A Time for Us

by Amy Knupp

  He went in and headed across the station toward the sleeping quarters without looking in Clay’s direction. As he passed the kitchen, though, Dylan’s voice reached him from within.

  “Rangers won, dude.”

  Cale grunted an unintelligible response and continued on his way. His colleagues had likely gotten used to his antisocial ways after Noelle’s death, but in the past few months, he’d made an effort to come out of it, to be more social. He’d started going out for burgers or beer when he was invited and had been told by his painfully honest sister that he was more pleasant to be around in general. Tonight they probably all thought he was having a relapse of grief and grumpiness...and maybe that was exactly what it was.

  He went into his tiny private room in the officers’ section and closed the door without turning on the light. He pulled his shirt over his head and hung it on the doorknob so he could find it easily should an alarm come in. Lined his shoes up right by the door and draped his pants at the foot of the bed. Though he was doubtful he’d sleep, he lay on the single bed on his back, not bothering to pull the blankets back over him.

  He should never have let Rachel kiss him. A part of him had known that at the time, but that part had been easily crushed by the desire the very first touch of her had awakened in him. By allowing the kiss to go on, by touching her the way he had, by being so undeniably into the moment, he’d led Rachel on. Big-time. He couldn’t blame her for being shocked and puzzled when he’d pulled away from her, and then what had he done? Had he tried to explain himself or even assuage her feelings? Oh, hell no. He’d acted like a prick and let her walk away thinking he’d hated every second of it.

  He hadn’t hated it. At all. Until that moment when he’d realized what he was doing—kissing Noelle’s twin sister.

  What a weak bastard he was. He hadn’t so much as thought about kissing a woman since he’d lost Noelle, not even on the two dates he’d been on, and here he was letting Rachel climb all over him. She may have initiated it, but he’d done plenty to keep it going. Had wanted to keep it going until the inevitable comparisons had filled his mind.

  It was wrong and, to use Rachel’s word, twisted. Kissing sisters was bad enough. Not his style at all. Twins? Yeah, that was tacky as hell. Moving on to the second one because the first one had died? People would have a goddamn field day with that. With good reason.

  Had he just been into it because she looked so much like Noelle? The sisters were so opposite, personality-wise, and they had their differences physically, as well, though they were subtle and probably unnoticeable to the casual observer. Cale had always been able to tell them apart easily, but was it their similarities that had drawn him in last night? Was he sick enough in the head that he was searching for Noelle in Rachel?

  As bad as that would be, the truth was even less acceptable. He’d known damn well whom he was locking lips with.

  He liked Rachel. He had ever since the night he’d met her. The social insecurities that she’d been so open about with him since their very first conversation gave her an honest vulnerability that was impossible not to like. He admired her dedication to her career, respected the way she was so purpose-driven in everything.

  And then there was the side of her that was drowning from the death of her twin sister.

  Cale was beginning to suspect she hadn’t yet gotten through the grieving process that counselors were so damn gung-ho about. Since she’d been back on the island, the two of them had had multiple discussions about Noelle, tough ones filled with memories that hurt like a bitch for both of them, and yet...he’d never seen her shed a tear. She had a knack for changing the subject before talk or memories could go too deep. He wasn’t an expert on grief, but he’d done enough reading to know there were steps, lots of them, all of them a gigantic barrel of suck, and he’d been through them. Denial. Anger. Sadness so deep there’d been days he’d struggled to get out of bed to pee. Other steps he couldn’t recall but he’d bet money that Rachel hadn’t been through them. Hadn’t let herself really feel any of the emotions that were supposedly so damn normal and were said to be the key to healing. She didn’t stop working long enough to. And while his eyes tended to cross at the mention of psychobabble crap, he didn’t doubt there was something to working through the stages of grief in order to move on with one’s life.

  Rachel was definitely still struggling hard with her sister’s death—there was no question about it. She was a bundle of contradictions. She didn’t want to talk about her twin in any detail, and yet she’d dared to take a couple of baby steps on her own—like opening up the bedroom door and looking inside. Volunteering for the fundraising group. Most people probably thought very little about it, but Cale knew how damn hard every single thing was—because he’d lived it. He’d had to do it, too.

  She didn’t have many friends, and it was obvious to him she could use one. The kiss on the beach—that was just a moment that had spiraled out of control. A little bit of bad judgment. They’d both been wrapped up in the discussion about Noelle and their emotions had taken a wrong turn, convinced them temporarily that there was something there when there really wasn’t. It was a mistake that had caught him off guard. It wouldn’t happen again. He wouldn’t be surprised by a false sense of attraction, and he wouldn’t give in if Rachel was. It was all totally controllable.

  With that realization, he relaxed a bit, turned on his side and stopped staring toward the ceiling he couldn’t actually see in the darkness.

  Cale needed to make sure Rachel knew he’d been upset with himself last night, not her. That he liked her and respected her, that they should still go on platonic ice cream dates. There was no reason to let one crazy mistake screw things up between them. It would have meant a lot to Noelle to know that he and Rachel could get to know each other better. From what he could tell, Rachel needed someone, and he was the best person to step in and be there for her.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  RACHEL SHOULD HAVE followed her gut and not ridden with her mom to the benefit-planning meeting. She didn’t want to go at all, and had, in fact, manipulated her work schedule so that she’d had a shift on meeting night. It was just her bad luck that this week’s meeting had been switched to Thursday. But she knew full well that if she skipped it, Cale would guess it was because she was embarrassed as hell about what had happened last night. God knew she was, absolutely, but she didn’t want to advertise it.

  Her mom, of course, was adamant about getting there early, which totally cramped Rachel’s style of showing up when there were no seats left around the table. It was so much easier to hide—and leave early—when she could sit along the outside of the room near the door. It also made interacting with the other volunteers harder to do, which was the way she preferred it.

  “I’ll be in in a few minutes,” Rachel told her mom as they approached the restroom. “Gonna stop here.”

  “That’s fine,” her mom said, distracted by her own thoughts of the upcoming meeting. Rachel breathed out in relief as she entered the deserted ladies’ room and her mom’s shoes clicked on down the tiled hall of the library’s wing of meeting rooms and offices. Now, if only Rachel could find a legitimate excuse to pass the next sixty minutes in here....

  A short, hefty woman wearing chained glasses came in, so Rachel plunked her purse down on the counter and rummaged through it as if she were searching for makeup. The search was futile, as she didn’t have anything besides cherry ChapStick in there. She pulled it out and applied it as the woman went in the stall, then fumbled around some more. A brush. Something to do. She ran it through her already untangled hair, making no impact on her appearance.

  When the toilet flushed, Rachel scurried into the other stall even though she didn’t need it. Waiting it out as the woman washed and dried her hands, which was of course taking aeons, she closed her eyes and wondered what the hell she was doing. Hiding out in a library bathroom stall? For real? She was a highly competent physician. Not a chicken.

  Much.
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  The woman left and Rachel checked her watch. Two minutes till the meeting started. It was better than being ten minutes early.... If she stalled too much longer, her mom just might send a rescue crew to find her.

  She walked out, took her time washing her hands and walked at a leisurely pace toward the meeting room.

  As soon as she went into the room, she realized her plan to pretend Cale wasn’t there was unrealistic and immature. Doubly so when he was looking straight at her and had a hand on the empty chair next to him, obviously indicating she could sit there.

  Not. A. Chicken.

  She wasn’t able to paste a grin on her face, but she did force her legs in his direction and sat down next to him just as her mom started the meeting.

  On the bright side, Rachel had avoided small talk with him. What, exactly, could one possibly chat about with the guy she’d thrown herself at not even forty-eight hours before?

  Mariah and Eddie sat on the opposite side of the table toward the other end, but Mariah made a point of smiling at Rachel, and Rachel offered an awkward wave in return. Familiar faces helped somewhat. Even though Noelle’s name had already been spoken once, the meeting itself wasn’t as bad as it had been last week—so far.

  Rachel sat back in her chair, determined to make it all the way through the meeting without wimping out again. She tuned in to hear Trina, one of Noelle’s best friends, give her update on volunteers for the event itself. Trina went into detail about how many volunteers she was going to need for every single aspect of the concert. Rachel’s attention wandered as she began to relax.

  Facing the table straight-on since her mom, at the head of the table, had opened up discussion to the rest of the group, Rachel couldn’t help but notice Cale’s hand resting on his notepad to her left. His fingers were long, the backs of his hands tanned. The body hair on his arms was a shade lighter than the hair on his head, almost light enough to consider blond, most likely from the sun. She couldn’t help thinking about the strength in his fingers, in him, to do his job. Even though he was primarily a firefighter, she knew a lot more about what he did on medical calls, and picturing him in action as she stared at his hands made her shiver. She’d bet in addition to saving lives and putting out fires they could do magic on a woman’s body....

  God, Rachel!

  Her cheeks burned as she reined in her thoughts. Then she made the giant mistake of glancing at his face to see if he’d noticed her fixation. It was too much to ask for him to be sidetracked by something, anything, else—he was looking straight at her and flashed a heart-gripping smile as if to put her at ease.

  Such a beautiful, kind man.

  Her sister’s man.

  Rachel looked away quickly as guilt washed through her and threatened to overwhelm her—and maybe make her puke, to boot.

  Focus on the meeting. The benefit. Anything but him...

  As the head of the finance committee, a woman she didn’t know, started reciting the latest numbers, Rachel straightened in her chair, took the cap off her pen and began taking notes in earnest. The numbers, without context, meant nothing to her, but she was damn well going to get every last one on paper.

  When the finance queen took a break for a swallow of bottled water, Rachel checked her watch. Only forty-four minutes and twenty-five seconds to go, if her mom stuck to her plan for an hour-long meeting.

  When it finally ended—seven minutes late, not that Rachel was counting each torturous second—she hopped up, wishing she could make a run for it, or do anything other than the thing she’d made up her mind she needed to do. She turned toward Cale and took a covert deep breath. Making contact with his emerald eyes nearly took that breath right back out of her.

  “Hi,” she said stupidly.

  “Hey. Imagine meeting you here. Glad you made it.”

  “It wasn’t as bad as the first one I went to.” Unless you counted the horrendous episode of guilt she’d brought on herself. “Can we...?” She gestured to the hallway with her head. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Sure.” He put his hand out for her to precede him.

  “I’ll be outside,” Rachel said to her mom as they walked by her.

  “Oh. Is Cale giving you a ride home?” Jackie eyed them with curiosity.

  “No,” Rachel answered.

  “Yes,” Cale said at the exact same time. “I can give you a ride if you need one.”

  She would walk home as soon as she said what she needed to say to him. She went out of the room ahead of him without another word to her mom.

  Without thought, Rachel proceeded to the shore, her eyes on a pair of kayaks gliding on the bay as the sun dropped behind the horizon of the mainland. Cale came up beside her and surveyed the awesome scene before them.

  “I guess I missed this while I was in the Midwest,” Rachel said.

  “You guess?”

  “I never gave it much thought while I was in school doing my residency. I was always busy,” she admitted. “But there’s nothing like this in Iowa.”

  He chuckled. “I don’t imagine there is.”

  She took in the muted colors as dusk descended on them—the lavender and blue-gray of the sky, the same reflected in the water, the dark silhouettes of the towering palms on the opposite shore.

  “What did you want to talk to me about?” Cale asked, rattling the calmness she was trying to absorb from the scenery into every cell.

  “I’m sorry,” she blurted out before her nerves could make her overemotional.

  There was a pause before he said anything, but Rachel refused to look at him.

  “For?”

  As if he didn’t know. As if it weren’t blatantly hanging there between them like a cringe-worthy neon sign.

  He was going to make her say it.

  “Let’s see,” she began, trying to make her tone flippant. “For kissing you. Multiple times. For crawling all over you. For making a fool of myself. Embarrassing both of us. Screwing over my sister.” Her pulse throbbed in her temples. “I think that about covers it.”

  “Is that all?”

  “For now. I...I don’t know what came over me.”

  He touched her elbow, nearly sending her into the stratosphere because she wasn’t expecting it. He pulled his hand back as if realizing she was tightly wound and that any kind of physical contact between the two of them was, yeah, a sensitive issue.

  “Rachel,” he said softly, maintaining a good eight inches between their shoulders as they stood side by side. “You are not going to take the blame for any of that—”

  “Too late.”

  “Nope. No one needs to take any blame. It was just...a crazy few minutes.”

  Crazy awesome few minutes, but she couldn’t let herself dwell on that. That would just make her sick to her stomach again. Instead, she latched onto what Cale was trying to say. Attempted to excuse what she knew was inexcusable.

  “We got caught up in talking about sad things....”

  Cale nodded. “We crossed a line we shouldn’t have. It was a mistake.”

  “Huge.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  She breathed out and nodded slowly. Absolutely right it wouldn’t happen again. Between the look of remorse on his face when he’d pulled away last night and the toxic guilt that had been so overpowering that at times she felt as if she might keel over from it ever since... No. Not going to happen again.

  “I wouldn’t mind hanging out sometimes, though,” Cale continued, and Rachel turned her head sharply toward him. He shrugged. “It’s taken me a while to be social again.” He gave a short, self-deprecating laugh. “A long while. Over a year. But it’s still tough to go out and act happy some nights, you know?”

  “So you want to hang with me and be unhappy?”

  He laughed again, this time more genuinely. “I don’t feel like I have to act around you.”

  Something about the intimacy of that statement made her heart constrict. She wasn’t well seasoned in the art of friendship,
with males or females, so it was easy to convince herself that was what the flutter was about. “You don’t.”

  “It’s comfortable,” he said, sounding a little unsure of himself, and that made Rachel want to reach out to him.

  She didn’t, though.

  “I get it,” she said as the coil inside her that’d been tightened until it was about to snap slowly unwound. She hadn’t realized it until now, but in addition to everything else she’d been feeling all day, she’d been terrified she’d scared him off by bumbling right over that line he’d mentioned. She couldn’t have what she wanted with him—for too many reasons to count—but she hated the thought of not having him in her life in some capacity, even if it was just as someone she could sit next to at planning meetings for a few weeks. Anything more would be a gift.

  They stood there watching the bay darken for a few minutes, the silence between them almost, like he’d said, comfortable. The small bit that was tense was all her doing—she had no doubt. And she could deal with that.

  “I promised your mom I’d get you home,” Cale said once the light had completely disappeared from the surface of the water, turning the bay into a dark abyss. “Ready?”

  “I honestly planned to walk.”

  “Not happening.”

  “Have you forgotten the Culver stubbornness?”

  “Are you chicken to be alone with me now?” Cale’s tone was light, and it was obvious he was joking with her, but the word chicken hit a raw spot.

  “I’m just going to pretend that doesn’t sound in the least bit egotistical,” Rachel said, throwing it back at him. “Bring it on. Give me a ride, Sir Gallant.” She turned and walked toward the parking lot.

  “Careful. That kind of sounds dirty.” Cale fell into step next to her, and Rachel lightly smacked his arm.

  They rode with the windows of the Sport Trac down all the way, the temperate night air blowing through the cab and making it tough to talk. But that was okay. Rachel didn’t feel the need for mindless chatter, anyway.