by Gemma Snow
“He didn’t go.” Dec said the words with the finality they deserved.
“No,” Lily said, mouth still hovering over the lip of her teacup. “He didn’t go. But he made me go. UC Davis was closer than Colorado, of course. He never said a thing, but I know he pushed because he wanted me to have something to hold onto when it all came to a head.” She let out a low, derisive laugh. “Of course, I didn’t finish the program, now, did I? One semester of fieldwork away from my master’s and…I quit. Took my college money and opened the shop, just like we’d dreamed of doing.”
She stood up, because all of a sudden the room was too hot and her comfy flannel was too hot and the weight of three sympathetic gazes was way too freaking hot.
“I panicked,” Lily admitted. “I just… Going back to the field set me off, I guess. It brought me back there, back to those months where I kept wondering if it was going to be this weekend, while I was off in the Redwoods, or this weekend out on the Appalachian.”
She looked from Micah to Dec, before finally landing on Maddy’s knowing face. Of course it was knowing. Maddy had been there through the whole thing, the shoulder Lily had used on far more than one occasion. Maddy knew pretty much every sordid detail of the whole wretched affair and, by the expression on her face, she was remembering them in real time, just as Lily was.
“He proposed to me,” she said quietly, rubbing the finger that would have held his ring, her husband’s ring. If only she had been so lucky. “Right around Christmas. Two weeks later, I got the call that the final semester research site had been moved to Arizona and I…I quit. Right there on the phone. How could I spend three months in Arizona when my fiancé was…? Well, it turned out I was right.”
Maddy stood up and walked over to her, determination in those fierce, glittering eyes, before she hugged Lily in a tight embrace.
“Shhh, now, sweetie. Don’t rush. It’ll come out as it needs to.”
But it had been five years and one month and three days she had been mourning. Hell, it had been over six years, nearly, since she’d been fighting the same fucking fight, with hope and panic and drenched fear, and it needed to come out now.
“He died three days before I would have graduated.” Her voice was strong, nearly unrecognizable, and Lily held her head just a little higher. “And I don’t regret dropping out of school or opening the shop, not for a fucking second.” She scoffed. “But apparently time doesn’t heal all wounds.”
“Time doesn’t heal wounds,” Dec said, from where he stood behind the couch, stance rigid, eyes blazing with something she just didn’t have the reserves to deal with right now. “Time just makes you better at dealing with them.”
She sniffed. “I’m not doing all that great a job dealing with them right now.”
“You are, though,” Dec replied, holding her gaze. “You’ve made a whole life for yourself, a business… After all that you had barely managed to make it through, you started a business. Most people wouldn’t even consider doing something like that.”
“It was Daniel’s dream,” she said with a sad fondness. “Toward the end, he got very involved in Eastern medicine, and flowers and nature, they called to him in a different way than they had when he was a scientist. We would spend hours just talking about the places in the world he wanted to visit and the plants he would import from South Africa or Brazil. So, I started the shop. For him.”
“How long has it been since you’ve done something for you, Lily?” Micah asked.
She nodded. “I came here,” she said. “I picked my research back up again.” The first genuine smile of the night. “And would you look at that, I’m scared completely and utterly shitless. Daniel, loving him, caring for him, dreaming with him, mourning him—it’s been my life for so long that…I don’t know if I really remember who I am outside of his memory.” And damn, if that isn’t the scariest thing of all.
Chapter Six
Dec was up at three. He lay in bed for a long time, watching the sliver of moonlight that rippled through the trees, casting waves of shadows and brightness across his bedspread. He watched the moon and he breathed and he thought.
About Lily.
It had been three days since she had broken down at the dinner table and he hadn’t been able to get the sight of her face, racked with grief and pain and guilt, out of his mind. And his heart ached, for her, for the girl—God, she’d barely been old enough to drink when the worst kind of thing that could happen to a person had happened to her. At nineteen, she should have been sneaking into bars and kissing the wrong sorts of boys, not caring for a dying fiancé who was not much older than she was.
His insomnia was getting bad again. Rather, it had been bad since March, teasing him, making him think that some nights he might actually be able to get some fucking sleep. But tonight, he didn’t want to fall back to bed, at least, not right away, not when his mind kept flitting back to the beautiful woman sleeping just two doors down from him. Alone.
Of course, he knew how it felt to be alone, didn’t he? All these twenty years later and he felt alone as keenly as his dad when his dear old mama had walked out of that trailer door and never looked back. Just because he knew it, didn’t mean he liked it. Hell, any psych major worth half their salt could connect the dots between a grown man with mommy issues and the same grown man who picked up a different chick at the bar every night of the week.
Had. Before Aubrey. Before he’d almost gotten married.
Yeah, he’d been serious about it, too. Serious enough about marriage to drive the near ten hours to her home in Billings, North Dakota, where she lived when she wasn’t working for her company’s consultant firm in Helena, hell-bent on asking her to marry him. The house had been plain, white and blue, two stories, small garden, a house she’d never invited him to—a house she’d apparently shared with her husband and three kids.
It seemed that this week was fucking feelings-sharing time, because Dec felt heat at the backs of his eyes and pulled up and out of bed before he could stop himself. He yanked on a pair of flannel pajama bottoms and stuffed his feet into fleece slippers, because damn this cabin had cold floors, and he went to the kitchen.
¼ cup sugar, ¼ cup flour, 2 tbsp cocoa, 2 tbsp oil, 3 tbsp water, pinch of salt.
He mixed the handful of ingredients around in a coffee mug and popped it into the microwave, setting the time for a minute thirty. Then he pulled open the freezer drawer and…score! Two cartons of ice cream were pushed to one side and he grabbed the Oreo mix one before shutting the freezer door.
He’d be lying to himself, and ineffectively, if he claimed that he didn’t want the brownie. Ever since he’d discovered mug recipes a few years back, he’d become something of an expert in them. But there was more to this now almost nightly ritual than just brownies and ice cream, not that he was complaining about that.
Cooking, and by extension baking, some of the simpler recipes, calmed him. Just like a really good run or hike through the mountains could help orient his compass, taking pieces of a puzzle and putting them together in just the right way, helped him to focus, sometimes even enough to sleep. He’d learned to cook by necessity, but come to appreciate it as an art after he’d returned from the Middle East, a little bit broken, wandering and disoriented. Cooking had directions.
The microwave beeped and he grabbed a dishrag to pull the hot mug out. The room smelled of rich chocolate and Dec smiled to himself. Yeah, he’d made a home for himself here, in these mountains, with his best friend turned brother all those years ago. He didn’t want for anything, not the absent mother he’d spent so many years of his life waiting for. One day, he might not even want the woman who had pulled his still beating heart from his chest and squished it under her black stiletto heels.
“I’ve never seen anyone look so angry while eating a brownie before.” She emerged from the shadows, shuffling until she was out of the hallway and standing just across the bar from him.
“I’m just thinking,” he said, hone
stly surprised to see her. Not just because of the hour, which normal people were rarely ever awake for, but because he had caught only flashes of her in the days since she’d told them everything. She’d gone down to her research early the next day and he and Micah had been called out on a job not long after, arriving only very late the night before, after rescuing two hikers—one of whom had a smashed kneecap and couldn’t climb out of a gulley. He also had the strange sense that she’d been hiding away, not the open, inviting woman she’d been in those early hours, but subdued and withdrawn. Which was why he was genuinely surprised to see her standing before him.
And a little interested, too. Because Lily Hollis had some damn fine legs. She wore only a pair of shorts, cotton and riding high on her thighs, and a Henley. A very tight Henley, because, though she was a slight, small-chested woman, her breasts strained against the V of the shirt, her nipples prominent against the fabric.
“Do brownies help you think?” she asked, settling down on one of the stools at the breakfast bar. Her smile was a little like a brownie, rich and warm and making Dec hungry.
“Do you want one?” he asked, his voice a shade gruffer than he would have liked it to be. Micah liked to tease him for being a real man about town, but Dec hadn’t had a lover since Aubrey. He’d tried, once. After a rescue mission that hadn’t ended as successfully as they had hoped—meaning it had been a downright goat fuck—he’d gone to the bar with the police team that had taken the lead on the missing persons case. One of the police officers, a young blonde woman named Katie, had been damn near as miserable as he was and, if it had been the Dec from BA, Before Aubrey, he wouldn’t have wasted any time taking care of both their pathetic states, helping them forget, just for a little while.
But he hadn’t been able to go through with it. He hadn’t cared, not that night or any of the nights after.
Until right now. Until Lily Hollis stood in his kitchen in cotton shorts, with her peaked, tempting nipples, and he didn’t just care. He craved.
“Let me try yours first,” she said. “Ooh, ice cream!” A hint of her early enthusiasm was back, and Dec just watched her for a moment, as she snagged the ice cream container and his spoon right off the counter, popping off the lid and taking a bite.
She must have been doing it on purpose. If she hadn’t, then Lily had been put on this earth to torment him, because Dec couldn’t look away from her neck, from the way she wrapped her lips around that spoon and sucked on the ice cream the way he really wished she’d be sucking on something else. Down, boy. It was a damn good thing he was standing behind the counter, that was for sure.
“Ice cream goes better on brownies,” he pointed out. He grabbed another spoon and cut into his brownie, bringing the dessert to her lips. God, she had beautiful lips. They were full and plump and a little dark and he could stand here and watch her eat brownies for the rest of his fool life.
She moaned at the taste of the dessert and Dec started counting backward from one hundred in a vain attempt to keep from growling, or doing something even stupider, like reaching across the counter and pulling her into his arms.
“You are a master cook,” she said, when she had finished her bite. “I’m sorry that I haven’t enjoyed much of your cooking while I’ve been here.”
“Or much of my company,” he pointed out. She flushed a little and darted her gaze down a fraction of an inch. “You’ve been avoiding me, Lily. I think you’ve been avoiding both of us.”
There was a long beat of silence and she stood up off the chair and moved over to the tea kettle, busying her hands and not looking at him, though, of course, she was far closer, far more touchable than she had been on the other side of the island.
“Not really,” she said, her voice far too bright.
“Lily.”
Satisfied with the tea kettle or otherwise fed up with her own pretense, she turned to face him. At this distance, he could see just how tall she was for a woman, willowy and petite, even though her head would brush the underside of his chin and he well cleared the six-foot mark. Good, he liked the idea of being able to tip his head down and…have her there.
Jesus fuck, what was wrong with him? Lily wasn’t here for sex, and it was clear that being here, out in Montana, away from her shop and back in the field, was a big enough challenge, overwhelming and more intense than she’d expected, and he was standing there thinking about her nipples. No wonder Aubrey had played him so hard. He wasn’t the kind of guy to buy a house and have kids with. Or the kind of guy to stick around for.
“Fine, yes, I’ve been avoiding you.” She held his gaze. “And Micah, too. I’d go back to the ranch and stay with Madison, but it just makes the fieldwork so much easier if I can pop over any time during the day. Plus, she’d just hover and I don’t want that, either. Sometimes she has a hard time remembering that her little sister is nearly twenty-seven.”
Which was…younger than he’d realized. Of course, if Dec had taken ten seconds out of his fantasizing then he could have done the math pretty. But twenty-six… Jesus, he was almost thirty-four.
And living in a cabin in the woods with his best friend because clearly neither he nor Micah was a functioning adult.
“She’s just worried about you,” he said, pulling out the ingredients for another brownie even though she hadn’t asked him to. “I know it’s not my place, not by a long stretch, but I’m a little worried, too. You’re good people, Lily, and Maddy—she’s family. What you dealt with, the other night and all the rest of it, that’s more than most people deal with. Ever.”
Lily licked her lips, not quite meeting his gaze.
“It’s not fair of me to ask you to just handle my breakdowns, though,” she said. “I mean, it doesn’t matter how comfortable I feel here, and I do feel comfortable, I don’t know either of you guys very well and it’s a lot to ask.”
“It’s not fair that you had to watch your fiancé die when you were twenty years old,” Dec countered. “And fine, you’re right. You don’t know either of us very well. So get to know us better. Don’t hide from us, Lily. We both know what it’s like to hurt, Micah and I. We both get it.”
A very sad, very small smile whispered across her lips.
“I hate the idea that either of you hurt,” she said, her voice quiet. “And I want to, I do. I’m just… I’m scared, Dec. I’m a scientist and I’ve been compartmentalizing Daniel and my job and my school for so long and now the data, well, everything has changed and I don’t know… God, I feel like I barely know who I am. All because I got my ass out of San Francisco and stuck my hand in the dirt, real dirt, still attached to the ground and not in a flower pot.”
“Don’t think about it like that,” he said. The microwave dinged and he opened the door, pulling out the hot brownie and placing it on the counter. “Just take one day at a time. One step at a time. Coming out here, finishing your research—it’s a freaking lot all at once. I’m not surprised you were overwhelmed.”
“Nicely phrased way of saying I had a nervous fucking breakdown,” she said. “And it’s not just that, it’s also that you guys…” She shook her head. “Never mind. You’re right. One battle at a time, right?”
He didn’t push her. Instead, he scooped a large spoonful of ice cream onto the brownie and handed it to her.
“Only way to the other side is through,” he replied, just watching her, as she dug into the dessert, intently focused and nodding slightly.
“Of course,” she said. “I just… It was five years ago, ya know? I know you can’t rush grief and healing, but part of me feels like I’m supposed to be over him by now, then I feel terribly guilty for thinking that way.” She sighed. “Do you want to join in feelings-sharing time here? What happened to make you such an expert?”
“Well, when you phrase it that way, how can I say no?” he joked, but, of course, it wasn’t a joke. Not yet, at least. Maybe in five or ten years… No, Dec couldn’t ever see it being a joke.
“I fell in love and when I
went to ask her to marry me, I met her husband.” Like pulling off a Band-Aid.
Lily froze with the spoon still halfway to her mouth. “What the ever-loving fuck?” she barreled on, not stopping long enough for him to get a word in edgewise. “That no good… You just don’t do something like that… I swear, I hope that woman never has children…”
“Three kids, too,” Dec put in, perhaps unhelpfully. Definitely unhelpfully. Except the glint of passion and anger in her eyes, at his expense, was so potent and so beautiful that he actually found he didn’t hit volcanic on the anger scale, like when he usually thought about that night in North Dakota.
“When did you find out?” She aggressively scooped more ice cream into her mouth. It was a little like watching a baby deer get angry, but Dec knew that there was serious fight inside her. God, she was still young and having gone through so much…
“March,” he said. “Micah will say I haven’t been taking it well, but I’m getting very used to the important people in my life not sticking around, so…” He hadn’t meant to say that, any of that. Hell, the last thing he should have done was tell Lily about Aubrey. He shouldn’t have opened up to her, as if she didn’t have a thousand struggles of her own, as if she wasn’t absolutely the wrong woman to be baring all his scars to, considering it was damn well set in stone that she was on a jet plane the second her research was completed—sooner, if it didn’t go according to plan.
And, Jesus, shit, that’s a real gut punch, isn’t it?
Lily mistook the expression on his face and came to stand before him, running one work-roughened hand down his cheek.