant.

She should let go of him now, let him get back to work, but she couldn’t. Not yet. She ran one hand through his hair, down the side of his forehead.

“Can you take a break for a few minutes?”

He didn’t smile then, just slid his hand into hers, let her lead him up the stairs to her bedroom. She’d decorated the room unabashedly girly and colorful, and yet he fit so perfectly in the middle of it all. The missing piece to make everything come together, the intensely male balance she hadn’t seen that it needed.

She slipped her hands under his T-shirt, running her hands over the wall of his chest, pulling up the hem to press kisses everywhere her hands roamed.

“Ginger,” he said, her name a raw, rough sound on his lips, “do you have any idea what you do to me? How much I needed you right when you walked in?”

Pulling the shirt up over his head, she leaned her cheek against his chest, listened to the beat of his heart. “If it’s anything like the way I needed you,” she said softly against his skin, “then yeah, I do.”

His hands threaded through her hair, tilted her mouth back up to his as she moved her hands to his jeans, popping the button off, unzipping them and pushing them off his hips so that they dropped to the floor. With her hands, she felt his erection straining the front of his boxer shorts. His tongue slipped into her mouth and she palmed him through the thin fabric, wrapping her hand around his thick length as her tongue met his.

But then he was peeling her fingers off with his own.

“Not like that.” He yanked off her pants, her panties, before pulling her down to the rug. “Like this.”

And then, he was pushing into her, his hips cradled between her thighs, until he was throbbing against her core.

His eyes were dark and hot as he held himself there above her, perfectly still.

“Sweet Ginger,” he whispered before kissing her softly. Tenderly. “I—”

He didn’t say anything more, but he didn’t need to. She could feel how much he cared in the way he kissed her, in the way he was so careful with her, even when he thought he was being rough.

“I know,” she said, and then his mouth was on hers again and they were flying. And afterward as she lay there on the floor beneath him, so perfectly complete, she knew that even if he never actually spoke the word love aloud, at least in that one moment with her on her bedroom floor, he’d felt it.

That night as they ate dinner out on the porch, she had to ask. “How did it go with your father?”

“He wants to help with the cabin.”

“Really? Is that the only reason he gave you for coming here?”

Connor was silent for a long moment. “Sam called him. Told him the news. He was worried.”

The news. That was all he would say about the phone call that had changed his life.

“What did you tell him?”

He lifted his beer, drank from it before answering. “Same thing I’ve been telling everyone.”

“That you’re fine.”

“Yup.”

Ginger bit her tongue in an effort to keep her mouth shut. But after what had just happened upstairs she felt so close to him, cared way too much to keep listening to the same lie over and over.

“Has anyone believed you yet?”

“Say that again.”

His words were cold. Hard. But she couldn’t back down. Not this time.

“You keep saying you’re fine. But you and I both know it isn’t true. You’re not. You couldn’t be. Not yet. Not when everything you ever wanted was just ripped away from you.”

“Jesus,” Connor said, slamming his bottle down on the table so hard a crack appeared in the spot it hit. “What the fuck is wrong with all of you? You’d think it was a crime to look on the bright side. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing? See how the world is my fucking oyster now? Now that firefighting isn’t tying me down, isn’t taking up every goddamned second of my life, shouldn’t I be seeing the endless possibilities?”

“Yes, Connor. Yes to all of that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t mourn first, let it all out. Even if it’s only for five minutes.”

“Don’t you get it?” He shoved away from the table. “I could travel the world, see the seven goddamned wonders. Just keep going until I feel like turning around and starting over.”

“But that’s not what you want,” she challenged him again.

“How the fuck do you know what I want?”

She pushed her chair back, went to him, took his hands in hers. “Because I know you. I know who you really are. And I want to help you. Please let me help you, Connor.”

“Fine. You want to help me? I’ll show you exactly how you can help. The only way you can help.”

He spun her around and shoved her into the logs behind them, pinned her hard against the wall with her wrists gripped tightly in his hands above her head. He was breathing hard and she gasped in stunned surprise at his rough handling of her.

“I know you don’t mean that,” she got out a second before he covered her lips with his in a kiss so rough she tasted blood. She wasn’t sure if it was his or hers, and the twisted truth was that as his mouth devoured hers, she didn’t really care. Not when all she wanted was to keep tangling her tongue against his. Not when she would gladly take her next breath from his lungs.

But a second later he was wrenching his mouth away from hers and tightening his grip on her wrists, hard enough now that she cried out. She could feel rage rolling off him in waves, almost as if he were even angrier now because she hadn’t run from him.

He shoved his thigh between hers, hard enough that a slick of fear ran through her. She tried to pull away from him, yank her wrists from his tight grip, but he only held on tighter.

“Talk to me, Connor,” she begged.

“You think you know what I want,” he said, his words harsh, utterly at odds with the soft swoosh of waves on the shore. “You’re wrong. This is what I want. All I want.”

She felt him drop a hand from her wrists, but instead of letting her loose, he ripped off her sundress in one quick movement.

She couldn’t see his eyes clearly in the dark, only the shadows beneath his cheekbones, the planes of his face that were so beautiful to her. It was all happening too fast for her to find any words to make him stop—too fast to even know if that’s what she wanted—and then he was covering one of her breasts with his palm, squeezing her roughly, branding her with the intense heat that always poured off his body.

Her body reacted instantly to his touch, opening to let him in, moisture quickly coating her thin panties, the top of his thigh.

“Connor,” she groaned as she instinctively rubbed herself against him, seeking the pleasure she knew was waiting in his arms, even now. And then his hand was between her legs.

Her hips instinctively bucked up into his fingers, seeking more, but even as he thrust two fingers into her, even as she responded to his touch as she always had, she was struck with the sense that he was stuck in the space between reality and a nightmare. Just like that night up in his room when she’d run in to help him and he’d pulled her hard against him.

And just like then, her fear left as quickly as it had come. Because even out on this rough and ragged edge, she knew he’d never deliberately hurt her.

How could she possibly be afraid of him, when at his core Connor was the most decent, most heroic man she’d ever known?

One word from her and he’d stop.

But she didn’t want him to.

“This is who I am now,” he said, the words raw as they exited his throat, his mouth moving at her neck, sucking, biting at the same time. He let go of her wrists with his other hand and moved it to her breasts, rolling an erect nipple between his thumb and forefinger, making her gasp again with another shock of pure pleasure. “This is who I’ve become. And now that you’ve seen the real me, it’s time to make your choice.”

“You can try to convince me a hundred times,” she managed to get out with the little air she had left in her lungs, “and I’ll never believe you.”

But instead of calming him, her words seemed to send him even closer to the edge as his fingers dove in, then out of her, his thumb pressing against her clitoris, his palm gripping her breast. And then tremors were taking over her body, her body tightening around his fingers, her eyes closing, her head falling back against a log.

As she came, her orgasm going on for what seemed like hours, he whispered into her ear, “It’s your choice, babe. Take me just like this. Or leave me the hell alone.”

Through the blur of desire, she could see what he was doing, that he was trying to use sex as a weapon. Trying to break her with it, pushing at her boundaries to see if he could get her to run.

And maybe if she hadn’t been running for so many years, if she wasn’t so damn tired of going in circles and getting absolutely nowhere, she might have let him scare her off.

Didn’t he know she’d already made her choice? That she’d choose him every time? Not just because of the way her body spiraled out of control whenever he touched her. But because loving Connor was what her heart knew to be the most true emotion she’d ever felt.

She’d never thought to announce her feelings to him in this way, up against the wall, trapped in his heat, his overwhelming strength, but now she saw that this was how things with Connor had been from the beginning.

Wild.

Unexpected.

Frightening.

But beautiful and utterly precious all at the same time.

“I love you, Connor.”

The relief at finally confessing what she felt, at accepting it fully herself, was so sweet, she had to say it again.

“I love you with everything I am.”

“No.” His eyes were dark. Wild. “You don’t. You can’t.”

“I do. I can.”

She reached up to his face with both hands, made him look at her. “So if this is what you want from me, if this is what you need to break through to the other side, then take it from me. I’m giving myself to you freely.”

He closed his eyes, still fighting a war within himself, the same war he’d been fighting for two years.

“Did you hear me, Connor? I’ve made my choice. To give myself to you. Because I love you.”

And then, beneath his eyelashes, she saw a tear emerge, his teeth, his jaw clenched against it even as it fell in a slow trail over his cheekbone, down into the hollow, then onto his mouth.

She moved her lips to his, tasted the salt there.

“Take me, Connor,” she whispered against his mouth. “I’m yours.”

Darkness was swallowing him up, pulling him down, all the way under as Ginger’s words—I love you, Connor—swirled around in his brain, wrapping themselves around his chest, the hollow place inside where his heart should be.

She couldn’t love him. There was nothing there to love. He was just a shell now. An empty shell. He tried to claw his way back to the top, but he’d never faced a threat so big, not even from the fire that had scorched his skin.

He felt wetness beneath her fingertips as she gently touched his face. He hadn’t cried on the mountain, hadn’t cried in the hospital, hadn’t cried after the phone call. Hadn’t cried until he’d shoved Ginger into the wall, made her come apart for him, beneath his fingers, then heard her say—

The wrenching pain in his chest was so intense, he wrapped his hands harder around her hips, digging his fingers into her softness.

“Ginger.”

He heard the violence in her name, looked into her eyes, saw the love in them, and knew he needed to stop. Step away. Leave her alone. Before he did something he’d never forgive himself for.

And still, all he could say was, “I can’t let you go.”

“You don’t have to, Connor. I’ve already told you.”

He’d never fought so hard, and yet, second by second, he went down farther, into the black hole at the heart of the undertow.

No fire had ever scared him like this, overwhelmed him so completely. His passion for Ginger, the unending desire that grew every second he spent with her, every time he touched her, was the most intense force he’d ever encountered.