But he had a few more hours in Pine Gulch and he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her yet.
“I’d like to stay.”
He said the words as more of a question than a statement. After an endless moment when he was quite certain she was going to tell him to hit the road, she nodded, much to his vast relief, and reached for his hand.
A soft, terrifying sweetness unfurled inside him at the touch of her hand in his.
How was he going to walk away in a few hours from this woman who had in a few short weeks become so vitally important to him? He didn’t have the first idea.
Chapter 14
She didn’t release his hand, even as she unlocked her door to let them both inside. When he closed the door behind him, she kissed him with a fierce, almost desperate, hunger.
They didn’t even make it past her living room, clawing at clothes, ripping at buttons, tangling mouths with a fiery passion that stunned him.
They had made love in a dozen different ways over the past few days—easy, teasing, urgent, soft.
But never with this explosive heat that threatened to consume them both. She climaxed the instant he entered her and he groaned as her body pulsed around him and followed her just seconds later.
He kissed her, trying to memorize every taste and texture as she clutched him tightly to her. To his amazement, after just a few moments, his body started to stir again inside her and he could feel by her response that she was becoming aroused again.
He carried her to the bedroom and took enough time to undress both of them, wondering if he would ever get enough of her silky curves and the warm, sweet welcome of her body.
This time was slow, tender, with an edge of poignancy to it that made his chest ache. Did she sense it, too? he wondered.
They tasted and touched for a long time, until both of them were breathless, boneless. She cried out his name when she climaxed and he thought she said something else against his shoulder but he couldn’t understand the words.
When he could breathe again and manage to string together two semicoherent thoughts, he pulled her close under the crook of his arm, memorizing the feel of her—the curves and hollows, the soft delight of her skin.
“I wish I didn’t have to go,” he murmured again.
Instead of smiling or perhaps expressing the same regret, she froze in his arms and then pulled away.
Though her bedroom was well-heated against the October chill, he was instantly cold, as he watched her slip her slender arms through the sleeves of her silky green robe that matched her eyes.
“Are you lying for my sake or to appease your own guilt?” she finally asked him.
He blinked, disoriented at the rapid-fire shift from tender and passionate to this unexpected attack that instantly set him on the defensive.
“Why do I have to be lying?”
“Come on, Quinn,” she said, her voice almost sad. “We both know you’re not sorry. Not really.”
He bristled. “When did you become such an expert on what’s going on inside my head?”
“I could never claim such omnipotent power. Nor would I want it.”
Okay. He absolutely did not understand how a woman’s mind worked. How could she pick a fight with him after the incredible intensity they just shared? Was she just trying to make their inevitable parting easier?
“If you could see inside my head,” he answered carefully, “you would see I meant every word. I do wish I didn’t have so many obligations waiting for me back in Seattle. These past few days have been...peaceful and I don’t have much of that in my life.”
She gazed at him, her features tight with an expression he didn’t recognize. After a moment, her prickly mood seemed to slide away and she smiled, though it didn’t quite push away that strange, almost bereft look in her eyes.
“I’m happy for that, Quinn. You deserve a little peace in your life and I’m glad you found it here.”
She paused and looked away from him. “But we both knew from the beginning that this would never be anything but temporary.”
Whenever he let himself think beyond the wonder of the moment, the shared laughter and unexpected joy he found with her, he had assumed exactly that—this was supposed to be a short-term relationship that wouldn’t extend beyond these few magical days.
Hearing the words from her somehow made the reality seem more bluntly desolate.
“Does it have to be?”
“Of course,” she answered briskly. “What other option is there?”
He told himself that wasn’t hurt churning through him at her dismissal of all they had shared and at the potential for them to share more.
“Portland is only a few hours from Seattle. We could certainly still see each other on the weekends.”
She tightened the sash on her robe with fingers that seemed to tremble slightly. From the cold? he wondered. Or from something else?
“To what end?” she asked. “Great sex and amusing conversation?”
Despite his turmoil, he couldn’t resist arching an eyebrow. “Something wrong with either of those?”
Her laugh sounded rough. “Not at all. Believe me, I’ve become a big fan of both these past few days.”
She shoved her hands in the pockets of her robe and drew in a deep breath, as if steeling herself for unpleasantness. “But I’m afraid neither is enough for me.”
That edgy disquiet from earlier returned in full force and he was aware of a pitiful impulse to beg her not to push him from her life.
He wouldn’t, though. He had a sudden, ugly flashback of his mother at the dinner table trying desperately to catch his father’s attention any way she could. New earrings, new silverware, a difficult new recipe. Only until she managed to push one of his father’s hot buttons would he even notice her, and then only to rant and rail and sometimes worse.
He pushed it away. He certainly wasn’t his mother trying desperately in her own sick way to make someone care who wasn’t really capable of it. Tess was not like his father. She had a deep capacity for love. He had seen it with Jo, even Easton and Brant and Cisco.
Why else would she have stayed with an invalid husband for so long?
But maybe she couldn’t care for him. Maybe he didn’t deserve someone like her...
“I want more,” she said quietly, interrupting the grim direction of his thoughts. “All I wanted when I was a girl was a home and a family and a husband who cherished me. I wanted what my parents had. They held hands in the movies and whispered secrets to each other in restaurants and hid love notes for each other all around the house. My mom’s still finding them, years after Dad died. That’s what I wanted.”
He was silent. If not for the years he spent with Jo and Guff seeing just that sort of relationship, he would have had absolutely no frame of reference to understand what she was talking about, but the Winders had shared a love like that, deep and rich and genuine.
“I thought I found that with Scott,” Tess went on, “but fate had other plans and things didn’t turn out quite the way I dreamed.”
“I’m sorry.” He meant the words. He hated thinking of her enduring such loss and pain as a young bride.
“I’m sorry, too,” she said quietly. “But that time in my life is over. I’m ready to move forward now.”
“I can understand that. But why can’t you move forward with me? We have something good here. You know we do.”
She was silent for a long time and he thought perhaps he was making progress on getting her to see his point of view. But when she spoke, her voice was low and sad.
“Easton told me tonight that when you were younger, you vowed you were never getting married.”
“What a guy says when he’s fifteen and what he says when he’s thirty-four are two very different things,” he said, though he had said that very same sentiment to Jo in the g
arden at Winder Ranch just a few weeks ago.
She sat on the bed and he didn’t miss the way she was careful to keep plenty of space between them. “Okay, tell me the truth. Say we continue to see each other for those weekends you were talking about. Look ahead several months, maybe a year, with a few days a month of more of that great sex and amusing conversation.”
“I can do that,” he said, and spent several very pleasant seconds imagining kissing her on the dock of his house on Mercer Island, of taking her up in his boat for a quick run to Victoria, of standing beside the ocean on the Oregon Coast at a wonderfully romantic boutique hotel he knew in Cannon Beach.
“So here it is a year in the future,” she said, dousing his hazy fantasies like a cold surf. “Say we’ve seen each other exclusively for that time and have come to...to care about each other. Where do you see things going from there?”
“I don’t know. What do you want me to see?”
“Marriage. Family. Can you ever even imagine yourself contemplating a forever sort of relationship with me or anyone else?”
Marriage. Kids. A dog. Panic spurted through him. Though Jo and Guff had shared a good marriage and he had spent a few years watching their example, for most of his childhood, marriage had meant cold silences alternated with screaming fights and tantrums, culminating in terrible violence that had changed his world forever.
“Maybe,” he managed to say after a moment. “Who’s to say? That would be a long way in the future. Why do we have to jump from here to there in an instant?”
Her sigh was heavy, almost sad. “I saw that panic in your eyes, Quinn. You can’t even consider the idea of it in some long-distant future without being spooked.”
“That could change. I don’t see why we have to ruin this. Why can’t we just enjoy what we have in the moment?”
She didn’t answer him right away. “You know, brain injuries are peculiar, unpredictable things,” she finally said, baffling him with the seemingly random shift in topic.
“Are they?”
“The same injury in the same spot can affect two people in completely different ways. For the first two or three years after Scott’s accident, all the doctors and specialists kept telling me not to give up hope, that things would get better. He could still improve and start regaining function some day.”
Through his confusion, Quinn’s heart always ached when he thought of Tess facing all that on her own.
“I waited and hoped and prayed,” she went on. “Through all those years and promises, I felt as if I were frozen in the moment, that the world went on while I was stuck in place, waiting for something that never happened.”
She paused. “He did improve, in minuscule ways. I don’t want you to think he didn’t. Near the end, he could hold his head up for long periods of time and even started laughing at my silly jokes again. But it was not nearly the recovery I dreamed about in those early days.”
“Tess, I’m very sorry you went through that. But I don’t understand your point.”
She swallowed and didn’t meet his gaze. “My point is that I spent years waiting for reality to match up to my expectations, waiting for him to change. Even being angry when those expectations weren’t met, when in truth, he simply wasn’t capable of it. It wasn’t his fault. Just the way things were.”
He stared. “So you’re comparing me to someone who was critically brain-injured in a car accident?”
She sighed. “Not at all, Quinn. I’m talking about myself. One of the greatest lessons Scott’s accident taught me was pragmatism. I can’t hang on to unrealistic dreams and hopes anymore. I want marriage and children and you don’t. It’s as simple as that.”
“Does it have to be?”
“For me, yes. Your views might change. I hope for your sake they do. Caring for Scott all those years taught me that the only way we can really find purpose and meaning in life is if we somehow manage to move outside ourselves to embrace the chances we’re offered to care for someone else.”
She lifted moist eyes to his. “I hope you change your mind, Quinn. But what if you don’t? Say we see each other for six months or a year and then you decide you’re still no closer to shifting your perspective about home and family. I would have spent another year moving further away from my dreams. I can’t do that to myself or to you.”
That panic from before churned through him, icy and sharp. He didn’t want to lose what they had shared these past few days.
Or maybe it didn’t mean as much to her. Why else would she be so willing to throw it all away? Maybe he was just like his mother, trying desperately to keep her from pushing him away.
No. This wasn’t about that. The fear and panic warring inside him took on an edge of anger.
“This is it, then?” His voice turned hard, ugly. “I was here to scratch an itch for you and now you’re shoving me out the door.”
Her lovely features paled. “Not fair.”
“Fair? Don’t talk to me about fair.” He jumped out of the bed and reached for his Levis, still in a heap on the floor. He couldn’t seem to stop the ugly words from spilling out like toxic effluent.
“You know what I just realized? You haven’t changed a bit since your days as Queen Bee at Pine Gulch High. You’re still the spoiled, manipulative girl you were in high school. You want what you want and to hell with anybody else and whatever they might need.”
“This has nothing to do with high school or the person I was back then.”
“Wrong. This has everything to do with Tess Jamison, Homecoming Queen. You can’t have what you want, your little fantasy happily-ever-after, and so kicking me out of your life completely is your version of throwing a pissy little temper tantrum.”
His gazed narrowed as another repugnant thought occurred to him.
“Or wait. Maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe this is all some manipulative trick, the kind you used to be so very good at. Don’t forget, I had years of experience watching you bat your eyes at some poor idiot, all the while you’re tightening the noose around his neck without him having the first clue what you’re doing. Maybe you think if you push me out now, in a few weeks I’ll come running back with tears and apologies, ready to give you anything you want. Even that all-important wedding ring that’s apparently the only thing you think matters.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“You forget, I was the chief recipient of all those dirty tricks you perfected in high school. The lies. The rumors you spread. This is just one more trick, isn’t it? Well, guess what? I’m not playing your games now, any more than I was willing to do it back then.”
She stood on the other side of the room now, her arms folded across her chest and hurt and anger radiating from her.
“You can’t get past it, can you?” She shook her head. “I have apologized and tried to show you I’m a different person than I was then. But you refuse to even consider the possibility that I might have changed.”
He had considered it. He had even believed it for a while.
“Only one of us is stuck in the past, Quinn. Life has changed me and given me a new perspective. But somewhere deep inside you, you’re still a boy stuck in the ugliness of his parents’ marriage.”
He stared at her, angry that she would turn this all back around on him when she was the one being a manipulative bitch.
“You’re crazy.”
“Am I? I think the reason you won’t let yourself have more than casual relationships with women is because you’re so determined not to turn into either one of your parents. You’re not about to become your powerless, emotionally needy mother or your workaholic, abusive father. So you’ve decided somewhere deep in your psyche that your best bet is to just keep everyone else at arm’s length so you don’t have to risk either option.”
He was so furious, he couldn’t think straight. Her assessment was brutal and harsh
and he refused to admit that it might also be true.
“Now you’re some kind of armchair psychiatrist?”
“No. Just a woman who...cares about you, Quinn.”
“You’ve got a hell of a way of showing it by pushing me away.”
“I’m not pushing you away.” Her voice shook and he saw tears in her eyes. Either she was a much better actress than he could possibly imagine or that was genuine regret in her eyes. He didn’t know which to believe.
“You have no idea how hard this is for me,” she said and one of those tears trickled down the side of her nose. “I’ve come to care about you these past few weeks. Maybe I always did, a little. But as much as I have loved these past few days and part of me wants nothing more than to continue seeing you after I move to Portland, it wouldn’t be fair to either of us. You can’t be the kind of man I want and I’m afraid I would eventually come to hate you for that.”
His arms ached from the effort it took not to reach for her but he kept his hands fisted at his sides. “So that’s it. See you later, thanks for the good time in the sack and all that.”
“If you want to be crude about it.”
He didn’t. He wanted to grab her and hang on tight and tell her he would be whatever kind of man she wanted him to be. He had discovered a safety, a serenity, with her he hadn’t found anywhere else and the idea of leaving it behind left him hollow and achy.
But she was right. He couldn’t offer her the things she needed. He could lie and tell her otherwise but both of them would see through it and end up even more unhappy.
“I suppose there’s nothing left to say, then, is there?”
She released a shuddering kind of breath and he supposed he should be somewhat mollified that her eyes reflected the same kind of pain shredding his insides.
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I, Tess.”
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