She had a notebook in her purse, she recalled. Might as well get started drafting a letter to the newspapers in Seattle and Phoenix in reply to their requests for interviews. But the idea held little appeal. The more she thought about leaving Washington—and Mason—the less excited she became about her exciting new future.
The time dragged as she waited for word about Emily and the baby, and gradually she began to grow drowsy, so she leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. She didn’t worry something might have gone wrong during the delivery, and she hoped Mick was hanging on all right. What was it about men that prohibited them from believing the women they loved were capable of taking care of themselves? Maybe it was something in their DNA, something that predated the dawn of civilization and would be around long after the modern world collapsed on itself. It wasn’t that it was a bad thing, their protective streak. It just got a little inconvenient sometimes.
“Lou?”
At the sound of the male voice, she at first thought it was Mick who had come to give her good news. But when she opened her eyes and slowly focused, she saw it was Mason instead. The first thing she noticed was that he looked more handsome than ever in jeans and a chambray work shirt that made the blue of his eyes seem even bluer. The second thing she noticed was that he looked really tired.
“Mason?” she said.
“I… How’s Emily?” he asked.
Lou willed her heart to stop beating so erratically and her lungs to take in some air. Mason was only here because he’d discovered Emily had gone into labor. His only concern was for his sister. His appearance here had nothing to do with Lou’s presence.
“She’s fine as far as I know,” she told him. “Her contractions started about five hours ago. I would think it wouldn’t be much longer now.”
Mason nodded, but he was clearly still worried about something. That peculiar masculine protectiveness she’d just been thinking about.
“Do you want to sit down?” she asked, indicating the seat across from her.
Mason took the chair immediately beside her instead, slumping into it as if his legs couldn’t hold him any longer. He ran his hands anxiously through his hair, folded his arms over his chest, crossed his feet at the ankles, stared up at the ceiling and sighed.
“Lou, we have to talk.”
Her heart actually skipped a beat. “About what?”
“About—”
Mick came bursting into the waiting room then, his body covered in surgical green, a huge grin splitting his handsome features. “Lou, it’s—” He stopped when he saw Mason seated beside her. “Mason, good. You’re here, too. I wanted to be able to tell you both at the same time.”
“Well?” Lou asked.
“Is Emily okay?” Mason said at the same time.
“Emily is fine,” Mick assured them. “Exhausted, but fine.” His smile broadened to the point of becoming silly. “It’s… it’s…”
“It’s what?” Mason demanded.
“It’s…a girl,” Mick replied. “We have a daughter. A beautiful, healthy baby girl.” For a moment, his eyes adopted a faraway expression. “I have a daughter. Oh, boy. This is gonna be great.”
“And I have a niece,” Mason said. “Wow. I’m an uncle.”
And Lou was… She sighed inwardly. Well, she couldn’t claim the baby as anything, since she was just a friend of the family. “Congratulations, Mick,” she said softly. “That’s wonderful. When can we see her? When can we see Emily? You say everyone’s all right?”
“Emily and I are a little stunned,” he conceded, “but, yes, everyone is fine. The baby is…is just… It was so amazing, you know? I mean, all of a sudden…”
Mick took a deep breath and shook his head as if words couldn’t describe his feelings. Lou smiled. She could only imagine what it must be like.
“Look, I have to get back to Emily,” Mick said as he began backing toward the door. “You should be able to see her soon. She’s in the recovery room now. Recovering. I think they’re taking the baby to the nursery in a few minutes. Me, I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from this.”
“We’ll meet you back at the house,” Mason said.
“As soon as we’ve seen the baby,” Lou added.
When Mick was gone, Mason turned to Lou and frowned. “But we need to talk. And the hospital isn’t the best place to do it. We’ll come back tonight and see Emily and the baby both.”
“Mason, I’ve been waiting here for hours for that baby to be born. I’m not going anywhere until I’ve seen her, and you can’t make me.”
Mason’s eyes fairly glowed at that. “You know what happened the last time you dared me like that,” he told her.
Lou tried to ignore the hurt from that memory. “I remember too well. But this time is going to be different. You don’t run my life, Mason. You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do. And that includes leaving the hospital before I’ve seen the newest addition to the Dante family.”
“I bet I can,” Mason challenged.
“I bet you can’t,” Lou countered.
“I can, too.”
“You can not.”
“Can, too.”
“Can not.”
“Lou—”
“Mason—”
They had nearly come nose to nose, and when Lou realized how close they were to each other, she took a giant step back. Mason frowned at her withdrawal.
“Why do we argue like this so much lately?” he asked. “We never used to fight this way.”
Lou shrugged slightly. She suddenly felt very tired. “I don’t know, Mason. Things have been different between us in a lot of ways lately.”
“And that’s just what we need to talk about,” he told her. “That and a few other things.”
Lou’s heart rate leaped again. She told herself not to hope. For anything. She did that before and wound up with a heart full of hurt. She told herself not to want, not to wish, not to wait. Just to tell Mason her intentions and then make tracks.
“I’m leaving Washington,” she said quickly.
He closed his eyes and flinched, as if she’d slapped him. “To go where?”
“I’m not sure yet. Maybe Phoenix, maybe—”
“Seattle?” he asked.
Lou’s cheeks flamed at his roughly uttered question, though whether that was a result of anger, embarrassment, or desire, she wasn’t sure. “You’ve been in my apartment without my permission again,” she said.
“I… Look, Lou, we need to talk,” he said again.
“I think you said everything you needed to say the day you left Sonora,” she told him.
Mason shut his eyes again, tightly this time, as if the pain he felt went even deeper. “No, I said the wrong things. I didn’t say enough.”
Lou expelled a single, humorless chuckle. “That’s funny. I thought you said more than enough.”
“Lou, please… Just give me a chance to explain.”
Although she’d already given him plenty of chances, she decided to give him one more. Maybe if they talked, it would make it easier for her to leave. Because she was going to leave.
He’d already made her sure of that.
Chapter Twelve
“Okay, talk,” Lou said as soon as Mason closed the front door of the Dante home behind them.
He drew in a deep breath and expelled it slowly. She wasn’t going to make this easy, was she? Then again, could he really blame her for that?
“Can we at least sit down first?” he asked wearily. He was beginning to feel the strain and exhaustion of the last few weeks taking their toll.
Lou followed him to the sofa, but instead of joining him there, she took a seat in the overstuffed chair beside it. Not one to be put off by small rebellions, Mason scooted to the end of the couch to be as close to her as he could.
“Now then,” he began. “What’s all this about you leaving D.C. to move to another city?”
Lou took a moment to answer. When she finally did, she
wasn’t quite able to meet his eyes. He told himself it was a good sign.
“Paula had nothing but praise for my articles on Sonora,” she said. “I figured if that was the case, then the editors of other newspapers might be equally impressed. I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t look for employment elsewhere.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Mason said.
Lou sighed, then met Mason’s gaze steadily. “I don’t want to live in D.C. anymore,” she told him.
“Why not?” he asked. “You love it there. And now you’ve gotten promoted to the newsroom, a position you’ve continually told me is the job of your dreams. I’d think with a big change like that, you would be even more inclined to stay here.”
“Some things have changed,” she agreed. “But others haven’t. The things I wanted most to see change, the things that were of greatest importance to me, have remained the same. And I don’t want to keep living in Washington knowing that’s the way it will always be.”
“What things?” he asked.
But she only looked at him intently and didn’t offer a reply. Mason thought he had a pretty good idea what she was talking about—at least, he hoped he did. But he wanted her to be the one to say it. He really had done a lot of thinking during the time they’d been apart, especially while he was riding out the rain—alone—with a band of half-serious rebels in the Central American jungle. Little by little, he’d begun to understand some things about himself he’d never been willing to think about before, and, little by little, he’d begun to realize he was in love with Lou. But he wasn’t sure how to tell her that after everything he’d said to her on Sonora. And he knew she would leave if he didn’t.
“Look,” he finally said. He rose from his chair to pace the length of the living room. “I know that I’ve always kind of treated you like a kid.” Spinning quickly around, he added, “But for a lot of that time, you were a kid. Which was why it was so hard for me to see and accept it when you did grow up. I’m sorry if I’ve been shortsighted and narrow-minded about that. You have to understand that I never meant to hurt you.”
As Lou listened to what Mason had to say, she became more and more depressed. He was doing exactly what she had feared he would do. He was going to try to justify his actions on Sonora and then try to make amends for the way he had behaved. He never meant to hurt her, she repeated numbly to herself. Well that didn’t make it any easier to accept that he did.
“Mason, don’t,” she said. “I know all that. You don’t have to make excuses for what happened on Sonora. Believe me, I understand too well how things progressed the way they did between us. You don’t have to worry. You’re off the hook. And once I’m gone from Washington, you won’t have to look at me every day and feel guilty about having gone to bed with me.”
“Guilty?” he asked. “Why would I feel guilty about the greatest thing that ever happened to me?”
“What do you mean by that?” Lou demanded, afraid to hope.
Mason shook his head. He was tired of taking the roundabout way to say what he had to say, and tired of hearing Lou disguise her own words. Just say it, he told himself. Just tell her how you feel. Tell her that you love her.
“I did a lot of thinking while we were separated,” he said, still stalling. “And I began to understand some things about myself that I maybe overlooked before.”
“Overlooked…?” she echoed. Kind of hopefully, too, he couldn’t help thinking.
“All right, so maybe it was something that I consciously denied by refusing to think about it,” he amended. “Maybe I buried it so deep that no one, including me, would ever be able to find it.”
“Mason, what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about needing people,” he finally told her. “I’m talking about all those years, going back before I even met you, when I appointed myself as Emily’s guardian, despite the fact that she kept saying she didn’t need one. While I was in Central America, I started thinking that maybe…maybe all that time I wasn’t trying to take care of Emily because she needed me. Maybe it was because I needed her. And when she married Mick, I was… I don’t know. Maybe I panicked a little. Maybe I got scared. Of being alone.”
Mason returned to his seat, leaning forward to take Lou’s hand in his. When she looked into his eyes, they were as warm and blue as the summer sky, and she knew he was telling her the truth. Her heart thumped harder, with happiness this time, sending her blood racing through her veins fast enough to leave her lightheaded. Or maybe it was Mason doing that. He was trying to tell her she was important to him. He was trying to tell her he needed her. But he wasn’t telling her he loved her, she reminded herself. And that was what she needed to hear. Before she could respond, he squeezed her fingers affectionately and began to speak again.
“So I latched on to you,” he said. “I told myself it was because you needed me, not the other way around. I haven’t been watching out for you all these years because I didn’t think you could take care of yourself or to keep you safe. It’s been because I wanted to think you need me, too. And because I didn’t want to lose you.”
“Oh, Mason,” she said. She reached out a hand to thread her fingers through his hair and pulled his forehead against hers. “You won’t lose me,” she promised. Her next words were harder to say, but she still knew she couldn’t keep living in Washington feeling the way she did about him. Not when he didn’t feel the same way about her. “No matter where I’m living, we’ll always stay in touch. I could never be separated from you completely.”
His expression clouded over at her statement. “You’re still going to leave?” he asked.
“I have to,” she told him. “You might need me and want me, but you don’t love me, not the way I love you. And I can’t stay here, working side by side with you every day, knowing you don’t feel the same way about me that I feel about you. Needing and wanting is one thing. Loving is a completely different matter.”
This time it was Mason who tangled his fingers in Lou’s hair and pulled her forehead against his. “But don’t you see, Lou? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I do love you. The way any man loves a woman. No, scratch that. More than a man can love a woman, that’s how much I love you. And if there’s any way you’ll give me another chance…”
“Mason, I—”
Her words were cut off before she could say them, swallowed up by Mason, who covered her mouth with his. For a long time, he only kissed her, then he pulled her out of her chair and onto his lap. Cradling her head in one hand, he circled her waist with his other arm and began to plunder her mouth more deeply. Then he was lifting her into his arms to carry her. He continued to kiss her as he climbed the stairs and entered the first bedroom they came to, the one normally assigned to him. He kicked the door closed and lay back with Lou on the bed.
After that, things got a little hazy for her. When Mason finally stopped kissing her long enough to gaze down at her face, all she could think about was how wanted, needed, and loved he made her feel, and how much she wanted, needed, and loved him in return. His eyes were lit with a passion she hadn’t seen since their night together on Sonora, and her body came alive for the first time in weeks. She lifted her fingers to the buttons of his shirt, fumbling to get them open, then pushed the soft garment over his shoulders. He shrugged out of it quickly and reached for her buttons. Lou lay still as he undid each one, then caught her breath when he spread her shirt open to place a kiss over her heart.
Her bra went next as he made short work of the front-closure clasp. He lifted her up to pull both garments from beneath her and toss them aside, then he leaned in again, naked torso pressing against hers. She spread her hands open over the hot, satiny skin of his back, pulling him closer in a silent plea for more. She purred at the feel of his fingers skimming along her rib cage, and she gasped when he caught her breast in one hand. For long moments they lay entwined that way, getting used to the feel of having each other so close again. Then Mason rolled
onto his back, bringing Lou atop him, sliding his hands down over her fanny to pull her closer still. Lou felt the hard, heavy length of him surge against her, and she moved her hand down to cup him in her palm over his jeans.
That single touch seemed to be his undoing. He growled with need as he rolled over once more to help her get out of the rest of her clothes. She returned the favor by helping him out of his, and together they began to explore well-remembered territory, to see if there was anything they might have missed the first time around.
A hot fever rose in her body as he caressed her all over, and just when she was sure she the fire would consume her, he claimed her body with his. Higher and higher they climbed together, until they both cried out in their climax. Then they were lying still together, their bodies slick and warm, their breathing ragged, their hearts full.
Lou gazed at the man beside her, loving him more than she had ever thought she could. Was this how it would always be? Every time they came together, she would love him more? Then he smiled at her, and she knew it was true. All of it. He not only wanted and needed her, but he loved her, too. As much as she loved him.
“Marry me,” he said.
Lou’s heart hammered hard in her chest. “Are you serious?” she asked.
“The only thing I could be more serious about is that my life won’t be worth living if you’re not a part of it. The biggest part.”
“You’re sure the reason you’re asking isn’t just because you don’t want to be alone?”
Mason pulled her close and placed a kiss on the top of her head. “Lou, the reason I’m asking you to marry me is because I love you. More than anything.”
Without saying a word, Lou placed her hand over Mason’s cheek and studied him hard. Then she began to smile again. The fatigue and anxiety in his eyes were gone, replaced by happiness and contentment. She was responsible for that. And the knowledge he could want, need, and love her so much made her feel like nothing could ever go wrong again. The world was suddenly a perfect place. She had everything she wanted. There wasn’t a thing in the world that could make her move from this spot, she decided as she snuggled up closer to Mason. Absolutely nothing.
Unforgettable Heroes II Boxed Set Page 17