The air in the vehicle suddenly seemed charged, crackling with tension. She had to say something but had no idea what.
“I... Chase—”
“Don’t. Don’t say it.”
His voice was low, intense, with an edge to it she rarely heard. She had so hoped they could return to the easy friendship they had always known. Was that gone forever, replaced by this jagged uneasiness?
“Say...what?”
“Whatever the hell you were gearing up for in that tone of voice like you were knocking on the door to tell me you just ran over my favorite dog.”
“What do you want me to say?” she whispered.
“I sure as hell don’t want you trying to set me up with another woman when you’re the only one I want.”
She stared at him, the heat in his voice rippling down her spine. She swallowed hard, not knowing what to say as awareness seemed to spread out to her fingertips, her shoulder blades, the muscles of her thighs.
He was so gorgeous and she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to taste that mouth that was only a few feet away.
He gazed down at her for a long, charged moment, then with a muffled curse, he leaned forward on the bench seat and lowered his mouth to hers.
Given the heat of his voice and the hunger she thought she glimpsed in his eyes, she might have expected the kiss to be intense, fierce.
She might have been able to resist that.
Instead, it was much, much worse.
It was soft and unbearably sweet, with a tenderness that completely overwhelmed her. His mouth tasted of caramel and apples and the wine he’d had at dinner—delectable and enticing—and she was astonished by the urge she had to throw her arms around him and never let go.
Chapter Six
For nearly fifteen years, he had been trying not to imagine this moment.
When she was married to one of his closest friends, he had no idea she tasted of apples and cinnamon, that she smelled like oranges and vanilla sprinkled across a meadow of wildflowers.
He hadn’t wanted to know she made tiny little sounds of arousal, little breathy sighs he wanted to capture inside his mouth and hold there forever.
It was easier not knowing those things. He could see that now.
He had hugged her many times and already knew how perfectly she fit against him. Sometimes when they would come back from traveling out of town together—Idaho Falls for the livestock auction or points farther away to pick up ranch equipment or parts—she would fall asleep, lulled by the motion of the vehicle and the rare chance to sit in one place for longer than five minutes.
He loved those times. Invariably, she would end up curled against him, her head on his shoulder. It would always take every ounce of strength he possessed not to pull her close, tuck her against him and drive off into the sunset.
He had always tried to remember his place as her friend, her support system.
Aching and wistful, he would spend those drives wishing he could keep driving a little extra or that when they arrived at their destination, he could gently turn her face to his and wake her with a kiss.
It was a damn good thing he hadn’t ever risked something so stupid. If he had, he would never have been able to let her go.
He had her now, though, and he wasn’t about to let this moment go to waste. She needed to see that she was still a lovely, sensual woman who couldn’t spend the rest of her life hidden away at the Star N, afraid to let anybody else inside.
If he couldn’t talk her into giving him a chance, perhaps he could seduce her into it.
It wasn’t the most honorable thought he’d ever had, but right now, with her mouth warm and open against his and her silky hair under his fingertips, he didn’t care.
He deepened the kiss and she froze for a second, and then her lips parted and she welcomed him inside, her tongue tangling with his and her hands clutching his shirt.
She might never be able to love him as he wanted but at least she should know she was a beautiful, desirable woman who had an entire life ahead of her.
He wasn’t sure how long they spent wrapped around each other. What guy could possibly pay attention to insignificant little details like that when the woman he loved was kissing him with abandon?
He only knew he had never been so grateful for his decision to get a bench seat in his pickup instead of two buckets. Without a console in the way, she was nearly in his lap, exactly where he wanted her...
This was the dumbest thing he had ever done.
Even as he tried to lose himself in the kiss, the thought seemed to slither across his mind like a rattlesnake across his boot.
He was only setting himself up for more heartache. He should have thought this through, looked ahead past the moment and what he wanted right now.
How could he ever go back to being friends with her, trying like hell to be respectful of the subtle distance she so carefully maintained between them? He couldn’t scrub these moments from his mind. Every time he looked at her now, he would remember this cold, star-filled night with the glittering holiday lights of Pine Gulch spread out below them and her warm, delicious mouth tangling with his.
Some small but powerful instinct for self-preservation clamored at him that maybe he better stop this while he still could, before all these years of pent-up desire burst through his control like irrigation water through a busted wheel line. He couldn’t completely lose his head here.
He drew in a sharp breath and eased away from her. Her features were a pale blur in the moonlight but her lips were swollen from his kiss, her eyes half-closed. Her hair was tousled from his hands and she looked completely luscious.
He nearly groaned aloud at the effort it took to slide away from her when his entire body was yelling at him to pull her closer.
She opened her eyes and gazed at him, pupils dilated and her ragged breathing just about the most erotic sound he’d ever heard.
He saw the instant awareness returned to her eyes. They widened with shock and something else, then color soaked her cheeks.
She untangled her hands from around his neck and eased away from him.
“It’s been a long time since I made out with a pretty girl in a pickup truck,” he said into the suddenly heavy silence. “I forgot how awkward it could be.”
She swallowed hard. “Right,” she said slowly. “It’s the pickup truck making things awkward.”
They both knew it was much more than that. It was the years of history between them and the weight of a friendship that was important to both of them.
“I so wish you hadn’t done that,” she said in a small voice.
Her words carved out another little slice of his heart.
“Which? Kissed you? Or stopped?”
She shifted farther away from him and turned her face to look out at the town below them.
Instead of answering him directly, she offered up what seemed to him like a completely random change of topic.
“Do you remember the first time we met?”
Of course he remembered. Most guys remembered the days that left them feeling as if they had been run over by a tractor.
“Yes. You and your sisters had only been here with Mary and Claude a day or two.”
“It was February 18, a week after our mother’s funeral. We had been in Idaho exactly forty-eight hours.”
She remembered it so exactly? He wasn’t sure what to think about that. He only remembered that he had been sent by his mother to drop off a meal for “Mary’s poor nieces.”
The whole community knew what had happened to her and her sisters—that their parents had been providing medical care in a poor jungle town in Colombia when the entire family had been kidnapped by rebels looking for a healthy ransom.
After all these years, he
still didn’t know everything that had happened to her in that rebel camp. She didn’t talk about it and he didn’t ask. He did know her father had been shot and killed by rebels during a daring rescue mission orchestrated by US Navy SEALs, including a very young Rafe Santiago, now Hope’s husband.
He didn’t know much more now than he had that first time he met her. When the news broke a few months earlier and her family returned to the US, it had been big news in town. How could it be otherwise, given that her father had grown up in Pine Gulch and everyone knew the family’s connection to Claude and Mary?
Unfortunately, the family’s tragedy hadn’t ended with her father’s death. After their rescue, her mother had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that might have been treatable if she hadn’t been living in primitive conditions for years—and if she hadn’t spent the last month as a hostage in a rebel camp.
That had been Chase’s mother’s opinion, anyway. She had been on her way out of town to his own father’s cancer treatment but had told him to drop off a chicken rice casserole and a plate of brownies to the Nichols family.
He remembered being frustrated at the order. Why couldn’t she have dropped it off on her way out of town? Didn’t he have enough to do on the ranch, since he was basically running things single-handedly?
Claude had answered the door, with the phone held to his ear, and told him Mary was in the kitchen and to go on back. He had complied, not knowing the next few moments would change his life.
He vividly remembered that moment when he had seen Faith standing at the sink with Mary, peeling potatoes.
She had been slim and pretty and fragile, with huge green eyes, that sweet, soft mouth and short, choppy blond hair—which she later told him she had cut herself with a butter knife sharpened on a brick, because of lice in the rebel camp.
He also suspected it had been an effort to avoid unwanted attention from the rebels, though she had never told him that. He couldn’t imagine they couldn’t see past her choppy hair to the rare beauty beneath.
Yeah, a guy tended to remember the moment he lost his heart.
“I gave you a ride into town,” he said now. “Mary needed a gallon of milk or something.”
“That’s what she said, anyway,” Faith said, her mouth tilted up a little. “I think she only wanted me to get out of the house and have a look at our new community and also give me a chance to talk to someone around my own age.”
Not that close in age. He had been eighteen and had felt a million years older.
She had been so serious, he remembered, her eyes solemn and watchful and filled with a pain that had touched his heart.
“Whatever the reason, I was happy to help out.”
“Everyone else treated us like we were going to crack apart at any moment. You were simply kind. You weren’t overly solicitous and you didn’t treat me like I had some kind of contagious disease.”
She turned to face him, still smiling softly at the memories. “That was the best afternoon I’d had in forever. You told me jokes and you showed me the bus stop and the high school and the places where the kids in Pine Gulch liked to hang out. At the grocery store, you introduced me to everyone we met and made sure cranky Mr. Gibbons didn’t cheat me, since I didn’t have a lot of experience with American money.”
She had been an instant object of attention everywhere they went, partly because she was new to town and partly because she looked so exotic, with a half-dozen woven bracelets on each wrist, the choppy hair, her wide, interested eyes.
“A few days later, you came back and said you were heading into town and asked if Aunt Mary needed you to come with me to pick anything else up.”
That had basically been a transparent ploy to spend more time with her, which everyone else had figured out but Faith.
“That meant so much to me,” she said. “Your own father was dying but that didn’t stop you from reaching out and trying to help me acclimatize. I’ve never forgotten how kind you were to me.”
Was it truly kindness, when he was the one who had benefited most? “It couldn’t have been easy to find yourself settled in a small Idaho town, after spending most of your childhood wandering around the world.”
“It was easier for me than it was for Hope and Celeste, I think. All I ever wanted was to stay in one place for a while, to have the chance to make friends finally. Friends like you.”
She gave him a long, steady look. “You are my oldest and dearest friend, Chase. Our friendship is one of the most important things in my life.”
He wanted to squeeze her hand, to tell her he agreed with her sentiments completely, but he didn’t dare touch her again right now.
“Ditto,” he said gruffly.
She drew in a breath that seemed to hitch a little. She looked out the windshield, where a few clouds had begun to gather, spitting out stray snowflakes that spiraled down and caught the light of the stars.
“That’s why I have to ask you not to kiss me again.”
Chapter Seven
Though she didn’t raise her voice, her hard-edged words seemed to echo through his pickup truck.
I have to ask you not to kiss me again.
She meant what she said. He knew that tone of voice. It was the same one she used with the kids when meting out punishment for behavioral infractions or with cattle buyers when they tried to negotiate and offered a price below market value.
Her mind was made up and she wouldn’t be swayed by anything he had to say.
Tension gripped his shoulders and he didn’t know what the hell to say.
“That’s blunt enough, I guess,” he finally answered. “Funny, but you seemed to be into it at the moment. I guess I misread the signs.”
Her mouth tightened. “It’s a strange night. Neither of us is acting like ourselves. Can we just...leave it at that?”
That was the last thing he wanted to do. He wanted to kiss her again until she couldn’t think straight.
He hadn’t misread any signs and they both knew it. After that first moment of shock, she returned the kiss with an enthusiasm and eagerness that had left him stunned and hungry.
“Can you just take me home?” she asked in a low voice.
“If that’s what you want,” he said.
“It is,” she answered tersely.
A few moments ago she had wanted him.
She was attracted to him. Lately he had been almost sure of it but some part of him had worried his own feelings for her were clouding his judgment. That kiss and her response told him the sexual spark hadn’t been one-sided.
Nice to know he was right about that, at least.
She was attracted to him but she didn’t want to be. How did a guy work past that conundrum?
The task suddenly seemed insurmountable.
He put the pickup in gear and focused on driving instead of on the growing realization that she might never be willing to accept him as anything more than her oldest and dearest friend.
Maybe, just maybe, it was time he accepted that and moved on with his life.
* * *
Though his features remained set and hard as he drove her back to the Star N, Chase carried on a casual conversation with her about the new horse, about a bit of gossip he heard about cattle futures at the stockgrowers’ party, about Addie’s Christmas presents that still needed to be wrapped.
Under other circumstances, she might have been quite proud of her halfway intelligent responses—especially when she really wanted to collapse into a boneless, quivering heap on the truck seat.
She couldn’t stop remembering that kiss—the heat and the magic and the wild intensity of it.
Her heartbeat still seemed unnaturally loud in her ears and she hadn’t quite managed to catch her breath, though she could almost manage to string two thoughts toge
ther now.
She felt very much like a tiny island in the middle of a vast arctic river just beginning the spring thaw, with chunks of ice and fast-flowing water buffeting against it in equal parts, bringing life back to the frozen landscape.
She didn’t want to come to life again. She wanted that river of need to stay submerged under a hard layer of impenetrable ice forever.
Knowing that hollow ache was still there, that her sexuality hadn’t shriveled up and died with Travis, completely terrified her.
She was a little angry about it, too, if she were honest. Why couldn’t she just resume the state of affairs of the last thirty months, that sense of suspended animation?
This was Chase. Her best friend. The man she relied on for a hundred different things. How could she possibly laugh and joke with him like always when she would now be remembering just how his mouth had slid across hers, the glide of his tongue, the heat of his muscles against her chest.
She didn’t want that river of need to come to churning, seething life again.
Yes, her world had been cold and sterile since Travis died, but it was safe.
She felt like she was suffocating suddenly, as if that wild flare of heat between them had consumed all the oxygen.
She rolled her window down a crack and closed her eyes at the welcome blast of cold air.
“Too warm?” he asked.
Oh, yes. He didn’t know the half of it. “A little,” she answered in a grave understatement.
He turned the fan down on the heating system just as her phone buzzed. She pulled it from the small beaded handbag Celeste had offered for the occasion.
It was a text from her sister: Girls are asleep. Don’t rush home. Have fun.
She glanced at the message, then slid her phone back into the totally impractical bag.
“Problem?” he asked.
“Not really. I think Celeste was just checking in. She said the girls are asleep.”
“I hope Addie was good.”
“She’s never any trouble. Really, we love having her around. She always seems to set a good example for my kids.”
The Holiday Gift Page 7