If I Stay

by Tamara Morgan

  This time, she got a reaction. He swiveled to stare at her, and even though he wasn’t looking out the windshield, he still somehow managed to get them turned around and heading safely down the winding drive—a testament to his superior driving skills.

  “Too soon?” she continued cheerfully. “I thought it might be, but I wanted to make sure.”

  “You could have just asked.”

  “Oh, okay. Ryan, are you still feeling a wee bit sensitive about crashing Mr. Montgomery’s car into a ditch?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am. Thank you for asking.”

  Unthinking, she dropped a hand to his thigh and gave it a squeeze, lingering long past the point of mere friendliness. There was a lot of strength in that thigh, power in the flex of his muscles under her fingertips. She was something of an expert on a man’s quads. Half the reason she’d stuck with dance as long as she had was her obsession with the mesmerizing movements of a male ballet dancer’s be-tighted lower half.

  He looked down where her hand met his leg and then back up at her. She let go, her face hot.

  “Don’t feel bad on my account,” she said, shaky from the contact. “That minor accident was the most excitement on four wheels I’ve ever had.”

  “It wasn’t that exciting.”

  “To you, maybe. But I don’t even speed.”

  “Ever?” Ryan glanced at her, a mischievous smile replacing his reserve, wiping away at least half a dozen years from his face. And was it her imagination, or were they suddenly moving faster than they had a minute ago? “No lead foot late at night when you’re feeling sleepy? No joyrides when you were a teenager?”

  “Of course not.” Amy sat up, feigning shock. “I’ve always been a perfect daughter. A model pupil.”

  “Who also participated in underage drinking behind laser tag dumpsters.”

  She set a hand on the door to steady herself. Okay, they were definitely going faster now. “If you must know, I also skipped chemistry once to smoke pot with the grunge kids. Except I don’t think I did it right, because I didn’t feel the least bit funny afterwards, and even got an A on my Spanish test. But you can’t fault me for trying—a girl needs some adventure to look back on with regret and longing.”

  “You want adventure?”

  “Right now?” She looked nervously around. One of the many benefits of living at Montgomery Manor was the relative isolation. Not only did the Montgomerys have enough private acreage to own the view in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree rotation, but the previous Mr. Montgomery had struck some kind of deal with the state that designated the surrounding land a wildlife preserve—even though there wasn’t much in the way of wildlife to preserve. No one could build; no one could develop; no one ever just happened to be driving by.

  The roadways transformed in front of her eyes from deserted paths of concrete to racecar tracks.

  “Better say the word soon.” Ryan was smiling. Beaming. Loving this. “I’m about to come up on the main road. Once I make that turn, it’s nothing but slow sailing and a life not worth regretting.”

  “Do it,” she breathed.

  He cupped a hand over his ear and leaned close. “What’s that? I’m not sure I heard you correctly.”

  “Let’s see what this baby can do.”

  She shrieked as Ryan did some kind of insane maneuver with the handbrake. One second they were flying over the roadway; the next, they were spinning in a perfectly controlled arc and crunching the tires to a rubber-burning halt. Her stomach rose up and settled again, making her feel as though she were on a roller coaster.

  Before she had time to do much more than admire the fact that he’d somehow turned the car around in less time than it took her to breathe, they were speeding off again, the rev of the engine building up and letting go in time to his movements on the clutch.

  Ryan paused only long enough to look over and gauge Amy’s reaction to the sudden blur of trees all around them. “Drive it like you stole it,” he joked when it appeared she wasn’t going to ask him to stop.

  As they whipped over the familiar roadways, he didn’t push the speedometer nearly as hard as he could have—not even close to as fast as his foot itched to go—but it was enough to remind him of everything he’d lost. He’d forgotten how incredible it felt to do this sober, not so much punching a clock as it was fulfilling some deep-seated, unnamed need to soar.

  They flew over a small wooden bridge that ran over the actual Ransom Creek for which the town had been named, landing smoothly before turning at a sharp sixty-degree angle. Amy gasped next to him, and, with another careful turn of the wheel, he brought the car to a skidding halt.

  “Wait—that’s it?” Amy pressed her feet against the floor, as if she could will the car moving again. “You can’t stop now. We barely got going.”

  He turned to study her, his heartbeat fast but steady, adrenaline bringing clarity to his thoughts. Racing always had that effect on him—stripped him of everyday nerves and worries, smoothed out his troubles so he could see them clearly, lying out flat like the road ahead of him.

  And for the first time in a long time, he could see his troubles clearly. He also didn’t particularly like what he found, obvious to the point of obscenity. His problem wasn’t this place or the people in it.

  The problem was him.

  There was no doubt in his mind anymore. He had to get this life back. He had to. Driving was like oxygen to him, and he hadn’t realized until this exact moment that he wasn’t suffering from a blow to the pride or a loss of income or even loneliness here in Ransom Creek.

  He was suffocating, clear and simple.

  “A taste is all you get,” he said, more for his own benefit than Amy’s. “I normally do this kind of thing on a closed circuit and with safety gear on. I’m not taking any chances with you on board.”

  “Aww,” she cooed. “That’s so sweet and condescending.”

  Her laughter reeled him back in, ripping him from the past, dissolving the rosy glow of the future, plunging him back in the here and now. Before he knew what was happening, he leaned across the gap and captured her laughter with his lips. He couldn’t help it—dizzy from the realization that he’d never be a normal man with normal desires, knowing that he’d do whatever it took to find a way out of here—he had to know what the kind of easy joy she had to offer tasted like.

  Candy and grapes. She tastes like candy and smells like grapes. It was a combination he never knew was intoxicating, a rush of sensations that overpowered him and threatened to topple everything.

  Unable to stop himself, he deepened the kiss, the high of the car ride wiping him of his inhibitions and reservations in one fell swoop. Capturing her bottom lip between his teeth, he forced his way in enough to stroke his tongue against hers, enjoying the soft, sweet texture as her mouth opened to let him in.

  Her laughter turned to a sigh. Her sigh turned to a moan. And he found himself falling further and further into each progression until he realized his hands had somehow found their way around her.

  He jumped back, mouth open, breath coming fast, his heartbeat jumpstarted in ways that no amount of stunt driving could ever manage.

  Wrong. This is wrong, no matter how incredibly right it feels. What kind of a man dreamed of leaving one second and grounded himself in a woman the next? He was escorting Amy on a date with another man, for chrissakes. He’d been hired by their shared employer to spy on her in exchange for his golden ticket home. There were so many blurred lines here he got cross-eyed just thinking about them.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, staring at his lap to avoid the flushed look of surprise on her still-parted mouth. She was dazed and soft and in danger of getting kissed again. “We should probably get going. Jake is waiting for us.”

  “Jake?” Amy echoed. “Oh. Yeah. Jake.”

  Ryan braved a peek at her.
She had a hand pressed to her lips, her eyes sparkling with some sentiment he couldn’t unravel. But it didn’t look like loathing—not that Amy could ever loathe anyone.

  She offered him a weak smile. “We don’t want to be late. For all his lazy airs, he is kind of a stickler for punctuality.”

  Ryan’s head pounded as he pulled the car back onto the road, this time taking all the turns at a twenty-mile-an-hour pace that he controlled as carefully as he did his emotions.

  “Is that what you see in him?” he asked, knowing as he did that the question was quite possibly the stupidest one to ever cross his lips.

  “His punctuality?” Amy frowned and then quickly turned to the window. “Yes, Ryan. The most attractive thing about any man is his ability to be in the right place at the right time. The best love stories can be boiled down to nothing more than a case of impeccable timing.”

  He didn’t ask the question that burned in his throat and in his mind: Did that mean he was too early?

  Or am I much too late?

  Chapter Nine

  The day would have been vastly improved if someone had thought to bring candy.

  Amy was a big believer that candy made any situation better. Oh, she knew there were some people who drowned their sorrows in alcohol, like Ryan. He might not like to talk much about his past, but you could tell, just by looking at him, that every day was a struggle not to give in to the strong pull of taking-the-edge-off.

  A great many other excesses could be seen beckoning to the people she knew and loved. Her mom couldn’t go a day without her rhododendrons. Jake was a big fan of mirrors and any reflective surface that caught the light. Evan and Lily needed each other in a way that made her feel the ache of only childhood in ways she never had before.

  But her? She mostly wanted a huge chocolate bar. Maybe with nuts in it. Something fancy like macadamia nuts or pecans, though—not walnuts. Never walnuts. Walnuts were like a squirrel exhibit at the zoo. You know they’re technically animals, and someone must care about them, but who really chooses squirrels over something cool like elephants or lemurs or penguins?

  “Amy! Are you even listening to me?”

  She sat up, startled out of her daydream and salivating more than was seemly for a public place. “Of course I am. That’s fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.”

  Her mother clucked and settled more firmly into her beach chair. “You have no idea what I just said, do you?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she murmured. She followed suit, wiggling her shorts-clad bottom into the sand to find a more comfortable position. Huge sunglasses hid most of the glare from the overhead sun and she fought a sleepy yawn. Even though the day was winding down and the spring air growing chilly, the Silver Sands Beach had a way of capturing the light and holding it close, reluctant to let it go without a fight. “You were telling me about that thing. The one you did. That one time. In that one place.”

  Her mom reached over and swatted her arm. “I was saying you should go over and play volleyball with the two young men who keep looking over here. I think they need a third.”

  That got her attention. She flipped her sunglasses up and peered around, disappointment settling alongside the growing hunger pangs in her stomach. Neither Jake nor Ryan was looking at her. They barely even remembered she was here.

  “Are you kidding? They don’t want me to play. They’re having a showdown to prove who’s worth more as a man. Give a guy some big white balls to play with, and all of a sudden he’s twelve and showing off in the locker-room showers again.”

  Her mom also lifted off her sunglasses and leaned closer, an unmistakable purse to her lips. “Is that what they’re doing?”

  “Showing off?” Um, yes. A thousand times over, yes. Not only had Ryan jumped away from that kiss in the car as though she was some kind of sexual leper, but he’d pretty much taken over her date with Jake, leaving her with no chance of winning anyone’s affections today.

  It all started when Jake had settled into the front seat of the car while she and her mom wedged into the back. His snide comment of “This is the best you could do?” to Ryan became a heated discussion on how difficult it was to rent a luxury car in a town like theirs, and things had only escalated from there. It was now officially a pissing match—and both men were pointing straight into the wind and letting it all go.

  Amy looked over to find that her mom’s pursed lips were trained on her own head now. “Sweetie, they’re not showing off over you, are they?”

  “Please.” Amy released a long scoffing noise that became a cough and then a throat gurgle and then possibly fluid down the wrong tube. “That’s absurd.”

  “Amy Winifred Sanders.”

  “I didn’t do anything! I could melt into the sand right now and neither one of them would notice or care.”

  She could be standing there naked and both men would probably throw her a towel and tell her to stop interrupting their game. She’d never felt less desirable in her entire life. How Ryan could kiss her like that only to blink, apologize and start talking about the weather was beyond her scope of imagination. She’d been ready to combust on the spot. Hell—she still was. Every time she started thinking about the way he’d just grabbed her and thrust his tongue into her mouth, taking control of her the same way he did a car, she felt her pulse pick up and her insides liquefy.

  She tried fanning herself with her hand, but it only made things worse.

  “Men only show off when they’re fighting for a female’s attention. It’s the way of the entire animal kingdom.” Her mom leaned closer, as if reading the hot-blooded desire Amy was trying so desperately to conceal. “This is not okay, young lady. You promise me right now there is nothing going on between you and Jake Montgomery.”

  Jake? He was who her mom was concerned about? “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. He’s been around the block so many times he’s worn a path into the sidewalk.”

  “Then why are you so red?”

  “It was bright out today. I’m probably sunburnt.”

  “This isn’t a joking matter. You know I love that boy to death, but he is not the man for you. I’m pulling a maternal veto on this one.” The ice in her mom’s voice could have frozen the entire Atlantic, had she directed the words along the lapping blue waters instead of at Amy. “Promise me you won’t have anything to do with him.”

  “It’s not what you think—”

  “Promise.”

  Amy didn’t respond right away, even though she had nothing to lose from reassuring her mother. She might be enjoying spending time with Jake, glad to have him back in her life and showing an interest, but she wasn’t about to start crying into her morning cereal over a man.

  At least, not that one.

  She lifted a hand to shield her eyes as she took in the pair of men standing a short distance away. Sometime in the past five minutes, they’d divested themselves of their shirts and decided to play a game that looked less like beach volleyball and more like let’s see who can spike the ball harder into the other guy’s face.

  She bit her lower lip as she watched. It was an undeniable fact that beach sports made the most out of a pair of hard heads and harder bodies. Sure, she’d seen more than her share of the summer Olympics before, tuned in to the swimming and beach volleyball for a bit of eye candy before guiltily showing support for the ping-pong team, but she’d never personally known her oglees before.

  Jake was tall and chiseled like a fine sandstone column. Beautiful in a godlike sort of way. Ryan was...unf. Ryan was one of those guys who didn’t have a single inch of fat on him but still wasn’t over-the-top muscular, both lean and bulky at the same time.

  Strong. He looks strong.

  “What about Ryan?” Her mom’s gaze followed Amy’s. “I always thought he was cute.”

  Yes,
Mother. Cute. As if that word could possibly contain the overwhelming sensation that she’d like to lick the sand from his shoulders and never stop until she’d explored every last inch of his body.

  “Ryan is...complicated.”

  “Complicated is good. Complicated keeps the mystery going.”

  Amy stared at her mother as if she were from a strange land—a land where parents urged their children to fall for men with enormous chips on their shoulders and confusingly hot-cold signals. A land where men went without shirts and drove fast cars and made swoony feelings congregate in unladylike places before unceremoniously tossing a girl aside.

  “Besides,” her mom continued, “you know John wouldn’t have hired him if he wasn’t a good person. John has always had a sense about these things.”

  To date, her mother was the only person in the world who dared call Mr. Montgomery by his first name. Even Serena had the disturbing habit of referring to him either by his title or as Big Man. To be fair, she called Evan her Little Man, so it might have been a family thing instead of an anatomical one.

  God, she hoped so.

  Amy got to her feet and brushed off the seat of her shorts. Her mom’s hand stopped on her arm. “Where are you going?”

  “To go stop their competition sometime before the sun goes down. If we don’t eat soon, I’m going to have to start fishing for our dinner.”

  Her mom didn’t let go. “Remember what I said, Amy. Jake is trouble. He’s a good boy at heart, and we all know he’s got a way with the ladies, but you have to remember that more than all that, he’s...”

  “Complicated?” Amy supplied.

  Her mom swatted her on the bottom. “Don’t you dare. Smartass.”

  * * *

  “Hey, there. My mom and I were wondering if we should start gathering some of the dead, washed-up crabs on the beach to eat, or if maybe you have alternate dinner plans.”

  Ryan stopped in the middle of serving the ball and turned to face Amy. His arms fell to his sides at the sight of her, sleepy and glowing, a woman who’d been lolling in the sun for hours. Her loose-fitting shirt slipped off one shoulder; her hair was tousled, her skin radiant.