“Nope. That was just a friendly greeting,” he assured her.
“And a timely one,” she said with obvious regret. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m not in the habit of attacking men I barely know.”
“I kissed you first,” he reminded her, then added solemnly, “Besides, kissing isn’t about thinking. It’s about feeling.” He tilted her chin up and met her gaze. There was no mistaking her need for reassurance, so he gave it to her. “I haven’t felt like that in a long time, Alice.”
She swallowed hard, her gaze drifting away, then back as she finally admitted, “Me, neither.”
“Why is that?” he asked, wondering whether someone had broken her heart.
“Bad choices and the sudden realization that I needed to figure out why I was making them.”
“Did you reach any conclusions?”
“A few.”
“Care to share them?”
“And ruin your image of me? I don’t think so.”
“You don’t know what my image of you is,” he pointed out.
“You think I’m a little ditzy, a lot naive and very prim,” she said.
Patrick chuckled. “That was my first impression. It’s been changing quickly.”
“I probably shouldn’t ask about your current impression.”
“Probably not,” he agreed.
He looked into her eyes and instantly the laughter died on his lips. From the moment they’d met, Patrick had had the feeling that he was no longer in control, that something bigger had taken over. He’d blamed it on the circumstances of their meeting, on his brothers, on anything other than the attraction that was so obviously simmering now.
“So, what are we going to do about all of this, Alice Newberry?” he asked.
“Nothing, if we’re smart.”
Patrick grinned at that. “Then isn’t it wonderful that no one’s ever accused me of doing the smart thing? How about you?”
“I always do the smart thing.”
Somehow he doubted that. He had the sense that she’d only recently made a resolution to do the right thing, but that she wasn’t quite living up to it yet. He rubbed his thumb across her lips, saw the flash of excitement stir in her eyes once more. “Then I suppose one of us will have to change,” he said.
Her mouth curved into a faint hint of a smile. “I suppose so.”
He glanced sideways and gave her a lazy once-over. “You any good at change?”
“Not much.”
“Neither am I.” He reached for her hand and laced their fingers together. “How about this for now? There’s nothing too dangerous about holding hands, is there?”
“Nothing at all,” she agreed, leaning back in the chair and closing her eyes against the sun’s glare, and quite possibly against his probing looks.
Patrick felt himself drifting off, oddly comforted by the feel of her soft, delicate hand in his much larger, rough one. What was it about a woman’s touch that had the power to soothe when nothing else worked, he wondered.
The highly emotional meeting with his brothers faded from his mind. The complications ahead didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered at this instant was the warmth of the sun on his face, the gentle rocking of the boat and the woman beside him. Life didn’t get much better than this…unless, of course, a little hot, steamy sex was added in.
He fought a grin and resisted the desire to sneak a glance at Alice. Best not to go there. That one stolen kiss of his had unleashed unexpected passion in her. While he’d never been averse to uncomplicated, energetic sex, he had a feeling slipping into bed with Alice was going to be anything but uncomplicated. Besides, he’d hate to prove his brothers right about his level of involvement with Alice only a few brief hours after heatedly denying that he had any feelings for the woman.
Yes, indeed, he thought, his eyes clamped tightly shut, definitely best not to go there.
Alice could feel Patrick’s gaze on her, but she absolutely, flatly refused to open her eyes. She was still simmering with embarrassment over her too-eager response to his kiss. What must he think of her? She’d all but crawled into his lap the instant he’d locked lips with her. She’d turned what might have been meant as an innocent, exploratory kiss into something wild and dangerous. She’d been so startled by her uncharacteristic reaction, it was a wonder she hadn’t jumped overboard just to cool herself off.
Finally, when she felt his grip on her hand ease, she slipped her hand out of his and sighed. Risking a glance, she saw that he’d fallen asleep. His impressive chest was rising and falling with each steady breath he took. His long, dark eyelashes rested against his deeply tanned skin like smudges of coal. His lips—his magnificent, sweetly provocative lips—were curved into a half smile, as if he were dreaming something wonderful. She could have looked at him all day…and all night. The thought made her shiver with a sense of anticipation.
It would happen, too. She could feel it. The attraction wasn’t one-sided. What she’d told Patrick was true. It had been so long since she’d felt anything like it.
When she’d first left home, she’d been so overwhelmed with work and difficult college classes that she’d had little time for romance. In her senior year, with the end of school in sight, she’d finally allowed herself the freedom to date and promptly fallen for the first man who’d asked her out.
Greg had turned out to be more interested in sharing her apartment than her life. She’d caught him at home, in their bed, with another classmate. An hour later everything he owned was on the lawn outside and he was sputtering protests and explanations even as she slammed the door in his face. It had taught her a lesson about getting involved too quickly.
Or at least she thought it had until she fell for the next man she went out with almost as rapidly. That hadn’t ended quite as badly or as painfully, but it had been doomed from the outset. She would have seen that if she’d given the relationship a hard look at the beginning.
She’d spent the next couple of years taking a good long look at herself and her tendency to fall in love at the drop of a hat. It hadn’t taken a genius to figure out that she was trying to find a replacement for the family she’d turned her back on. As the song said, she’d been looking for love in all the wrong places.
Until yesterday she’d thought she’d broken the pattern, but now here she was, all-too-fascinated with Patrick, and they hadn’t so much as had a first date yet. Well, she wasn’t going to make the same old mistake, no matter how tempting it might be. She was going to be smart this time, even if kissing him gave her a momentary sense of being connected and filled a huge void in her life.
Besides, there were flashing neon warning signs practically posted all around the man. He was a self-professed loner. He had major issues with his family. He was drifting through his life, quite literally at the moment, she thought wryly. He was the last man on earth she had any business falling for. She didn’t even have to take one of those long, hard looks at the situation to figure that much out. Not that her hormones seemed to give two figs about any of that. Her body seemed to care only that he was a top-of-the-line kisser.
“Everything okay?” he asked, his voice husky with sleep.
“Sure,” she said, a little too brightly. “Why?”
“You were frowning.”
“Just wrestling with some old demons,” she said, keeping her voice light.
“Who won?”
“I suppose that remains to be seen,” she said honestly.
“Tell me about yourself,” he encouraged, regarding her with unmistakable interest.
“There’s not much to tell.”
“You’re from Widow’s Cove, though, right?”
She nodded.
“Why don’t I remember you from school? I thought I knew all the beautiful girls.”
She grinned at the puzzlement in his voice. “I’m sure you did,” she said. “I wasn’t beautiful, and I was two years older, but I certainly knew who you were.”
“Is that s
o?” he said with a hint of all-male arrogance.
She ticked off the obvious reason why the awareness had been so one-sided. “Star football player even as a sophomore. Advance placement in most of your classes. Girls falling at your feet. You were already a legend.”
“And you let that scare you off?” he taunted.
“Absolutely. Besides, senior girls did not give sophomore boys a second look,” she said airily, as if that had had anything at all to do with it. “We didn’t want anyone thinking we were so desperate we had to rob the cradle.”
“Oh, I think I could have held my own with you.”
“No question about it,” Alice said. “But senior girls had a reputation to maintain, even the quiet ones like me.”
“So, who did you date?”
“No one. I just had one goal back then, to get away. I wasn’t about to let romance interfere. I headed for Boston the day after graduation.”
His gaze narrowed. “And never came back?”
“Not until last summer.”
“What happened last summer to finally get you back home?”
“My parents were killed in a car accident,” she said, surprised that she could actually say the words without getting choked up.
His expression immediately sobered. “I’m sorry. That must have been rough.”
“You have no idea. We’d never reconciled. I will regret that till the day I die.” She gave him a sideways look. “Let that be a lesson to you. We never know how long we’re going to have to mend fences with the people we love.”
“Some fences can’t be mended,” Patrick said.
“They must be,” she insisted.
“Alice, I can see where you’re coming from, but trust me, in my case, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. If you understood the whole story—”
“Tell me,” she urged.
He shook his head. “There’s no point. The past is what it is.”
“And your brothers, where do they fit in?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Will you be seeing them again?”
“I agreed to go to Boston in a few days for Michael’s wedding. After that, who knows?” he said with a shrug, as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.
Alice ignored the shrug and went with what she thought she saw in his eyes, a need so raw that it probably scared him to death. She could relate to that only too well.
“Don’t leave it to chance,” she told him. “Do whatever it takes to keep them in your life.”
His jaw tensed. “Again, not your call to make.”
“I know that,” she said impatiently. “But I also know what it’s like to live with regrets, to know that it’s too late to fix things. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I don’t want that for you.”
“Why do you give a damn about any of this?” he asked. “You hardly know me.”
“I know you better than you think,” she said. “For a lot of years, I was you. I was angry and resentful and completely closed off from my parents. I made them miserable, and I lost something important that I can never get back. It’s not too late for you to avoid the mistakes I made.”
Patrick’s expression softened ever so slightly. “I see where you’re coming from, I really do, but I have to handle this my way, Alice. Maybe it’s better if we steer clear of this particular topic from here on out.”
She shook her head. “We can’t, not if we’re going to be friends. It’ll be like the elephant in the room that we’re trying to pretend isn’t there. We can disagree over what to do about it, but we can’t ignore it, Patrick.”
“Friends, huh? That’s how you see us, even after that steamy kiss?”
“Absolutely.”
“That kiss didn’t feel anything at all like a friendly peck,” he noted.
Alice chuckled despite herself. “Which is why we’re turning over a new leaf here and now. No more kisses.”
Patrick groaned.
“I take it you disagree.”
“I think that’s pretty much as futile as trying to prevent a swamped boat from sinking by bailing with a teacup. It’s not going to happen.”
“I can control my urges, can’t you?”
He reached for her hand and turned it over in his palm. She felt the warmth, the sandpapery, callused texture of a hand that worked hard. He rubbed his thumb across her wrist and sent heat spiraling through her to settle low in her belly. Her pulse jumped and he grinned.
“Still think you’ve got total control over those urges?” he asked.
“Maybe not total control,” she admitted. “I’m working on it.”
“Why fight the inevitable?”
“We are not inevitable,” she insisted, even as she admitted to herself that she was lying through her teeth. Old patterns died hard. A part of her was falling fast, but she knew exactly how little judgment that part of her tended to exercise. She intended to fight it with every ounce of common sense she possessed. Real love didn’t happen after two or three passing encounters. And she wasn’t the kind of woman who could have a casual fling just because a man appealed to her.
She drew in a deep breath and steadied her racing pulse. Not this time. This time she was going to be smart and in control of her hormones and her emotions. Besides, if Patrick was destined to ignore the wisdom she’d gained from her own mistakes, she didn’t want to be around for the train wreck that followed. And that wreck really was inevitable. She could already see it coming.
It had been a perfectly pleasant, lazy afternoon, right up until the moment when Alice had gotten that bee in her bonnet about his family. Patrick regretted more than he could say that she knew anything at all about his history with his folks or his recent reunion with his older brothers. He had a hunch she could be a worse nag than Molly, and that was saying something.
Still, he wasn’t totally inclined to send her packing the instant they returned to the dock. He enjoyed provoking her, seeing the quick rise of heat in her cheeks, the flash of desire in her eyes that she was trying so hard to ignore.
“Want to stay for dinner?” he asked. “I could run over to Jess’s and bring back some of Molly’s chowder, and there’s half a loaf of your bread left.”
She turned those golden eyes of hers on him with a sorrowful expression. “What would be the point?”
“Staving off starvation,” he suggested wryly.
She frowned at that. “You know that’s not what I meant. Sooner or later, we’ll just butt heads again.”
“I’ve got a hard head. I can take it,” Patrick assured her.
She fought a grin. “Isn’t that the problem, your hard head?”
“Only if you let it be,” he responded. “We could play cards after dinner. Where’s the harm in that?”
Her gaze narrowed speculatively. “Poker?”
“If that’s what you want to play,” he agreed, hiding his surprise at the choice. He’d figured on a few hands of gin rummy, maybe.
“Okay, you’re on,” she said. “But I’ll warn you here and now that I’m very, very good.”
Something in her voice alerted him that she was dead serious.
“Where’d you learn to play?” he asked, suddenly cautious.
“In Jess’s back room.”
Patrick stared at her. “Jess taught you to play poker?”
“When Molly and I were about ten.”
“I see.”
She grinned. “Still want to take me on?”
“More than ever,” he said with heartfelt enthusiasm that wasn’t entirely based on her self-proclaimed poker-playing ability.
“Then get the chowder,” she said. “I need stamina.”
“Is the chowder going to do it?”
“If Molly made an apple pie today, a slice of that would help, too.” Her expression turned thoughtful. “And maybe some chocolate. Molly keeps a stash of Hershey bars behind the counter. Two ought to do it.”
Patrick chuckled. Everyone in town knew
about Molly’s cache of chocolate. When she ran out, it was best to steer clear until she’d replenished her supply. Toughened seamen tended to slip extra candy bars into the box just to assure a pleasant Molly who wouldn’t take offense at some slip of the tongue and dump a beer over their heads.
“Should I risk asking or just steal the candy?” Patrick inquired.
“Ask,” she said. “And do it politely. It’s too late to get any chocolate from the drugstore. It closes at five.”
“Aye, aye,” Patrick said. “Shall I grab a couple of beers, too?”
She shuddered. “With chocolate? Are you crazy?”
Patrick grinned. “Coffee, then. There’s some below deck. You can make it while I’m gone.”
“Well, hell,” she muttered with a pretty little pout. “I was counting on that time to stack the cards.”
He laughed, not entirely sure she wasn’t totally serious. “Keep your hands off the cards. And just in case you lose control and don’t, I’ll be shuffling and dealing the first hand.”
“I’ll still win.”
“We’ll see.”
“And I won’t have to cheat to do it,” she added.
“I’m thrilled at your level of self-confidence,” he assured her. “The higher you climb, the harder you’ll fall.”
“You wish,” she hollered after him, laughter threading through her voice.
Damn, but teachers had changed a lot since his school days. If he’d had a teacher like Alice, he’d have fallen in love on the first day of school and never recovered.
Chapter Seven
The salty air had sharpened Alice’s appetite and dulled her brain. She almost fell asleep waiting for Patrick to get back from Jess’s with their dinner. Only a strong cup of coffee revived her. Okay, that and the prospect of beating the pants off Patrick at cards.
She hadn’t been lying about her skill with a poker hand. Jess had taught her and Molly not only how to gauge their own cards, but how to read their opponents’ faces. Alice could spot someone trying to bluff a mile away, while concealing her own reactions with stoic control. She’d earned a good bit of her college tuition money playing cards with unsuspecting classmates in Boston.
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