The Majors' Holiday Hideaway

by Caro Carson

  Shut the hell up, already. I don’t want to lose India.

  But he would lose her. Tomorrow morning, his sister would bring back his daughters. He couldn’t wait to see them, to hear their voices, to hold them, to smell them. If he hadn’t had India this week, he would have gone crazy from missing them.

  He tugged off one leather glove with his teeth and tossed it into his toolbox. He dug in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the two pennies. He let them sit in his palm a moment, then he closed his hand around them loosely and shook them a bit, letting them jingle together. Poppy and Olympia would be back where they belonged, thank God, because without them, he might go crazy from missing India.

  While India drove to San Antonio, while her borrowed house was being filled with noxious fumes, he would assemble his artificial Christmas tree. Melissa had bought it the year she was pregnant, declaring that she couldn’t run a vacuum to suck up any falling pine needles that year, not when she was so big. Of course, Aiden could have run the vacuum for her, but Melissa had still wanted the artificial tree because the following year, she’d said confidently, it would let them avoid worrying about two babies picking up pine needles and putting them in their mouths.

  That had been before they’d known anything about real babies, of course. The next year, two real-life babies had crawled over a safety gate and pulled off an entire artificial branch. He and Melissa had been shocked by their determined little teamwork. Aiden smiled a bit at the memory. He jingled the pennies some more.

  Real life. Real babies. Tomorrow, things would go back to normal.

  Oh, that poor widowed father...

  Women would continue to pay attention to him, melting with sympathy at his situation, expecting to take him to bed, wanting to offer the widower gentle comfort. It occurred to him, for the first time, that he’d probably been the object of more than one mercy screw.

  Sex offered out of pity. He tossed the nail punch into his toolbox and hooked his hammer on his leather belt with a little savagery. If they’d started their dates expecting him to be grateful for their mercy in bed, they’d ended by trying to catch their breaths after a climax for which they were always the grateful ones. Surprise, surprise, ladies.

  He couldn’t go back to that.

  After tonight, that would be all there was. Again.

  He left the bookcase and yanked open the fridge, grabbed one of his beers and downed half of it in one go. It didn’t help. His future love life looked exactly like the past two years; a murky jumble of carrying on with life, enjoying pleasure where he could, getting by with less. There were only two bright spots: Melissa and India. The time between them? Nothing he wanted to go through again.

  How long ago did his wife die? He must be lonely, raising those girls by himself...

  “Here you are. I was looking for you to let you know my secret-recipe spaghetti sauce is almost done. We can eat anytime.” India’s voice washed over him, clearing away the ugliness of his memories.

  He didn’t look at her, not yet.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” she said.

  He laughed to himself at nothing remotely amusing as he jingled the pennies in his hand.

  India came up to him, touched his hand. “You actually have pennies? Two thoughts, then.”

  Emotion kept Aiden silent. He watched India’s thumb smooth over the black-domed onyx of his West Point ring as he held the pennies. The sight stirred something in him, an awareness of the stages of his life: his schooling and career, his first wife and their children...and the stage he wanted to move to next.

  I’m not quitting on you, he’d said.

  I won’t compete with a child for a man’s time and attention, she’d said, so unaware that it was the only future they might possibly have.

  “Oh, wow. This is the bookcase? It’s so cool.” She left him to run her hand over the tree’s branches, in no danger of catching herself on a nail because he was a father who took care of things like that. “When you said a bookcase, I had no idea it was going to be a tree. You’re so creative.”

  “I saw one on TV and copied it.” But it was a warm feeling to see her admiring his work. The tree was like a child’s drawing of a Halloween tree, leafless branches angling every which way from a central trunk. The books that would be lined up on each branch would be the leaves.

  “This is a Christmas gift?” She turned to him suddenly, her fingers suspended in the air over a branch. “For the family that’s coming. You made somebody a bookcase from scratch? I wish I had relatives that made me something this cool.”

  “It’s for a little girl.” He watched India carefully, aware of every nuance in her expression. Her eyebrows lifted a little, mild surprise, and then the look came over her. That look.

  “Oh, that’s so sweet.” She tilted her head and practically cooed over him. “She’ll love it.” It’s so precious, the way you care for those girls.

  God, he hated it.

  He didn’t want it, not from India. Her hands were touching her heart now—did she know it? She was melting, same as all the others.

  He and India hadn’t started like all the others. They’d been equals, stripping themselves down the first morning they’d met. She hadn’t pitied him. She’d been angry with him, clenching her hands together under her chin, kneeling over him, angry that he’d pitied her. Furious that he’d think she didn’t want the heat that had been burning them up in bed.

  She was looking at him now like he was some kind of adorable puppy.

  That is not me, damn it. You know me. Remember me.

  Whatever the look on his face was, it made her smile fade and her eyes open a little wider. “What—what’s up?”

  He looked into those gray eyes as he yanked off the other glove. He threw it on the cement floor just as he reached her, crowding her back against the wall. For one suspended second, they stared at one another, and then he was kissing her hard, taking her mouth, swallowing her gasp. She made a sound in her throat, a little surrender, and then her tongue was smooth against his.

  He raised his hands to hold her head, to angle her face the way he wanted it, but he had the pennies in one hand. Greedy for her, impatient, he dropped them on the floor, barely hearing their metallic pings as she whispered his name against his jaw.

  She knew him now, and he knew her, every breath. Knew those fingers digging into his right shoulder. Knew what she wore under those black leggings: nothing.

  She shifted sharply when his hips pressed into hers—he was wearing his tool belt. He backed off a few inches, still kissing her, shorter tastes, letting them both catch breaths between kisses as he jerked down the waistband of her black leggings a few inches, then slid his hand where it wanted to go. She was all heat, smooth and slick. “Already wet,” he murmured over her lips, a lover’s compliment.

  “Because you’re with me.”

  “Good.” He pressed her against the wall once more, giving in to a darker, possessive feeling. “I’ll be with you all night.”

  He forced himself to let up, to ease back and keep himself and his damn belt far enough away so that he wouldn’t hurt her—but he made demands with his hand. She gasped, a sound of anticipation. Her eyes were open, unfocused, looking at the blue sky beyond his shoulder as he played her with his fingers. She was going to look rumpled and sleepy, right here in the garage where he’d first laid eyes on her—right here, right...about...now.

  “Aiden,” she breathed as she shuddered against the wall, as she pulsed against his hand. “Aiden,” she breathed afterward, as if his name was all she could think of. “Aiden.”

  He kissed her softly. “Yes, this is me.”

  But when she went back in the house to check on her farewell dinner, he bent to scoop up his pennies once more, and finished the bookcase.

  * * *

  Twilight was turning into night.

 
Not yet. It’s not dark yet.

  India rested her cheek against Aiden’s shoulder. He was sitting in a teak deck chair, and she was sitting sideways across his lap, like a child. She wasn’t little, but she didn’t care. It was cozy to have his arms around her, to feel his warmth against her.

  It was very chilly this evening. Even Fabio had chosen to stay in the warm kitchen, but neither of them had wanted to break the mood and go inside for a blanket. With a long reach, Aiden had snagged one corner of the patio table’s vinyl tablecloth, and he’d pulled it over them. The flannel backing was actually soft and warm, but the red-and-white checked vinyl made crinkling, wrinkling noises whenever they shifted positions. It should have been ridiculous. They should have been laughing about it.

  They weren’t.

  The landscape undulated toward the setting sun, reminding her of an ocean. “It’s like we’re on a cruise ship.”

  “What is?”

  She had a hand tucked under her chin. She held it out and made a little wave motion. “The land. See the waves?”

  “I do now.”

  She tucked her hand back under the tablecloth, out of the cold. “It’s really like a cruise, isn’t it? This week has been our vacation. We’ve had a shipboard romance.”

  “The best one.”

  India watched the waves turn gray in the gloaming. “We can’t stop it from being over. The ship is going to dock and the passengers must disembark. It’s inevitable. All good things come to an end.”

  “Vacations do. Lives don’t.”

  “Lives return to normal. You’ll go back to your normal, and I’ll go back to mine. Our houses. Our jobs. Our routines.”

  Aiden was silent as he set his cheek on her hair. She guessed that he knew what she knew: it was time to say goodbye.

  Sadness made her head too heavy to lift from his shoulder. “Maybe I’ll be able to bear this better if I tell myself it was a lovely cruise, but it couldn’t last forever.”

  “What if we wanted it to?”

  To last forever? Her heart thudded. He couldn’t have meant forever, but maybe he wasn’t ready to say goodbye, either.

  “Can you come to Belgium?”

  “Once a year.”

  It wasn’t forever, but she’d take what she could get. “I can come back here next year.”

  Aiden took a deep breath, sighed it out. “Two vacations a year. Six nights each? Five, depending which flights we catch.”

  “We can talk in the meantime. I’d rather see your face on that video app than anyone else’s.”

  “We won’t really be part of each other’s lives, India. A face in an app doesn’t give you the full picture. We’d only see what we wanted to show each other.”

  “Like having a perfect life on social media.” She hated that he had a point.

  “I’ve looked at this every way I can,” he said. “Trying to keep this shipboard romance going after the vacation is over won’t work.”

  “But we could write. And—and text.”

  But Aiden was shaking his head, shifting their positions, sitting her up so that she faced him as an adult and not as a helpless child.

  “My beautiful, beautiful India, we could do all that, all of it, and we want to, because nobody wants their vacation to end. It will help, for a little while. A few weeks. A few months? How long will it be, before we realize that we’re pretending we’re still involved, when we aren’t? It will hurt, and we’ll be mad at the world or mad at the circumstances that keep us apart. Then we might start being mad at each other, for being the reason we hurt. Mad at each other for being so wonderful that we couldn’t prevent ourselves from falling in love this week.”

  “Aiden. Is that true? Do you think we’ve fallen in love with each other? Because I think—I was afraid to think it, let alone say it, but...”

  He waited, his dark eyes unreadable in the darkening night.

  “But I think it’s true,” she said, but she didn’t sound confident, not when he was so grave.

  “And then,” he continued, his voice calm and even, “eventually, I’d be mad at myself, furious at myself for being so shortsighted about it all that I’d set myself up for all that pain in the first place.”

  That sounded true, coming from a man who knew himself. All the qualities she’d recognized on that first morning—his empathy, the way he could put others before himself—came with maturity. He was being brutally honest with himself, and with her, because he didn’t want to ruin what they had.

  He was right. Trying to force a vacation to last after they resumed their real lives would not work.

  “I don’t want you to be mad at yourself,” she said. Because I love you. “The cruise ship is arriving at port. We can’t stop it.”

  He seemed to exhale a little bit, as if he was disappointed that she’d accepted his wisdom. He couldn’t have expected anything else. They had no other choices.

  “What time do you disembark?” he asked.

  “Seven in the morning.”

  She was going to let him go. She had to. She rushed her words a little bit, so he wouldn’t feel obliged to fill in the silence. “You know I’m not much of a morning person. Maybe this should be goodbye. What good will it do to sleep in the same bed tonight, really? It will just make tomorrow morning all the harder, when I have to go around opening windows a few inches and locking them into place with this pile of screwy things Helen left for me. That wouldn’t allow for a decent goodbye, not with workers pulling into the driveway...and stuff.”

  He was silent in the dark.

  “Plus, I’ve got to pack. So...”

  He nodded, but he didn’t say anything to make this easier.

  “So I guess this is goodbye.” Tears—she wasn’t sobbing, but she felt the tears. “I’m going to miss you so very much.”

  She leaned toward him and kissed him, and the thought of never feeling his lips against hers again just about killed her. He raised his hands to hold her face as he kissed her back, his thumbs touching her wet cheeks.

  “Don’t cry, India. We knew this was how it was going to end.”

  He stood, careful not to step on her toes as they both came to their feet. He set the tablecloth on the chair, then turned and walked away.

  She couldn’t watch him for long because the darkness swallowed him up, but she stayed and stared until she imagined that she heard his boots on the boards of a faraway bridge.

  Chapter Eleven

  One hour.

  Aiden had been home for one hour, and he still didn’t have the Christmas tree assembled. It had seemed like a good idea to put it together tonight instead of in the morning. India had said goodbye; his children’s tree would distract him.

  But tonight, it was Melissa’s tree. The memory of Melissa—hell, his heart hurt so damn bad, anyway, he let himself think about her. When he thought about Melissa, really thought about Melissa, he missed her hard.

  It was painful. Usually, a weighty ache. Sometimes, a sharp pain, like when he’d pulled the tree box down from the rack in his garage.

  Now, he would miss India, too. Differently—she fit in a different part of his life—but with that same sense of longing. Of emptiness. The lack of someone who should be there. Another person to remember and wonder what might have been.

  Pain made him angry. There was no help for it with Melissa. She was gone from this life. He had to deal with that pain.

  India was not gone.

  The difference was so blindingly obvious. He stood in his living room with a half-built Christmas tree and wondered how he could be so stupid.

  India is not gone. She would be in the morning, but right now, at this very moment, he didn’t have to miss her. They might not have forever. They might not say I love you, and he would absolutely miss her tomorrow and every day after that, but right this second, he didn’t ha
ve to hurt. He could be with India.

  He tossed the last branches on the floor and headed for the back door. For God’s sake, what was wrong with him? The woman he wanted was alive and well and only an acre away, and he was wasting time missing her before he had to miss her.

  He slammed the porch door behind himself and took the steps two at a time to the grass. There was just enough moonlight to see where he stepped as he covered the distance as quickly as possible. Why wasn’t he with India? Just because she’d made a little speech and said goodbye? She’d had tears running down her face, tears, but he’d walked away as if it would hurt any less if they were apart.

  The only way the hurt would lessen was if he was with her.

  He looked up from the uneven ground to see how much farther it was to the bridge. On the far side, coming toward him, was the beam of a flashlight, bouncing with every step of the person who carried it. India. He could make her out as she crossed the bridge. India.

  She was on his land before she saw him. She broke into a run and called his name, and then he called hers like they were in some sappy movie, India bursting from his throat, and he started running, too. The impact when she crashed against his chest felt like the best thing on earth—a hard chest compression to jump-start his heart into beating again.

  “I’m so stupid—”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking—”

  “God, India.”

  “I know.”

  He couldn’t even kiss her. He could only stand in the moonlight and drink in the face he loved while she held him tightly, two arms tight around his chest to keep him from falling or flying or doing anything at all without her.

  “We don’t have to start missing each other yet,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “It’s not even ten o’clock. We have hours and hours until tomorrow.”

  They walked back to her house, but they didn’t hold hands. Instead, she kept her arm around his waist and he kept his arm around her shoulders, and they held on to each other as if they never would let go.

  * * *

  Nine hours.

  For nine hours, Aiden had not missed India, because he’d been with her. For nine hours, they’d made love and talked and catnapped and snacked before making love again. He’d had nine hours to fall further in love with her—but she’d had her arms wrapped tightly around him, so he must have taken her down with him as he fell.