by Gina Wilkins
On that resolute note she turned to go back to the cabin—only to find herself standing face-to-face with that same obstinate male.
Chapter Fifteen
Silhouetted against the spring pastels of the woods behind him, Dan looked dark and almost forbidding as he stood there on the rocky path glowering at her. He didn’t look particularly happy to see her. She wondered why he’d even gone to the trouble of finding her. “What are you doing here?”
He probably hadn’t expected her to throw herself into his arms, but he seemed a bit taken aback by the gruffness of her greeting. Maybe he’d expected her to show a bit more surprise at his sudden appearance. While she hadn’t been expecting him, she wasn’t overly startled by his arrival. If nothing else, he would feel obligated to check up on her—his big-brother act that annoyed her so greatly.
“I had a hell of a time finding you,” he growled without answering her question. “You could have told someone where you were going.”
“Riley knew,” she said with a shrug.
“Riley wasn’t talking. He said you deserved your privacy. What if your brother had wanted to reach you?”
“I have my laptop with me. I check my e-mail occasionally. B.J. knows he can reach me that way. So, how did you find me?”
“Marjorie took pity on me and got the information from Riley. He couldn’t turn her down, of course.”
“Few people can.” She shoved her hands more deeply into her pockets and met his gaze without blinking. “You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”
He glanced over his shoulder, toward the modest little cabin that was just visible through the trees. “Why don’t we go inside where we can have some coffee or something and talk?”
The cabin was very small. Cozy. The lights dim and intimate. “I’d rather stay out here.”
“You look cold.”
“It isn’t any warmer inside. What do you want to say?”
He studied her expression for several moments before speaking. “You aren’t being very encouraging.”
“You expected me to blush and giggle like the silly schoolgirl you think I am?”
For a moment she thought he was going to accuse her of being unfair again. Maybe she was—but she felt she deserved a few shots in return for the terrible unjustness of his doubts about her.
Instead he drew a deep breath and stepped past her, stopping at the water’s edge. Gazing at the mountains in the distance, he spoke without looking around at her. “You’re still pretty mad at me, huh?”
It was such a typically dense, utterly male thing to say that all she could do was stare at his back in wholly feminine exasperation. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I’m still mad.”
“I hurt your feelings.”
A fist-size rock lay right beside the toe of her sneaker. She considered picking it up and throwing it at him—just for the satisfaction of it. But since she wasn’t really a violent person, she contented herself with saying simply, “You broke my heart.”
“I wasn’t trying to break your heart. I was trying to keep mine from being broken.”
“Oh, please,” she muttered, stiffening. Was he going to try to convince her now that he’d really cared? After the things he’d said to her that night?
“Lindsey—”
She shook her head forcefully. “Do we have to go through this again? Didn’t we say everything there was to say when I left your house?”
“No. There were a few things that didn’t get said.”
“You wanted to tell me then that you were trying to keep your heart from being broken again?”
“I didn’t say again. Melanie bruised my ego. Humiliated me. Infuriated me. But she didn’t break my heart—it was never hers to break.”
He had refused to talk about his ex-wife before. Why was he suddenly willing to do so now? Just what was he trying to tell her? How much was he willing to share, now that he’d brought the subject up? “If you weren’t in love with her, then why did you marry her?”
“Because she told me she was pregnant.”
Stunned, Lindsey reached up slowly to brush her breeze-tossed hair out of her eyes. “I never knew that.”
He shrugged. “She told me the night of your birthday party. On our way back to her place, actually. She convinced me to elope with her, and I stupidly agreed it was the right thing to do. A couple of weeks later I realized we’d made a mistake. Several of them, actually.”
“She wasn’t pregnant.”
“No.”
“But she told you she was—the night of my party?” She remembered how angry Melanie had been that Dan had danced with Lindsey, that he’d given her that birthday kiss afterward. Surely Melanie hadn’t decided then to…
“Yeah. That night.” Dan turned a stone over with the toe of his boot. “I tried to make it work. But maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Maybe if I’d worked as hard at my marriage as I did at my career, Melanie wouldn’t have been so bored and dissatisfied that she turned to having affairs and pilfering cash to keep her entertained.”
“That wasn’t your fault. Melanie had a reckless streak. B.J. always said so.”
“Maybe that’s what drew me to her initially. The old opposites-attract principle. But I don’t think I would have let that attraction lead to marriage if it hadn’t been for…well—”
“If she hadn’t told you she was pregnant.”
He nodded, still without looking around.
“Were you very disappointed?” she asked quietly. “About the pregnancy, I mean.”
“No. To be honest, I was relieved. I told myself I just wasn’t ready for fatherhood. Truth was, I wasn’t eager to have a child with Melanie. I never was.”
Lindsey drew a deep breath. “I’m sorry things went so badly between you and Melanie. But I still don’t appreciate you comparing me to her. I had no intention of trapping you into marriage. And I would never have betrayed you the way she did.”
“I’ve never compared you to Melanie. I just didn’t want to get involved in another relationship for the wrong reasons.”
It hurt to hear him say that. To hide her emotions, she walked to the water’s edge and idly picked up a small, flat stone. “Because you think I’m merely infatuated with you?”
“It seemed like a distinct possibility to me. And I wasn’t the only one who worried about that,” he added a bit defensively.
She let the stone go, watching it skip four or five times across the surface of the water before it finally sank. “You could have discussed your concerns with me. Or you could have trusted me to know my own mind.”
“There was just too much at stake this time.”
“Because I’m B.J.’s sister. Too many connections. And you were probably feeling protective toward me. Afraid I would be hurt.”
“All of that is true,” he conceded. “But mostly I was afraid the infatuation would wear off. That I would be hurt. Because I never mistook my own feelings for infatuation.”
Her fingers closed tightly around another small stone. “What did you feel for me?”
“The same thing I feel now. I love you.”
The stone fell from her suddenly limp hand, landing with a soft plop in the water at her toes. “Like a little sister?”
“I haven’t thought of you as a little sister since the first time I kissed you. Probably for some time before that. I just wouldn’t admit it—not even to myself.”
She blinked rapidly in a futile attempt to hold back a wave of tears. “Then you love me?”
Though she wasn’t looking at him, she heard him swallow before answering, “Yes.”
She turned then, finding him watching her with an anxious expression that twisted her heart. “How can you love me when you don’t trust me?”
“I would trust you with my life,” he answered firmly. “But I was afraid to trust you with my heart. It took me a while to get past that cowardice. But I’ve done a lot of thinking, and I know what I want now. More than anything I’ve ever wanted.”
“You aren’t afraid now?”
“Maybe a little,” he admitted. “But I’m willing to take the risk—if you still are.”
“What…?” she had to stop to clear her throat. “What made you change your mind?”
“I missed you too much to risk losing you forever,” he answered simply. “I haven’t been able to sleep since you’ve been gone. I couldn’t eat. Damn it, I couldn’t even work.”
That made her eyebrows rise. “That’s a shock.”
“It was to my staff, too,” he admitted with just the faintest touch of wry humor. His half smile faded almost as soon as it appeared. “When you left me, you told me you were over me. I can’t blame you for being mad at me. I was a dumb jerk, and I hurt you badly by treating you so insensitively. All I’m asking is a chance to win you back. I’d like to take you out on dates. In public. I want to court you the way I should have from the beginning. Will you give me that chance, Lindsey?”
Her breath caught in her throat, temporarily preventing her from answering.
He took a step toward her. “I’m prepared to beg, if necessary.”
That loosened her voice. “No, please don’t do that. I’m trying very hard not to cry.”
He frowned. “Is that good or bad?”
She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I hate to cry. It makes my face all red and splotchy.”
“You’d still be beautiful to me,” he assured her.
A watery giggle escaped her. “Okay, don’t overdo the courtship stuff. All I wanted from you was your trust, not a bunch of flowery compliments.”
“I meant it, you know.”
The smile that accompanied his words was so sweet that her eyes filled again. “Stop that. Right now,” she ordered a bit desperately.
For the first time since she’d turned to find him standing behind her, he reached out to touch her. He wiped a tear from her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “You still haven’t given me an answer. Is it too late?”
“I’ve been in love with you for most of my life,” she whispered, gazing up at him. “It would’ve taken me a lot more than a few weeks to get over you.”
He cupped her face between his hands—and once again she felt this very strong man tremble. His lips brushed hers lightly, gently. Almost reverently.
But that wasn’t what she wanted from him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and tugged him down to her, rising on tiptoes to crush her mouth against his.
He responded with a fervor that he must have been barely holding in check until then. He pulled her so high into his arms that her toes dangled above the ground. His tongue slipped between her lips, and she eagerly welcomed him back.
She’d known she missed him, but only now did she realize exactly how empty she had been. It was as if she’d been in stasis—and was only now coming back to life. She could almost feel the warmth spreading through her body again, tingling in her fingers and toes, pooling deep inside her.
It felt so good to be fully alive again.
“Can we go inside now?” he murmured against her lips. “I really am too old to make love on a beach. At least without an air mattress.”
She giggled into his mouth. “Would you stop with the old-guy routine? You aren’t even forty yet.”
“Okay, I’m a mere kid. But I still don’t want these rocks cutting into my bare—”
She covered his mouth with hers again. When she finally released him, they were already moving toward the cabin.
Dan was true to his word when they returned to Edstown. He courted her. Publicly.
He called. He sent flowers. He brought candy. He took her out to eat. To the movies. To official functions. He did everything but hire an airplane to write across the sky that he was dating her. He rarely spent an entire night with her—that, he said, would have caused too much negative talk about her—but he no longer tried to keep it a secret that there was more between them than friendship these days.
After the initial buzz of interest, their friends and neighbors had accepted the relationship quite well. They weren’t quite as surprised as Lindsey might have expected. Apparently, she hadn’t been as discreet about her feelings for Dan as she’d thought, during the past couple of years.
There were some who expressed mild amazement that Dan was being quite so attentive to her. He’d always been so careful to keep his personal life private. Even during his marriage to Melanie, he’d spent more time on the job than at home. That was changing now. He was even starting to take off weekends, though his pager and radio were never far from his hand, of course.
Lindsey should have been deliriously happy. She couldn’t quite understand why she wasn’t.
“Everything’s going okay with you and Dan?” her brother asked during a telephone call early in May.
“Oh, sure. Things are great,” Lindsey assured him heartily. B.J. was one of those who had expressed no surprise about Lindsey’s feelings for Dan, but found it a little harder to believe that Dan was equally committed. It wasn’t that people who knew him thought of Dan as cold or hardhearted. He was just known for being very reserved. Extremely reticent about expressing his feelings. And, of course, a hard-line law enforcer with a deep-seated wariness of the media.
Lindsey couldn’t blame anyone for expecting a few conflicts to crop up between her and Dan. She told herself it was ridiculous that it bothered her that no such problems had occurred.
“This really is great, you know,” B.J. said. “I know you’ve had a thing for Dan for a long time, and I’m glad he’s finally realized you belong together. I spoke to him yesterday, and he seems very committed to this relationship.”
Almost relentlessly committed, Lindsey was tempted to add. Dan seemed to be working harder at this relationship than he had at anything in a long time. If this was meant to be, should it really be so hard for him?
She didn’t share her concerns with her brother, but chatted amicably for another few minutes about other subjects before they disconnected. B.J. promised to get home as soon as he could for a visit. Lindsey warmly urged him to do so. As she hung up the phone, she told herself she was being uncharacteristically apprehensive and pessimistic to wonder if she and Dan would still be together when B.J. arrived.
She was kept late at the newspaper office the next day, arriving home at almost six-thirty. Dan was already there. He even had dinner started. He greeted her with a smile and a kiss. She couldn’t help noticing that he looked tired, even though he’d put in a shorter day at the office than usual. “Hi. Running late today, I see,” he said.
“Mmm. Early day for you?”
“No, I left at the usual time. Just after five.”
Lindsey shook her head. “Since when is eight to five a ‘usual’ day for you?”
“Since I decided to set different priorities in my life,” he replied, popping a slice of carrot into her mouth.
She crunched and swallowed, then said, “You know, I really don’t mind if you work late sometimes. I tend to have long hours, myself, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. I certainly don’t want to interfere with your job.”
He shrugged and turned back to the stove. “I’m handling it.”
“When are you handling it?” she insisted. “You’re spending so much time with me you must have cut your work hours by at least a third. I’m not complaining about the amount of time we’re together, of course, but I don’t want your duties to suffer.”
“I said I’m handling it,” he said, and it was as close to snapping as he’d come since that day at the fishing cabin. He drew a deep breath and sent her another smile. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that to come out so abruptly.”
That was another problem she was having with him, she mused. He was just too darned polite lately. She felt almost as if she needed to apologize in return, for some reason.
“I’m going to go wash up,” she said, turning toward the doorway. “I’ll be back in a minute to help you finish dinner.”
“I’ve go
t it under control if you’d like to rest awhile. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”
She gave him a smile that felt a bit too toothy and left the room before she could say anything imprudent.
What was the matter with her, anyway? Splashing cold water on her face in the bathroom, she wondered if she was losing her mind. For at least half her life, she’d fantasized about being with Dan. Now that she was, she kept feeling that something was wrong.
She couldn’t quite put her finger on the problem. He was being the perfect lover. Attentive, polite, thoughtful.
Maybe that was what was wrong, she thought with a frown. The Dan she’d always loved wasn’t known for being any of those things. This one sort of unnerved her.
Over dinner she tried again to get him to talk about work. She even asked him a few pointed questions about an on-going investigation. The old Dan would have flatly informed her that the answers were none of her business. Instead he gave her the information and then asked her politely not to print it without an official release.
She sighed and finished her dinner, telling herself that only a crazy woman would be upset because the man she loved was being so nice to her.
Dan must have fallen asleep at his desk. It seemed that one minute he’d been peering blearily at a computer printout and the next minute someone was shaking his shoulder, bringing him out of a very bizarre dream. Something about being buried under piles of paperwork, he thought.
Rubbing his eyes, he looked up expecting to see his secretary frowning over him. He was startled to find Lindsey glowering at him instead. “What are you doing here?” he asked blankly. “It’s only…”
He glanced at his watch, trying to focus on the dial.
“Five o’clock in the morning,” she supplied for him in a voice cold enough to freeze coffee. “And the reason I’m here is to tell you that you’re a jerk. A stupid, stubborn, chauvinistic, macho jerk.”
“I’m not chauvinistic.” He eyed the familiar flush of temper on her face, wondering what he’d done to set her off this time. He’d been so very careful lately. He hadn’t argued with her, hadn’t neglected her. He’d given her compliments, flowers, gifts. What had he done wrong? “How did you know I was here, anyway?”