by Mary McNear
“Uncle Reid,” Wyatt said, still jumping, “my mom and Mila have a surprise for you.”
“Do they?” Reid said, smiling and reaching over to pat Wyatt’s mop of unruly brown curls. “Well, I can’t wait to see what it is.”
He glanced over at Mila, who was standing at the end of the dock, and she waved to him shyly. She looked excited, too, but she also looked nervous. She’d obviously been in the water already. She had a beach towel wrapped around her waist, and her still wet hair was pulled back in a ponytail. But towel aside, there was still plenty of her bathing-suit-clad body visible to him, and Reid tried, mightily, not to gawk at her. God, he loved that bathing suit. Loved it even better from close up than he had from far away.
“All right, let’s get started,” Allie said briskly, handing Brooke over to Walker. “Are you ready, Mila?” she asked, walking out onto the dock. Mila nodded, and it was then that Reid realized that Allie wasn’t wearing a bathing suit, and that she hadn’t been in the water yet, either. He frowned. He thought she got into the water with Mila during their lessons.
“Have a seat,” Walker said to Reid, sitting down on a nearby deck chair and settling Brooke onto his lap. Reid sat down distractedly. He was watching Allie and Mila, who were conferring quietly with each other. Then Mila stole a quick look at Reid, dropped her towel on the dock, and climbed down the ladder into the water.
“Isn’t Allie going in with her?” he asked Walker.
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Just watch,” Walker said, jiggling Brooke on one knee and pulling Wyatt over to sit on the other.
Allie sat down on the edge of the dock and spoke to Mila, who was standing in the shoulder-deep water. “You know what you’re doing,” she said encouragingly. “Just take it slowly. And whatever you do, remember to breathe, okay?”
Mila nodded, and then, with an expression of quiet determination on her face, she turned around, pushed off from the bottom of the lake, and began to swim a slightly awkward front crawl.
“Oh my God,” Reid said after a moment. “She’s doing it. She’s swimming.”
Walker smiled. “She started swimming last week, but she wanted to be able to swim out to the float and back before she showed all of us.”
Reid nodded, watching her. Now that she’d settled into her stroke, it was less awkward. More graceful. She was swimming in a straight line, too, more or less, from the end of the dock to the swimming float a short distance away. But the water out there was deep, he realized, deep enough to be over her head.
“She’s not . . . she’s not going to get tired, is she?” he asked Walker. “Because she can’t touch the bottom out there.”
“She’s fine. She’s not going very far, and Allie wouldn’t let her go even that far if she didn’t think she was ready.”
“You’re right,” Reid said, relaxing a little. “She’s doing fine.” Better than fine, he thought, his pride in her building steadily as she swam. She reached the swimming float and stopped there for a moment, catching her breath, and then she turned around, pushed off the float, and swam back to the dock.
“That was fantastic,” Reid said, more to himself than to anyone else, and, ignoring Walker and Allie and Wyatt, who were all cheering for Mila, he pulled himself up on his crutches and started down the dock. Mila climbed up the ladder, wrapped her towel around her, and, after hugging Allie, she started toward Reid, meeting him halfway.
“You did it!” he said, wanting to reach for her, but knowing if he let go of his crutches, he’d fall.
“I did it,” she agreed, coming up to him, her face alight with happiness. “And, Reid, I love it! I love it so much! One day, when your leg is stronger—”
But he didn’t let her finish. He leaned in to kiss her cheek, her smooth, cool cheek, and then, at the last second, he shifted direction, fractionally, and kissed her mouth instead. If he’d stopped to think about it, it might have occurred to him that kissing her this way, in front of everyone, wasn’t a great idea. But he didn’t stop to think about it. He didn’t want to. And neither, apparently, did Mila, because after hesitating for a moment, she kissed him back.
After that, everything but the two of them seemed to disappear. The dock, the lake, the whole world, and everybody else in it. And when Mila pulled away from him, breathless, he was amazed to see that everything, and everyone, was still there. He looked over at Allie. She was mildly surprised, but also, Reid thought, very pleased. She had seen this coming. Then he looked at his brother. He hadn’t seen this coming, or hadn’t wanted to see it coming, Reid thought. There was a long silence then, during which the only sounds were Brooke gurgling and Wyatt still jumping up and down.
“Well, I don’t know about anyone else,” Walker said finally, “but I could use a drink.”
If I live to be a hundred, I will never, ever, forget the expression on my brother’s face after I kissed you,” Reid said with satisfaction as Mila let them into the cabin’s kitchen. But Mila said nothing. Reid paused, resting on his crutches, his brow creased with sudden concern. “You’re not upset about what happened, are you?” he asked as she closed the door.
“I’m not upset with you, Reid,” she said, though she was careful now to put a safe distance between them. “I’m upset with myself. Letting that happen was poor judgment on my part.” She leaned against the kitchen counter, her arms folded protectively over the bathing suit and cover-up she was still wearing. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I don’t think you were thinking,” Reid said. “I think you were just doing what felt right to you in the moment.”
“Well, that’s not a very good formula for living your life, is it?”
“I don’t know about that,” Reid said. “Some people would say it’s a very good formula.”
She frowned, though, preoccupied by something. “What did your brother say to you when he was helping you into the van?”
He hesitated. “He said . . . he said ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’”
“Do you, Reid?”
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” he said, looking at her in that way he had of looking at her. That way no one else had ever looked at her before. It was as if he were seeing her as the person she actually was, instead of seeing her as the person he wanted her to be, or hoped she would be. And she almost asked him then, What is it, exactly, that you’re doing, Reid?, but the truth was, she was afraid of how he might answer the question.
So instead she said, “We need to turn some lights on in here. It’s almost dark.” But when she headed for the light switch next to the door, Reid objected.
“I like the light in here now,” he said, and she stopped, because she realized she liked it too. Outside, the sky was lavender, and inside, everything seemed to be bathed in its gentle light. It seemed a shame, she thought, to drown out this twilight softness.
“This is my favorite time of day,” Reid said.
“It is?” she asked. “Why?”
“Because it’s the one time of day you feel like anything could happen,” he said, not taking his eyes off her.
Exactly, Mila thought. That’s the problem. But he smiled at her now, and she felt that irresistible tug toward him that she knew was as emotional as it was physical.
“I think Lonnie left something for dinner,” she said, resisting it. “Should I heat it up?”
“If you’d like some of it,” he said.
“No, not really,” she said. Because what was the point of heating up food she had no intention of actually eating? And what was the point, finally, of postponing the inevitable between them? Because standing there with him, she realized she couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t resist the sheer force of their attraction to each other. She had tried, since their first kiss on the deck, and it was wearing her down. It was exhausting her. And she wondered why they were still talking, instead of doing what they both knew they were going to do, and then she realized, for the first time in her l
ife, that talking—just talking—could be as sensuous as touching. Or at least it could be with Reid. She felt that warm, almost liquid sensation sliding through her body now, as if his hands and lips were already on her.
Why didn’t he come to her? she wondered. There was only six feet separating them, maybe less, from where they both stood, leaning against the kitchen counter. But he made no move to close the distance between them, and, suddenly, she understood why. He was waiting for her to come to him, waiting because it needed to be her choice. As persuasive as Reid could be, he would never pressure her to do something she didn’t want to do. Never ask her to be someone she didn’t want to be. And, in that sense, he was Brandon’s polar opposite. He was a man who could take no for an answer. A man who wouldn’t take yes, in fact, unless she could give him that yes wholeheartedly. With all her being.
Somehow, knowing this gave her the courage to walk over to him now, angle herself between his crutches, put her hands on his shoulders, and kiss him, full on the lips, without any inhibition. And he kissed her back, but this kiss, she quickly discovered, wasn’t part of his repertoire of kisses from that night on the deck a week ago. This kiss was something else entirely. It was . . . it was so many things. It was hungry, and deep and sweet, and tender, and needful. It held nothing back, and it gave everything away. And within thirty seconds, Mila knew this kiss couldn’t end as innocently as the last one had, with the two of them saying a chaste good night at Reid’s bedroom door. But that was all right. She didn’t want it to end that way. She wanted everything from this man, she realized, with a little shock. She wanted everything at once.
He must have known that, too, because no sooner had he started kissing her than he started to unbutton her cover-up, which was really just an oversized white cotton shirt that buttoned up the front. She let him unbutton it, and let him slide it down her shoulders and her arms, and drop it onto the floor, where it settled at her feet. Then, still kissing her, he caressed her bare arms, and shoulders, and collarbone, until finally, when she thought she couldn’t stand it anymore, he began to caress her breasts, very softly, but very deliberately, through the stretchy fabric of her bathing suit.
She shivered and felt her nipples harden immediately. He concentrated on one of them, stroking it softly at first and then harder, until the friction he’d created between her bathing suit and her nipple made Mila break away from their kiss with a little moan of pleasure. He kissed her again then and dipped a hand inside of her bathing suit top and, after cradling her breast tenderly in his palm, he stroked her nipple harder, in a way that sent a rush of warmth through her body.
“Let’s go to my room,” he said into her neck. “Or your room.”
“I, I don’t know. It’s not . . . it’s not a . . .” It’s not a good idea, she meant to say, but she lost her train of thought. What Reid was doing to her felt so good, so unbelievably good, that she couldn’t form a single coherent sentence. So she stopped trying to and instead dug her fingers into his hair and arched her back so that she could feel more of his body against her body.
“Oh God, Mila,” he groaned. “Let’s go.”
Mila started to shake her head, but he kissed her lips again, and it was quiet in the kitchen for a while, quiet as he slowly peeled the top of her bathing suit down, leaving her breasts bare in the dusky light, and his hand free to explore them with his expert touch. “Mila,” he said, finally, his voice throaty with the same excitement she felt, “it’s given me so much pleasure, watching you learn how to swim this summer. Now let me give you a little pleasure. Just . . . just a little.” He skimmed his lips along her collarbone.
A little? Was he serious? If this was a little pleasure, what was Reid’s idea of a lot of pleasure? Because right now her pleasure was so intense that she was about to spontaneously combust. With Reid, it was all about pleasure. Her pleasure. He wasn’t asking anything of her. Anything at all. Except that she feel the exquisite sensations he was coaxing from her body.
He had worked her bathing suit down around her waist, and done it so seamlessly that the only reason she noticed it now was that the evening breeze, blowing in through the open kitchen windows, felt suddenly cool on her bare skin. And his fingertips glided over that skin with a featherlike lightness, from her collarbone, down between her breasts and all the way to her navel. His other hand was busy, too. The man was clearly not deterred by the fact that he was on crutches, she realized. He was simply letting his underarms bear the bulk of his weight so that both his hands were free. Which was why he was able to use that other hand to gently stroke the inside of her thighs, a soft, insistent stroke that would have been mesmerizing if it wasn’t also so electrifying.
Another moan escaped her, and she wavered then, for one second, on the edge of surrender. It would be so sweet, so very sweet, to let them finish what they’d started. But even as she was thinking this, she saw an image in her mind of her wedding ring, lying on the bottom of the lake. It didn’t look the way it had when she’d thrown it in at the beginning of the summer. It wasn’t bright and shiny anymore. It was slightly tarnished, coated with algae, and partially buried in the soft muck of the lakebed. But there it was. No less real for all that. And as soon as she saw it in her mind, she untangled herself from Reid.
“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to catch her breath and reflexively folding her arms over her bare breasts, whose pale skin seemed to be glowing faintly in the near darkness. “I can’t do this,” she mumbled as she clumsily yanked at her bathing suit straps and reached for her crumpled cover-up on the floor. She couldn’t help but feel faintly ridiculous now. Only one of them, after all, was partly undressed.
But Reid, seeing how self-conscious she’d become, shook his head. “Mila, no. Don’t ever be embarrassed by the way you look. You are so beautiful. Every single inch of you is so beautiful.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, because she could see by the expression on his face that he actually believed what he was saying. He reached out and gently ran a finger down the side of her face and kissed her so tenderly it made her heart ache. “I just . . . I just want to love you,” he said then. “Please, let me love you, Mila.”
But as soon as she heard those words, she felt her eyes tear up. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and, pulling away from him, she hurried out of the kitchen before real tears started. And she made it all the way down the hallway, into her bedroom, and under the covers of her bed before they came. Really came. She buried her face in the pillow and tried to cry quietly.
She hadn’t cried since the first night she’d arrived at the cabin. And that night, she’d cried for different reasons. She’d cried because she was alone, and afraid, and bereft of hope. She’d cried, too, because she was married to an abusive man, and she saw no way, legally, at least, out of her marriage to him. Tonight, she was crying because she knew now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she was in love with a man, a man with whom she could have no real future, not when she knew she would have to spend the rest of her life on the move, trying to stay one step ahead of a man who wouldn’t rest until he’d found her. And she was crying because the words Reid had said to her, Let me love you, Mila, were the kindest, loveliest, and most beautiful words anyone had ever said to her.
CHAPTER 19
After Mila was done crying, she felt both curiously empty, and completely exhausted, so exhausted, in fact, that she could barely muster the energy to change into her nightgown, brush her teeth, and crawl back under her covers. But no sooner had she fallen asleep than something dragged her, violently, awake. What is that? she thought, sitting up in bed, her heart pounding, her covers thrown off, her feet already on the floor. What is that noise? But she knew. She’d never heard it before, but as its shrill electronic pulse filled the cabin, she realized that she’d been waiting—no, she’d been expecting—to hear it all summer. It was the alarm, and something, or someone, had tripped it.
“Brandon,” she whispered into the darkness, and the simple act of sayin
g his name frightened her more than the alarm’s incessant blaring. Her next thought, though, wasn’t of Brandon, or even of herself. It was of Reid. Oh, my God, Reid. No! She scrambled out of bed and tore down the hallway to his room, but when she got there, she found an oddly disorienting scene. The door was open, the lights were on, and Reid was out of bed, leaning on his crutches and holding his iPad in his hands and typing something onto it. He looked mildly annoyed, but otherwise, perfectly calm.
“Mila?” he said, right as the alarm stopped shrieking. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” she repeated, holding on to the doorjamb to steady herself. Her breath was coming so fast it was hard for her to talk. “Reid, the alarm . . . It woke me up . . . why’d it stop?”
“I turned it off,” he said.
“Why?” she asked, her legs rubbery beneath her.
“Because if it goes off for more than forty seconds, the security company calls the police.”
“But, Reid, they should call the police,” Mila said. “Call them back. Right now. Please. Or better yet, call 911.”
Reid put the iPad down on his dresser and came over to her. He looked worried. But not about the alarm. About her. “Mila, it’s okay,” he said, his eyes finding hers. “It was a false alarm. Nobody broke in, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“How, how could you know that?” Mila asked, and she heard an edge of hysteria in her own voice.
“I know that because the sensor that went off tonight—it’s for one of the basement windows—has already malfunctioned twice. Both times, though, were before you got here. The first time, the police came out. But it was nothing, Mila. It was a waste of their time. The security company was supposed to send a tech out to replace the sensor, but they never did. I’m sorry. I should have told you about—”