by Nina Lane
“And revenge had nothing to do with it?”
His jaw tightens. “Richard Peterson was a goddamned bully who was bottling groundwater from three locations near former human waste and petroleum dump sites and selling it…way overpriced…as pure spring water. His company deserved to be shut down as much as the Iron Horse did.”
I blink, startled by this different side to the story. “Then why does everyone think you’re so…”
Terrible?
Painful understanding snaps inside me like a lock clicking into place. As a teenager, even as a child, Cole had had a reputation for being a troublemaker and a bad kid. No one had believed his accusations of abuse against his charismatic, successful father. No one had believed Cole was capable of good. The accident had only intensified the town’s negative view of him.
So many drastic changes in our lives. And yet that one thing has remained the same.
I’d once been the only person who’d known there was more to him. The quiet boy who brought me my forgotten backpack, returned my dropped roll of Lifesavers, left my stuffed rabbit Wally on the front porch after I’d lost him in the woods, saved my Halloween candy…to me, Cole Danforth was mysterious, fascinating, and heroic. Everyone else had it all wrong.
And now he’s embodied his bad reputation on a whole other level.
An ache constricts my throat. “Nathan told me eighty people were left unemployed by the shutdown.”
“And that’s my fault?” He strides to the sunroom. “I’m not in the business of hiring everyone who loses their job because of their shitty employer. I’m not a crusader in disguise either. I don’t shut down lousy companies for the greater good. Peterson was duping his customers, but you’re damned right I was out for revenge. It was a sheer pleasure watching him fall. I’d waited my whole life to take down my father’s company too. But I don’t do a damned fucking thing if I don’t think I’m going to make a profit. Because of that, Invicta Spirits will soon be the top liquor producing company in the country.”
“Then you’ll take on the world, right?” Disappointment, sharp and acute, lances through my chest.
Over the past decade, my pain mutated into nightmares and phobias. His turned into ruthless ambition. Which one is worse?
“Stop looking at me like that.” His expression suddenly darkens.
“Like what?”
“Like you lost your best friend,” he snaps.
“I did.” Unexpected tears sting my eyes. “Ten years ago.”
He stares at me, his face paling beneath his tan. A live wire of tension crackles in the air and arcs right into my blood.
“Goddammit, Josie.” He turns away, his shoulders stiff.
I grab my portfolio and unzip it. My hands tremble. Years ago Cole and I stood on a cliff at Eagle Canyon, both of us drenched by the sun and vibrating with the awareness of what we could be together. I’d known in that instant that whatever happened next would change everything between us.
I have that instinct again now.
“I want to show you something.” Shuffling through my artwork, I pull out my preliminary drawings for the mural and spread them out on the bed. “Look at these.”
He glances at the drawings, his fists clenched. “I saw them already.”
“No. Look at them.” I step back, willing him not to block me out again.
The moment stretches. Finally he moves to the bed, his hands on his hips. He stares at the drawings. Deep lines groove his forehead.
I know the second he sees it. The rigid line of his profile softens ever so slightly. He expels a breath, his shoulders slumping.
“Castille has a history of its own.” I walk to his side. “But so do I. So do we.”
He studies the images, the woodlands stretching between the lighthouse and downtown. Nestled in the branches of a pine is a platform treehouse with a dangling rope for climbing. On the Water’s Edge Pier, two carnival-goers sit astride the goofy whale on the Ocean Carousel. A tall young man with sun-streaked brown hair staffs the Milk Bottle Toss game booth. Far in the distance, where Eagle River cuts and twists through the canyon, that same man stands on the cliff, his arms outstretched, poised to leap.
“I’ve spent a lot of energy these past ten years being angry with you.” The old ache of loss spreads through me, dark and empty. “I’ve come to some understanding about why you left, but mostly it’s just been a wasteland. I’m tired of fear and darkness. I’m really tired of nightmares and not remembering.
“And I’m tired of resenting you, hating what you did, being angry. I came back to see if I could somehow come to terms with what happened. I’m trying to close the distance between me and my sister. I’m trying to put something good into the world with the mural. And you can bluster around all you want, but you forget that I once knew you. I still know things about you.”
A muscle jumps in his jaw, the only evidence past his implacable expression that he’s even listening.
“I know your Monopoly strategy of developing your properties really fast,” I continue. “I know you can’t stand shirts with tags and that you sprained your wrist when you were thirteen attempting a one-handed cartwheel. I know you always go to McGinty’s pub on the first day of hockey season. I know you’re Team Superman, that you don’t like mushrooms, and that you have a birthmark shaped like an arrow right above your butt. I know Magus was your favorite character on Empire of the Gods and that your mother’s father was the one who introduced you to Marine Sciences. I know the best cake I’ve ever eaten was the lemon cake you made for my twentieth birthday. I know you would never hate-fuck me.”
Darkness flashes in his eyes. He shakes his head and turns to the door. My heart sinks to the pit of my stomach. If the evidence of what we once meant to each other isn’t enough to ease his rigid anger, then nothing is.
“Go back to California, Josie.” His voice is rough, serrated. “There’s nothing here for you anymore.”
“You’re wrong.” My spine straightens, fresh resolve filling me. “I’m painting the mural. If not on your stupid garden wall, then somewhere. Not only did I lose my parents and brother and you ten years ago, I lost my sister too. Now the one bright spot in my life is that I’m going to have a nephew. Vanessa and I finally have something to look forward to, and you, of all people, are not taking that away from me.” I take a breath and clench my fists. “You once told me you would do anything for me. That all you wanted was for me to be safe and happy. If you really meant that, then prove it now.”
He grips the doorknob, then stops, his head bowed and shoulders tight. A hard exhale rushes from his lungs. He turns and stalks back to me. Determination glitters in his blue eyes and edges his strong features.
Startled, I step back. Anticipation flares inside me, the strike of a match. He grabs my arms and hauls me against his chest, lowering his mouth to mine in a descent so swift the entire world tilts off balance, and I fall.
Chapter 9
Josie
* * *
Cole catches me, pinning me against him. And this time, the touch of his lips is a thousand things all at once—a shock, a homecoming, an explosion. Fire sparks in my blood. I grip his T-shirt, unable to do anything but kiss him back, our mouths fitting together with such hot, easy pleasure it’s impossible to believe that so many years have passed, that we haven’t been lovers all this time.
He lifts his palms to the sides of my face, his big hands like a cradle, his thumbs resting in the hollows of my cheekbones. He urges my lips apart with his, and our tongues meet with an electric spark that courses clear down to my toes.
Everything about this—the wall of his chest against mine, the salt-and-citrus scent of him filling my head, the urgent pressure of his mouth, the scratch of his stubble—floods me with relief and pleasure. Thought slips away. Time disappears. It’s only me and him again, sinking into the private world only we could ever understand.
He mutters my name under his breath, easing my head back, sliding one hand to car
ess the nape of my neck. Need uncoils inside me like a bright red ribbon that’s been knotted too long.
This is what I’ve missed, what I’ve longed for during countless dark nights when my mind is wired with fear and my body aches for comfort. It’s him—the way he engulfs me with his entire body, the way we fit together like a lock and key, the way everything bad that has happened or will happen dissolves into the pure certainty of us.
I unclench my hand from his shirt and shove it underneath the hem to touch his bare skin. He jerks in reaction, his breath expelling. The sensation of his warm, hard abdomen under my palm floods me with awe and delight.
He’s heartbreakingly familiar, yes, but also different. He’s harder, older, stronger. My fingers touch the ridge of a scar at his side. He trails his lips to my cheek, his breath hot, his body tensing with an erotic urgency I remember all too well.
He closes his hands on my shoulders and lifts his head, breaking our contact. He stares down at me, his eyes darkened to indigo, a flush cresting his cheekbones. Trembling, I bring a hand to my lips.
The only sound is of our breath. The space between us tightens with thwarted desire and lust.
“I don’t want you to get hurt again.” The words escape him in a rush. He clenches his fingers on my shoulders. “And if you stay here, you will.”
“No.” I swallow past the tightness in my throat. “Staying here is my last hope. And if you really don’t want me to get hurt again, then stop trying to push me away and act like you don’t give a shit about everything we once had. Stop trying to protect me from you. It didn’t work ten years ago, and it won’t work now.”
He pushes himself away, his eyes hardening with an internal battle I’ve seen before. For a heart-stopping instant, I think he’s going to walk out again.
Then his gaze lands on the papers in my open portfolio, the mural images scattered to reveal the drawings beneath.
He freezes.
Panic flickers in my veins. I start forward to close the portfolio. Cole shoots out a hand, bringing me to a halt. He pushes the mural drawings aside and lifts out a torn sketchbook page scrawled with a disembodied head, eyes empty sockets of bright red, skinless lips peeled back in a silent scream.
He stares at the horrific image before lifting his gaze to mine. A cold shudder courses through me.
“It’s...um, a preliminary sketch for my last series.” With a trembling hand, I push a lock of hair away from my face. “Distortion.”
Cole’s throat works with a swallow. “What happened to the forests full of treehouses and fireflies? The girls lighting their path with candles? The rabbits and badgers?”
I rub my palms on my jeans, hating this further evidence of how much I’ve changed. “Those are all gone.”
His mouth tightening, Cole drops the sketch and looks through the others—gaping mouths, cavernous eyes, skeletal cheekbones dripping with blood.
“Tell me,” he demands.
“It doesn’t matter, Cole.”
“Tell me, dammit.” He tosses the images down.
“I…I draw and paint these when I can’t sleep.” I shove the drawings back into the portfolio, locking them up again. “I guess in some ways it’s good because it built my career. People love this kind of art. The first series of paintings I sold through a gallery was called Dreamland, six dystopian landscapes of ruined buildings and creatures who are half-human and half-insect. Fucking creepy stuff. They sold almost immediately and the gallery owner asked for more. Soon other collectors and gallery owners were calling. It’s almost all I’ve done for the past decade.”
“You’ve been creating that art for ten years?”
“It’s what drove me back here.” I clench my shaking hands together. “My nightmares have been getting worse. Last month, I had a solo exhibition of paintings of these decapitated heads. After every painting sold, I had a panic attack that they were still out there and would forever haunt me.
“Then I found a painting in my studio that I barely remember creating. It was of a boy wearing a suit like the one Teddy had been wearing the night of the accident, but he had no face. I think I’d done it in the middle of the night. I must have been totally zoned out. It was so weird, like I’d wanted to paint Teddy but I couldn’t remember his face.
“And then I got scared, wondering if I really was forgetting him. As if the black hole in my memory was getting bigger and starting to pull other things into it. Even my little brother.”
I hug my arms around myself. I’ve never told anyone all that before. It shouldn’t surprise me that it was easy to tell Cole. I used to tell him everything.
He doesn’t move. His darkened eyes pin me to the spot. Pressure builds, like the inside of a balloon about to burst.
“It’s okay.” I swallow to ease my dry throat. “I mean…it’s fucked-up and awful and ultimately the reason I’m here, but—”
“You can paint the mural.” His voice rasps out of his throat like sandpaper. “I’ll tell Allegra tomorrow.”
Relief billows through me but doesn’t eradicate my despair over the pain this is causing him.
“Cole, I’m…I don’t want you to blame yourself.”
“Christ, Josie.” An old, hard agony contorts his features. “There’s no one to blame but me. I’m the fucking reason this happened to you.”
Tears burn my eyes. “I never thought of you like that. I meant it when I said I didn’t blame you. I hate that so many people still think it was your fault. Even when you left, I knew there was nothing you could have done. If nothing else, I wish I’d told you that sooner.”
Our gazes lock like a chain. Raw energy flickers in the air. My pulse increases, driving the despair from my blood and replacing it with a heat I haven’t felt in longer than I care to remember.
He opens his palms, unclenching his fists, and takes a step in my direction. The tension snaps. And then we’re both closing the distance between each other as if crushing time itself. He opens his arms. A cry breaks loose from my throat. Our bodies collide.
I wrap my arms around his neck. He grips the back of my head, his eyes blazing with a sudden naked longing that inflames all my senses. He brings my mouth to his again, a hot open kiss simmering with pent-up lust.
“Cole.” I drive my hands into his thick hair. “I missed you.”
He murmurs my name, locking one arm around my back and lifting me off the floor. Two steps to the bed, and he lowers me onto the mattress, his breath heating my cheek. He stares at me for a second, almost as if he can’t believe I’m real.
Knowing he’ll think way too hard about this if given a chance, I grab the front of his T-shirt and pull him on top of me, lifting my head to kiss him.
Heat explodes in my chest. And again, this is exactly what I’ve wanted in those nights when terror splinters my dreams and loneliness weights my soul. I’ve ached for the strength of him on top of me, his hands buried in my hair, our lips clinging. I’ve wanted so desperately for the truth of us to conquer the horror of what had happened to us.
Pressing my hand to his heart, I part my lips for him. He’s still the only man in the world who knows exactly how to kiss me. My body softens, heat melting through my veins, a pulse sparking to life in my core. Beneath my hand, his heartbeat quickens, and his muscles tense with the onset of a desire I’d once known so well. Even all these years later, I sense his breath change in rhythm, the urgency already uncoiling in him.
He trails his lips across my cheek and down to my neck, flicking his tongue into the hot hollow of my throat. God. It’s been so long since I’ve felt anything like this, the flare of excitement, the sheer pleasure of kissing and being kissed. He tips my chin up and reclaims my lips, sweeping his tongue into my mouth in an act of pure possession.
My heart jolts. Is that…? He’s already getting hard, a thick bulge in his jeans pressing against my thigh. Desire surges through me. I clench my thighs against the growing ache and lose myself in the heat of our kiss.
After
edging his hand between our bodies, he cups my breast, flicking his thumb over my tight nipple.
“I can’t wait for you.” He lifts his head, his blue eyes smoldering. “I need to see you.”
I pull away from him only long enough to yank my T-shirt over my head. A groan of appreciation escapes him at the sight of my breasts cupped in a plain blue bra, my stiff nipples visible through the thin fabric. I’m hot, prickly, excited, and nervous all at the same time. And when he unhooks my bra with one swift twist of his fingers, I arch toward him in invitation.
“Goddamn, Josie.” He slides his hand down my belly, pressing his lips to my bare breasts. “Still the most perfect woman ever.”
He lavishes kisses over my breasts and sucks my nipples until I start to pant, my insides twisting with growing pressure. He still knows everything I like, everything I want. Moving down my body, he unfastens my jeans and tugs them off. As he reveals my pink hipsters printed with little bananas, he gives a hoarse chuckle.
“Your underwear was one of the many thousands of reasons I loved undressing you.” He presses his lips down my abdomen. “Always a surprise.”
He flicks his tongue out to stroke along the edge of my panties. Flames lick through my blood. I drive my hand into his hair, part of me still astonished that this is happening. He hooks his fingers into my panties and eases them down my thighs. Then I’m naked, cooler air brushing over my skin, and a sudden self-consciousness seizes me.
He pauses, his hand on my thigh. “Okay?”
I nod and gulp air into my tight lungs. More than okay.
A frown tugs at his mouth. “I don’t have a condom, but—”
“It’s okay. I’m on the pill for my period, but I haven’t had sex in well over a year.”
“You need to know I’m healthy.” An emotion resembling regret tightens his jaw. “I haven’t been celibate, but I’ve always been safe.”
“I know. I trust you.” I stroke his stubble-coated jaw and brush my finger over his lower lip. He kisses my palm, then trails his lips over my arm, my shoulder, and back down to my breasts. Each press of his mouth evokes a spark of pleasure.