The Rebel's Return (Red River)

by Victoria James

  “Hi, Nat. You look beautiful.”

  She couldn’t speak. His eyes were telling her so much more than his deep voice. How was she going to survive this date and then let him go? Getting close to Aiden again was her biggest fear. And yet, not letting him close, and then watching him leave Red River, seemed to be even worse at this point. “Hi,” she said, busying herself with getting a long, open cardigan wrap and purse. He held the door open for her, but before she shut it, he yelled, “Bye,” to Sabrina.

  She frowned at him, just as Sabrina yelled, “Bye,” to him.

  “How did you know Sabrina was here?”

  He gave her one of those mischievous, lopsided grins that showcased the dimple and the cockiness. She should find the entire thing revolting, but she didn’t, sadly. She followed him out to the back parking lot and stopped when she spotted the motorcycle. Oh no.

  She shook her head and stopped walking. “Nope.”

  “What?”

  “Not getting on the back of that thing.”

  “Why?”

  Because it was like heading straight back into the past. It also involved body parts being smashed together in an entirely irresistible way. She wasn’t prepared for any of it. “We’ll take my car,” she said, pointing to her pink SUV.

  “I will never again enter that vehicle.”

  She frowned at him. “You have a thing against Volkswagens?”

  “I have a thing against pink.”

  “Well, then I guess I’ll go back upstairs.”

  “Get your cute ass on the back of my bike, Nat.”

  She feigned horror as a delicious heat wracked her body. Good Lord, the man could bark out orders and be unbelievably hot at the same time. “I find that offensive.”

  His lips twitched. “Hot ass?”

  She closed her eyes and prayed for self-control. “All of it.”

  She opened them when she felt him take her hand and gently tug her in the direction of the bike. “See, I’m thinking you don’t want to be close to me because you won’t be able to control yourself.”

  “Ha,” she scoffed, holding out her hand for the helmet. But he didn’t place it in her hand, he put it on her head, with an adorable little smirk. She stood there for a moment, fighting an internal battle with herself. The past was the past. What would one night do, really?

  Twenty minutes later she realized one night could be absolutely devastating. Her arms tightened around Aiden’s rock hard abs as he pulled into the driveway of a house that held her best memories of the two of them. He parked, and she let go of him, angry. She scrambled off the bike and glared at him.

  “Why are we here?”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t been here in ten years?” he asked softly. It was dusk, and a thin fog had settled around the old Colonial home that was perched on top of the hill that overlooked Red River. The windows were still boarded up, the weeds still overgrown, but they were different.

  “I came here every day for a month after you left,” she whispered, hating that tears sprang into her eyes. “I thought you’d come back, and I was so pathetic that I actually wanted you to come back. You. The guy who I thought was my soul mate. The guy I thought I was going to marry. I defended you to everyone when we were going out. Everyone had said you were going to hurt me, and I refused to believe it. I was the only one who believed in you, and in the end you lied to me, Aiden.”

  She was floored when she spotted tears in his eyes. He walked forward slowly until he was a breath in front of her. “I never deserved you. You were always too good for me, Nat, but none of my feelings for you were a lie. I was just too screwed up to do the right thing. But I’m a different guy. I’ve grown up,” he said gruffly. “Come here,” he said, tugging her hand.

  She followed him up the porch, surprised when he opened the door. The house wasn’t pitch black yet. It didn’t look dirty and dusty. He led her to the room they always went in, and she stopped in the doorway, catching her breath. Aiden walked through and began lighting the candles and lanterns that were scattered about the room—some on top of the fireplace and in front of it. Some on the blanket laid out in front of the fireplace. She swallowed against the lump in her throat. The blanket had dishes and takeout containers of food, a bottle of wine, and a vase with pink roses in the middle. The room was clean, the hardwood floors shiny. He had gone to so much trouble, and now he was standing in the middle of the room, hands in his pockets, watching her. That hint of vulnerability that had always been her undoing shone in his blue eyes, in the slight tilt of his mouth. “This place cleans up nicely, eh?”

  She bobbed her head up and down. “You did all this?” she whispered.

  He gave her a nod before he went to light a fire in the old hearth. “Don’t worry, I had this thing inspected by Jake, and it’s safe for a fire,” he said once he’d lit it. “Come sit. You hungry? I hope you still like Chinese.”

  She would have eaten anything with him right now. She sat down beside him on the blanket and didn’t say a thing as he poured them a glass of wine.

  He lifted his glass to hers. “To second chances, and the woman kind enough to give me one,” he said in a raspy voice.

  Tears sprung to her eyes. Oh God, she really was giving him a second chance, wasn’t she? “Aiden…”

  “Here, eat.” He proceeded to fill her plate with copious amounts of food. “I hope it didn’t get too cold. I had to bribe them to let me use their takeout bag to keep everything warm.” Aiden was never nervous. He never babbled, but he was now.

  Since it appeared she could no longer resist him, she wanted to know about him. His life in Toronto, his business. “So, tell me about your business, what you and Dylan created.”

  He gave her a nod, finished chewing, and then spoke. “We didn’t know what to do at first. We had no money. Hadn’t done any post-secondary. We had a friend who lived in Toronto at the time—a crappy basement apartment in the worst neighborhood in town. We crashed there. Both of us found a job at a big mechanic shop and took on as many shifts as we could and tried to save our money. It was the turning point for us. We knew there was no money to waste on drinking, going out, it was make money or basically die.”

  “Did you miss home?”

  He reached out to cup the back of her head, and it took all her self-control not to lean into him, curl up on the blanket beside his hard body. “I missed you every single day. I’d look at your picture every night before I went to sleep and every morning when I woke up. It reminded me to be a better man, to maybe make something of myself to get you back.”

  “Aiden,” she whispered not knowing whether she believed him.

  He reached into the back of his jeans and pulled out his wallet. Her heart hammered in her chest as he slipped out a small wallet-sized picture. It was the two of them in the photo booth from the Red River fall fair. She’d been sitting on his lap, his head resting on her shoulder. She had been laughing. The picture was bent at the corners, worn. “Told you.”

  She wanted to believe in him, wanted to read more into what he was saying. “Then why didn’t you come back?”

  “After we worked there for six months, we both knew we’d never get ahead. It wouldn’t be enough. We each enrolled in some online entrepreneurism programs, with the goal of our own startup. We had the idea for the Mobile Mechanic, but we had no idea what to do with it. After another six months, we came up with a business plan. We worked our asses off, day and night, saving money, planning out the business. Then we needed some venture capitalists to make it happen.”

  Somewhere along the way, he’d reached out to hold her hand. At first, it had sent that familiar jolt of recognition, of life, but now, he was rubbing her palm with his thumb, and it was sending a ribbon of desire through her core, making her have to focus very hard on what he was saying.

  “Dylan and I were lucky that we found the right guys. The next two years, all we did was work. Got up at four every morning and went to sleep at eleven every night. We did nothing ex
cept build our business. We needed to prove to everyone that we weren’t failures. We slowly got rid of a lot of the anger we had and grew up. Dylan and I wanted to help our dad.”

  “Then how could you stay away from him for so long?” She hadn’t meant it in a judgmental way. She knew his relationship with his father was complicated. She knew about how unstable Mr. McCann was. He’d always been so good to her, but it wasn’t that way with his sons.

  He let go of her hand to run his hands through his hair. “We haven’t gotten along for years. We take care of him because of guilt, I guess. Yeah, he wasn’t great, but there’s a part of me that feels bad for leaving him all alone. But there was no way we could stay here. We would have screwed up the rest of our lives. We both needed to get away from Red River, and him, to figure out how to get our crap together.”

  “Have you ever thought about moving back?”

  He looked over at her, and she felt a warm heat spread through her body. “These last few weeks, I’ve thought about it every day.”

  She looked down for a moment. “Your father would really like it.”

  He let out a grunt. “I don’t think so.”

  She reached out for his hand. “It means so much to him that you’re here, that you’re not letting him go through this alone. I think he has a hard time saying it and regrets so much. He doesn’t know how to act now.”

  He stared at her and his eyes softened slightly. “I don’t even know what I’m doing. He’s going through hell…old memories. My mom.” He ran his hand over his face. “He misses her. He’s afraid of dying.” His voice caught slightly on that last part, and Natalia reached out to grab his hand.

  “He’s going to be okay.”

  Aiden gave a nod, at once looking formidable and vulnerable. “I spent so much of my life hating him, and now…he’s just this man who screwed up, you know? And hell if I don’t see myself in him, and that’s what scares me the most.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Yes, there are similarities, but there are differences, too. You fixed up your life, at a much younger age.”

  He shrugged. “But what if I had been him? What if I had been married to someone…that I loved more than anything, and she died? How do I know that I wouldn’t fall apart and screw up my kids?”

  She quickly blinked back her tears, but it was hard, because she wanted to wrap her arms around him and hold him. She wanted to comfort the man, the boy.

  “Natalia, if you and I—”

  She shook her head and then reached out to hug him. His arms went around her instantly, and he buried his face in her neck. She felt the shudder that wracked his hard body and held on tighter, she was falling for him all over again. She quickly pulled out of his arms.

  “We should probably eat before it gets cold,” she whispered.

  He opened the packages of food, and they started eating. Natalia knew she was falling for the one guy she swore she’d never give a second chance to.

  …

  “Do you remember that night after the Christmas Fest?”

  His eyes locked onto hers, and he could swear they were right back there. How could he have forgotten that night? No woman had ever come as close to reaching his soul, or making him believe he had a soul, than Nat. She’d always had an innocence to her, or maybe it was an awareness, an insight that he had always lacked. She’d always believed in him. She’d always seen the good in him. Until he’d destroyed her.

  He didn’t know what he was even doing. All he knew was that being back in Red River made him forget all the reasons he couldn’t be with Natalia. It made him want to believe that they could find a way to make it work.

  “Of course I remember,” he said, clearing his throat.

  “It was here. The old house.”

  He grinned. “That’s why I wanted this place. That barn is in every single dream I’ve ever had about you,” he said, watching her eyes warm, and her cheeks turn a darker pink. He had no idea how he’d managed to earn her faith in him. She’d been a play-by-the-rules kind of girl. And she’d broken almost all of them to be with him. If her father had known they’d broken into this abandoned house every weekend…

  “Me, too,” she whispered.

  “So you dreamed about me?”

  He expected her to flip him off or give a sarcastic retort, but she didn’t. Tears filled her eyes for a second, and she blinked rapidly until they almost disappeared. “I’ve thought about you every single day since you left. I thought about you. I cried for you. I wondered how my instincts could have been so wrong. I thought about that night—about how close we came to giving in to what we both wanted most. I regretted not sleeping with you. I blamed myself,” she whispered.

  That was it for him. He swallowed up the space between them until he was within inches of her, and when he saw her pulse race at the base of her neck, he took that remaining space and framed her soft face with his hands. She didn’t move from him, she moved into him. But he needed to speak before he kissed her. “Not having you was the most difficult thing in the world. But you were worth waiting for, and I’d do it all over again. You were in no way responsible for what I did. That was all on me. The truth was that you were, and always will be, too good for me, Nat. The truth is that you were the best thing that ever happened to me. The truth is that you fill every fantasy I’ve ever had about a woman.”

  He lowered his mouth and finally felt the lips that he knew so well. He kissed her softly, slowly at first, because he wanted to savor the moment he’d wanted so badly for so long. She tasted like he remembered. Sweet, like icing sugar and Natalia. Her lips fit his. He pulled her closer, so that her curves fit against him and suddenly, he couldn’t do slow anymore. Her hands climbed his chest, and she tugged him down closer, making a sweet moan as his tongue entered her mouth, tasting, claiming what had always been his. Soon that wasn’t enough. He backed her against the wall, and she squirmed against him. He let his hands roam her curves, taking all that she offered.

  Somewhere deep in his subconscious, guilt started chipping through his desire-clouded head. The words he’d said to Natalia were all true, but…could he give her what she wanted? Could he move back here, start a family with her, live a life that he didn’t know he was capable of living? Five years down the road, if something happened, how would he be able to handle it? Would he be a good father? A good husband? Or would he cave like his dad? What if he turned into an alcoholic and hurt her…again, but only so much worse?

  He pulled back from the only woman he’d ever loved. Her eyes slowly opened, still cloudy with desire, her lips swollen, her cheeks flushed. God, if it were anyone else, he wouldn’t have stopped. “Aiden?” she whispered.

  He closed his eyes for a second and then gently disengaged himself, putting a healthy distance between them. She immediately wrapped her arms around herself and wariness entered her eyes.

  “Nat, I, uh…” He stopped to clear his throat, but she was already standing.

  “Don’t even say it. It’s written all over your face. You’re about to screw me over a second time aren’t you?”

  He had to look away for a moment because the hatred in her eyes made his stomach churn. “I’m not saying that. I just don’t want to do something we’re going to regret.”

  “So you’d regret sleeping with me?”

  He shook his head. “Uh, never. But I don’t want you to regret it. I know what you want. You want the house, the kids, the family, right?”

  “Is that wrong?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You just can’t give it to me.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “So in the ten years that you stayed away, you couldn’t figure out if you wanted a family or not?”

  He ran his hands down his face and searched for the words to explain something he didn’t even understand. “I have a shitty relationship with my dad. Coming back here, seeing him all the time…starting a family…it makes me feel claustrophobic.”

  She was going to
attempt to beat the shit out of him. It was probably better than tears. But then he deserved that torture, too.

  “So starting a relationship with me makes you feel claustrophobic?”

  He shook his head. “No…but I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.”

  She smiled at him, and he wondered what was happening. “Oh right, because you’re the fabulous, irresistible Aiden McCann, and you don’t want to hurt poor little Natalia again. No worries, buddy, I’m outta here.”

  “Nat,” he groaned catching her wrist and holding her still. She didn’t turn around.

  “Unless you’re about to tell me that you aren’t chicken, and that you know you want me, let go of my hand.”

  He couldn’t speak for a moment. She had a big heart, and she loved those closest to her with a fierce desperation, always wanting to believe the best of them—and that extended to him, especially at one time, and he was disappointing her again. “Aiden.”

  He stared at her, and the backs of his eyes burned. He couldn’t handle what being back in this town meant. The pressure. He’d have to see the man who reminded him of loss and neglect of his childhood every day. He’d have to forgive him. All the freedom he felt from moving away from Red River would be gone. He’d left this town, ashamed, filled with hate and regret. He couldn’t come back…even for Natalia. And if he let her in completely…and something happened to her, he knew he wouldn’t survive. He wasn’t the man she needed. He cleared his throat. “Let me take you home.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Week Seven.

  Okay so this was the week that all her training was for. This was the week it should all come together. Natalia adjusted the hoodie on her raincoat, glad that she’d splurged for the one that covered her from her head to her knees. She glanced down at her running shoes, making sure they were tied—it would be her luck to trip and fall when she was so close to actually completing her running program after so many failed attempts.