The Homecoming

by Anne Marie Winston

  He’d been there and he could relate. Not that it made him feel any better. The bottom line was that Felicia hadn’t cared for him enough to want to live. The bottom line was that he was done caring for people.

  Oh, he still loved some of the members of his family, Katie and Ivy, and especially Trent, but he had no intention of adding to that list and risking yet another knife to the heart. How many times was a man expected to get stabbed before he died? How many could he survive?

  He had a feeling he knew.

  His resolve hardened. Getting any more involved with Sydney would be a huge mistake, for both of them. She needed, deserved a man who had a future. He was a man who hadn’t survived the past.

  Sydney had to go. She had to leave the island and she had to leave it soon.

  To that end, he put in a call to Eddie Atada, asking him to come over tomorrow and examine Sydney again. If he found her well enough to travel, he, Danny, would pay for her transportation back to Kauai or one of the other islands if she preferred, until she was well enough to return to the mainland.

  Eddie agreed to come over the following afternoon, and Danny knew a sense of relief. She could leave with Eddie tomorrow. He knew Leilani already had planned tonight’s dinner, but it wouldn’t be hard to pretend to be busy through the morning hours. Sydney didn’t need to be entertained. Besides, if he told her what he intended, she would need to pack.

  He thought he’d prepared himself, but when she walked onto the lanai before dinner, it was all he could do not to stare and slobber.

  She wore a pale-blue fitted sweater and skirt in some silky material that clung to her slender frame in a way that the flowered robe hadn’t. And though she’d worn a bikini earlier this morning, she’d also worn that baggy T-shirt dress as a cover-up so he really hadn’t gotten a good look at her figure even then.

  Now… He almost groaned aloud in sheer frustration. Now she looked utterly beautiful and intensely attractive. She’d acquired a little color from their time in the sun even though he’d insisted she be careful and use liberal quantities of sunscreen. The pale blue of the simple, clinging sweater and matching skirt made her skin look tanned and glowing, and gave a shining luster to her silvery blue eyes. Her arms and legs were bare, as was a generous amount of cleavage, and his fingers actually tingled with the need to touch all that flawless, lightly muscled skin. Her hair was nothing special, a no-frills brown in a straight, shoulder-length cut. But it gleamed with red highlights and swung in a perfect bell around her bare shoulders in the dying sunlight.

  Danny closed his eyes for a moment. Maybe it was his imagination, maybe she didn’t really look that good. But when he opened his eyes, her impact hadn’t faded one bit.

  Except for the expression on her face. When he’d first walked onto the terrace, her heart-shaped face had been warm with welcome. Now she looked puzzled, and increasingly concerned.

  “Danny?” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” He cleared his throat, remembered the manners he’d learned from watching his brother Trent work a room at a business function. “Would you like a glass of wine?”

  She nodded. “That would be lovely.”

  Good. That was good. He busied himself uncorking the wine and poured a glass for each of them. “So,” he said, “do you work?”

  She laughed, sounding startled. “Of course I work! I’m a campaign manager for a big public-relations firm.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “What firm?”

  “Kremler, Dalhbright and Ackerman.”

  He nodded. “Crosby Systems has used them for a couple of things.”

  “I know.” She smiled. “We got the account for the new client-presentation package three months ago.”

  “So you’ve probably met my brother, Trent.”

  She shrugged. “We’ve sat in a meeting or two. But his wife, Rebecca, is a friend, so yes, I’ve met him. I, uh, actually was at a bridal shower for them not long ago.”

  “He’s a good guy,” Danny said quietly.

  “He’s been good to Rebecca.”

  A silence fell. Danny wondered if she was feeling as awkward as he was. “Tell me about your childhood.”

  Sydney laughed. “Nothing earthshaking to tell. I grew up with an older brother and sister in a rural county outside Seattle. My mother was a teacher, my father was a plumber. They’re both retired now. We got our first dog the year after I was born and he lived for fourteen years. We got our second dog, Bistro, the same year that Heath died and—”

  “Bistro?”

  She smiled wryly. “My sister was pretending she was a sophisticated cosmopolitan at the time.”

  “Ah. So what happened to Bistro?”

  Her eyebrows rose in question. “Nothing. He’s old and gray now but still tottering around after Mom.” She took a breath. “We all went to the same schools and graduated from the same high school. My brother Stuart played football. Shelley and I were cheerleaders—”

  “Stuart, Shelley and Sydney?”

  She shrugged, a wry smile curving her lips. “My parents were on an S-streak, I guess. Anyway, I was a Student Council representative and I sang in the choir. Went to church every Sunday and helped with Bible school. And in the summer, my dad made us kids help weed the garden, which we thought was one of the subtlest forms of torture ever invented. I still can’t stand peas after shelling bushels of them and helping my mother make split-pea soup for the church bazaar year after year.” She laughed. “I’ve never served Nick split-pea soup in his life, but I bet he’s been introduced to it by my mother this week.”

  Wow. She hadn’t been kidding about the normalcy of her growing-up years. He could barely imagine such a blessedly mundane experience. In his house, his mother had always been screaming at one or the other of them, him more often than not.

  “What about yours?”

  He glanced up from the roast beef he was cutting. “My what?”

  “Your childhood,” she prompted.

  He shook his head. “You don’t really want to hear about my childhood, Sydney. There’s nothing the least bit normal about it.”

  “I do.” There was a quiet, unshakable determination in her tone.

  He set down his fork. Very deliberately, he held her gaze across the table. “All right. My mother was an alcohol-sodden, self-centered bitch who should never have been allowed to breed. My father was a philanderer who found her so distasteful that he pretty much just distanced himself from the household. I was a lousy student. Anything else?”

  Sydney didn’t say a word. She just studied him, for so long that he began to feel ashamed of his curt recital.

  “I wonder why he married her,” she said.

  Danny uttered a bark of cynical laughter. “I’ve often asked myself that. I think she must have gotten pregnant, or else told him she was. A trick like that would be something she would do.”

  “You sound as if you’re angry at her.”

  Danny shook his head. “Not angry, exactly. My past is like a bad dream. I do best if I don’t think about it.”

  “But things are better now.” There was certainty in her voice.

  He hesitated, for some reason unwilling to be dishonest with her. “Not better, exactly. But…placid, I guess is a good way to describe life here.”

  The little dimple in her left cheek winked at him. “I refuse to believe you live here surrounded by all this beauty, where it never snows and almost always rains at night, and aren’t happy.”

  He appreciated her attempt to lighten the mood. “I guess I am,” he said. As happy as I’m ever likely to be again.

  “You are,” she said with certainty. “You know, I’ve never been anywhere outside the Pacific Northwest except for family vacations to Yellowstone, Niagara Falls and Disney World, in Florida, and a trip down the California coast, where we saw a whole lot of redwoods and wineries.”

  He had to chuckle. “Sounds memorable.”

  “Not when you’re eight and you’re stuck in th
e car for days on end. I always had to sit in the middle because Stuart and Shel would fight.”

  Again, he was struck by the utterly normal sound of her childhood memories.

  “Did you fight with Trent?” she was asking.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Are you close in age?”

  He shrugged. “Three years, which is enough to make a difference when you’re kids. And we hardly ever went to the same schools. My sisters were so much younger, I barely knew them.”

  “How many sisters do you have?”

  “Two,” he said. “Katie’s six years younger than I am and Ivy’s eight. I was sent away to school when they were still pretty young, so we never really had a chance to grow close.”

  Sydney’s blue eyes were soft and sympathetic. “You were sent away?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Better educational opportunities, all that jazz.”

  “Did you like it?”

  Did he like it? He debated telling her about the ridicule he’d endured from teachers who thought he was an easy mark because he wouldn’t talk back, about the beatings for not making eye contact. About the freezing-cold showers and the weevils in the bread. About sleeping with a broken piece of metal bedrail because that was the only way he could protect himself from the older boys’ abuse. He debated telling her that he didn’t talk for eighteen months after Trent finally convinced their father, Jack, to get him out of there. “It was hell on earth,” he finally said.

  Sydney’s eyes went wide. Apparently she’d discerned some of the truth from what he hadn’t said. “It must have been,” she said. “And you’d already been through so much.”

  “My parents didn’t know what to do with me,” he confessed before he could stop himself. “I was defiant, physically aggressive and getting completely out of control before I left.”

  “Were you always like that? Because you certainly aren’t now.”

  He shook his head.

  “So what hap— Oh.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Oh.”

  “How about counseling?” she suggested, her brows drawing together. “Did anyone ever offer you mental health help after your little friend was abducted?”

  He uttered a short, harsh bark of amusement. “Yeah. That was right at the top of my mother’s list, along with hugging her kids and doing volunteer work.” His voice was loaded with sarcasm.

  Sydney froze. He imagined she couldn’t even conceive of a childhood as chaotic and frightening and lonely as his had been. Then she reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. “I’m so sorry, Danny. No child should ever have to endure all the things you did. It’s a wonder you’re still sane.”

  He almost told her sane was a relative state of mind. “I got past it,” he said grimly.

  “And then you lost your family.” Were those tears pooling in her eyes? “How could you stand it?”

  “I’ve learned to live with it,” he said through his teeth. He really did not want to talk about this anymore.

  “It’s no wonder you’ve buried yourself in this quiet paradise.”

  “It’s not a paradise,” he said harshly, shoving back his chair and slamming away from the table. He shot her a look of bitterness, furious that she’d forced him to think about the royal screwup that was his whole life. “Don’t you get it? It’s a hideout.”

  Five

  It’s a hideout.

  There was a ringing silence in the wake of his explosion.

  Danny stood with his back to Sydney, looking out over the low balustrade around the edge of the lanai. Beyond him, across the ocean, rose the cloud-shrouded peaks of Kauai. God, he wished he could just disappear into that thick mist. He felt as if one more word would shatter him like a plate of glass.

  Sydney didn’t say another word. But after a moment he heard her chair scrape back and her dainty footsteps cross the terrace to his side.

  And then he went rigid with shock when her slim arms slipped around his waist and she pressed herself to his back.

  Holy heaven, but she felt good. Her breasts and thighs were soft against him, reminding him of how very long it had been since he’d known a woman’s touch. Then he realized she was crying. Crying for him. And somehow it wasn’t a turnoff but made him want her even more. More than the damn-near-constant wanting he’d known since she first opened those big blue eyes and blinked at him.

  “I’m so sorry that I dredged all that up,” she said, her voice breaking. “I only wanted to understand you a little better.”

  Hell. How could he stay mad after that? Her tears were soaking the back of his combed-cotton shirt and he could feel her body shaking with silent sobs.

  “Hey,” he said. With some difficulty he turned in the circle of her clinging arms, and now, sweet Lord, she was pressed against him from neck to knee, and her body flowed over the hard contours of his as if she’d been made to fit there exactly so. “It’s all right.” He put his own arms around her cautiously, overwhelmed by sensation and groping for the right words. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have been so touchy.”

  “Yes, you should have.” Her voice was muffled against his chest. “You’ve had some perfectly awful things happen in your life and I had to remind you of every single one of them.”

  “Sydney.” He pried her away just enough to loosen her grip and place a finger beneath her chin, tipping her face up and forcing her to look at him. “It’s okay. It’s not like I ever forget, anyway.”

  “Never?” Her tears were slowing to an occasional sniff that hitched her breasts against him, making it even more difficult for him to keep his mind on the exchange.

  He slowly shook his head. “Hardly ever. Except recently, sometimes…when I’m with you.”

  Her lovely, luminous eyes widened and suddenly there was an indefinable tension in the atmosphere that hadn’t been there a second ago. He knew, without a word being spoken, that she was as aware of their intimate position as he was.

  He wasn’t going to kiss her, he insisted as her gaze fell to his mouth. Nope, he absolutely was not. But he lowered his head anyway, just for one breathless instant…

  And then he was kissing her despite all his best intentions, her soft lips clinging to his, opening slightly when he traced them with his tongue, and finally opening wider to admit him as deeply as he could get. He slid his arms more fully around her, gathering her up against him, crushing her breasts against him, fitting his aching flesh to the soft notch between her thighs. The sensation was so exquisite that he groaned aloud as he changed the angle of the kiss and took her mouth again.

  How long it had been… He couldn’t sustain the thought, only knew that he hadn’t felt like this in years. Maybe never. But he didn’t want to think about the past, didn’t want to think at all. Then Sydney shifted slightly, widening her stance enough that he moved even closer, enabling him now to feel the heat between her thighs. Ah, the heat.

  She was like the lava that flowed down Kilauea’s slopes, so hot she was burning him alive, twisting and turning, her mouth hot and passionate beneath his, her body pressed against him in surrender. He might not survive this, but he wasn’t sure he cared. It was such a pleasure to feel passion again, to feel his body coming alive as it hadn’t in a long time.

  He tore his mouth from her and kissed his way down her neck, fiercely pleased when she shuddered and her head fell back. His fingers actually tingled with the need to experience her sweet flesh. He had to touch her or die, and he supported her with one arm while his other hand slipped beneath the little sleeveless sweater she wore, finding and stroking the smooth expanse of skin across her back and around her ribcage. His mouth moved lower, and her hands came up to thread through his hair and cradle his head as he found the swell of one breast and traced a path with his tongue along the lacy bra he discovered beneath her top.

  At the same time, he slid a stealthy hand up beneath the bottom edge of the lingerie, cupping a surprisingly full breast and whisking his thumb over the already taut
peak.

  Sydney gasped. “Danny!”

  “Sydney.” His voice sounded strange, rough and low. “Let me touch you.” He tugged the sweater up and pushed the bra out of his way, and he actually heard himself make a noise deep in his throat as the perfect globe of one breast was exposed. Her nipple was a deep rose, standing up tight and proud, and he bent his head to her, running his tongue around the tip and then sucking at her. His body was the one on fire now, and he shifted uncomfortably in the suddenly too-tight khaki trousers he’d worn to dinner.

  He wanted her, wanted her so badly that his thoughts were swirling around in his head like high waves around a reef. “I want you,” he murmured, lifting his mouth a fraction. “Come upstairs with me.”

  “What?” She sounded dazed and bewildered.

  “I want you in my bed,” he said, kissing her breast again.

  Sydney’s body, which had been so pliant and fluid against his, suddenly stiffened. Her hands fell away from his hair and she began to push at his shoulders. “Wait, Danny,” she said. “Stop. Please.”

  He felt like a person coming out of a deep, deep sleep. Disoriented and confused. It was a long moment before the words penetrated the sexual haze into which he’d fallen. But finally, her lack of response got through. He lifted his head and saw indecision on her passion-flushed face. It was quickly replaced by a growing wariness that stung. Surely she knew she didn’t have to be afraid of him, didn’t she? He immediately released her, taking a moment to pull her top back into place. Silently mourning the loss of both the sight and sensations of her, he stepped a pace away, turning his back and staring blindly out over the ocean. His current condition was a little embarrassing, not to mention sure to make both of them doubly uncomfortable.

  Behind him, she said, “I’m sorry, Danny. I should never have let that go so far.”