Baby, It's Cold Outside

by Kait Nolan

  Things between them had escalated so quickly because of the close-quarters circumstances. Gaining some distance had been necessary for work, but what if he’d changed his mind about her? What if she’d built up this whole fantasy about what they were or could be to each other and the guy who came to get her was…something else? What if the intimacy they’d shared had been an illusion? Those questions had been enough to scare the crap out of her, so she’d buried herself in the book, throwing Annika unavoidably into Michael’s path. Better to force him to face facts than make herself crazy facing her own.

  But now she’d stepped away from the book and all those insecurities had come roaring back to the forefront. How should she greet him? Probably grabbing him by the shirtfront and dragging him into her room wasn’t the way to go, no matter how much she wanted to. A hug? A kiss on the cheek? Should she take the lead or wait to see what he did? Would she have to start all over earning his trust? Or would he be the same guy who’d blown her brain with a lingering kiss on the porch when he’d left two days ago?

  Because she was perilously close to pacing the floor, Ivy sat back down at her laptop.

  “If you’re gonna make anybody nuts, do it to Michael.”

  She fell back into the story, deep enough that when the knock came on the door some time later, it took her a few moments to register where she was.

  Harrison.

  Her heart leapt with nerves and excitement. Shoving back from the desk, she rushed across the room in bare feet, pausing with her hand on the knob to try to get herself under control so she didn’t look as over-eager as she felt. Sucking in a few calming breaths, she fixed a smile on her face and opened the door.

  A massive bouquet of flowers blocked her view.

  Flowers?

  Lifting her gaze, she spotted Harrison behind them, ears faintly pink, looking hella uncomfortable.

  The fixed smile melted into a genuine one. “You brought me flowers? Awww.” Reaching out, she accepted them from his outstretched hand and buried her face in the sweet-smelling blooms.

  All the nerves, all the angst and questions, seeped out of her. He’d brought her flowers. A man didn’t bring flowers to a woman he didn’t actually like or was planning to break things off with. Flowers—especially flowers like these—took a little thought and planning. So he’d been thinking of her as she had him.

  A little giddy with relief, she grinned up at him. “Come in.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, he stepped into her room. Belatedly, she looked around, wondering what state she’d left the place in. Thankfully, she hadn’t been deep in the book long enough for it to turn into a pig sty. There was no pile of dirty clothes in the floor and the bed was actually made, courtesy of the inn staff. Of course, that just had her thinking about tumbling him onto it and mussing that neat comforter.

  “These are beautiful. I’ll have to ask Pru for something to put them in.”

  Fidgeting a little, Harrison scrubbed a hand at the back of his neck. “I should’ve thought of that.”

  Wanting to put him at ease, she lifted to her toes and brushed a kiss to his cheek. “You thought of me, which I appreciate. Thank you.”

  His hand slid around her waist, his dark eyes intent on hers in a way that made her stomach jump. “I’ve thought of little else the last couple of days.”

  She sensed the admission was hard-won. Maybe he’d struggled as much as she had being apart. Setting the flowers aside so they wouldn’t get crushed, Ivy flowed into him, feeling all the nerves settle as his arms came around her. His broad hand slid into her hair, angling her head for a kiss. Then his lips were on hers and every doubt, every question faded.

  She hadn’t romanticized this, hadn’t imagined it. He still wanted her and lord, did she still want him. Needing to get closer, she slid her hands up and over his shoulders to lock behind his neck. Maybe she could revisit that dragging him to bed scenario.

  “Hey Ivy, did you need—oh!”

  Feeling her cheeks go nuclear, Ivy pulled back to glance toward the still open door, where Pru’s teenaged daughter, Ari, stood.

  The girl didn’t even bother to hide her smile. “Sorry.”

  Ivy had to clear her throat to speak. “It’s fine. Did I need what?”

  “I saw him bring in the flowers, so I thought you might need a vase.” She held up the one she carried.

  “That’s very thoughtful. Thanks, Ari.”

  The girl stepped into the room, far enough to set the vase on a table. “I’m just gonna leave this here and get out of your way.” Hastily backing up, she grabbed the door and swung it closed behind her. “Have a good night!”

  Chuckling, Ivy dropped her head to Harrison’s chest. “Well, now I feel way too weird to do what I really want to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  She lifted her head. “Show you exactly how soft and cushy this bed is.”

  Heat flared in his eyes. “There’s always later.”

  “I like later.”

  “What about the meantime? How’s the book coming?”

  She pulled away, snagging his hand and dragging him over to her new laptop. Triumphant, she pointed at the bottom of the screen. “Behold that word count!”

  Harrison went brows up. “You’ve cranked out nearly seventeen thousand words in two days?”

  “Damned skippy! My brain is gonna be completely useless goo when this book is done, but it’s going to be done. That’s the important part.”

  “That’s fantastic.”

  “What’s even more fantastic is that it’s good. Some of the best work I’ve done. I mean, I think. I’m probably not exactly unbiased at this stage. But I’m loving the story. I’m loving the chance to peel back their layers and show them as so much more than what the reader saw before.” Squeezing his hand in gratitude, she smiled up at him. “You saw it first. I couldn’t have done this without you. You’ve helped me fall back in love with writing again.”

  And maybe more than a little bit with you.

  The realization slid between her ribs like a knife, leaving her stunned and only a few steps ahead of panic. Oh God.

  It was too much, too fast. She hadn’t meant for this to happen. She couldn’t be in love with him. Not really. It was just lust. Wasn’t it?

  “Do you need to take notes?”

  Ivy blinked up at him. “What?”

  “You’ve got that distracted look, like you’ve just had a major plot realization. Do you need to write it down before we leave for dinner?”

  That he’d think of that, respect that, made her heart go gooey. Damn it. This wasn’t just lust.

  “No. No, I definitely won’t forget this.” Squeezing his hand, she stepped away to find her shoes, grateful for the opportunity to hide her face for a moment. “Let’s go get some dinner.”

  Chapter 12

  “So I believe we had a deal.” Across the table, Ivy leaned back in her chair, a glass of wine in her hand. “A question for every ten thousand words. I’ve earned a question and three quarters.”

  Damn. Harrison had hoped she’d forget. Not that he wasn’t willing to share with her, but he was a little afraid of what she’d ask. “You can’t ask a partial question.”

  She wrinkled her nose in a little snit that bordered on adorable. “Fine. I’ll bank those seven thousand words for next time. I still get one.”

  You made the deal. Bracing himself, he picked up his beer. “So you do. Ask away.”

  “This has been circling around in my head since you dropped me off.” She ran a finger around the lip of her glass, angling her head to study him. “What is it you do for a living that you can stick around here waiting on me?”

  Of all the things she could’ve asked, that wasn’t what he’d expected. Relief and mild embarrassment had him settling back in his own chair, rubbing a palm on his thigh. “Oh, that. Well, as it happens I’m also a writer.”

  Ivy blinked. “What?”

  The stupefied expression on her face made him w
ish he’d said something sooner.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  Self-conscious, he shrugged. “I’m not in your league. You’re all multi-New York Times best seller, and I’m self-published. I mean, I do well enough. I make a living. But I figured you get all kinds of requests and shit from other aspiring or newly published writers who want an introduction or an in to the big leagues. I didn’t want you to think I was one of them.”

  She waved a hand. “Oh, that whole snobby traditional vs. self-published debate is so five years ago. The indies have more than proven themselves savvy businesspeople. To my mind, you have it harder. You have to be author and publisher. I can’t imagine doing more than I’m already doing.”

  “I’m not, really. I hire out my editor and cover artist. And I wager I do a lot less social media and fan stuff than you just because I don’t have that kind of fan base. I don’t have the acclaim, and I’m totally fine with that because it also means I don’t have the pressure. There’s no agent breathing down my neck, and my editor works on my schedule, not somebody else’s. It’s not a bad gig.”

  “No, I don’t guess so.” She dropped her head back and sighed. “No wonder you were so insightful about the problems I’ve been having. You get it.”

  “Well enough.”

  When she straightened, her eyes held a gleam of interest. “So what do you write?”

  Harrison hesitated.

  “Oh, come on. You can’t just tell me you’re a writer and not expect me to want to talk shop. This all still falls under the category of the first question I asked. Do you write thrillers, too? You’re awfully damned good at helping plot them.”

  He shook his head. “I write science fiction.”

  “What kind of sci fi? Like…Dune or Aliens or space opera or what?”

  “It’s kinda Firefly meets Game of Thrones meets Star Wars.”

  Her eyes brightened. “That sounds epic. Why scifi?”

  It was a logical turn of the conversation. She’d told him why she wrote thrillers. But the whys of his fiction skated a little too close for comfort to the ghosts he’d been struggling to escape.

  Ivy’s expression softened as she reached out to lay a hand over his on the table. “It’s fine. I’ve used up my question.”

  What kind of coward was he, making her earn the right to know him? He wanted more with her than the physical, and that meant sharing more of himself, even the less than sterling parts. It meant choosing connection instead of avoidance and deflection. He wouldn’t tell her all of it. Couldn’t. But he could give her the gist.

  Turning his hand over to curve around hers, he swallowed. “You weren’t wrong in your profile. I left the Army three years ago. It was…a rough transition.” Captain of Understatement. But he couldn’t bring himself to revisit those first six months out. “I’d enlisted when I was eighteen, worked my way through the ranks. It’s all I’d really known in my adult life. Those men and women were my family. And I’d lost three of them because of a call I made.”

  Her fingers tightened around his but she said nothing, offered no false platitudes. And somehow that made it a little easier.

  Harrison sipped at his beer to wet his parched throat. “I didn’t handle it well. I kept replaying it over and over, trying to see what I’d missed, what I could have changed that would’ve altered the outcome.” He’d relived it too, for about eighteen months. But those attacks had come fewer and farther between. The one he’d had at the cabin had been his first in more than a year. But even that hadn’t been a full-blown flashback. Thank God.

  “My therapist suggested I write about it. She meant journaling, but that was too…close. Too personal. I couldn’t look directly at it without ending right back up in the same place. So I ended up creating this character and shifting the whole damned thing to another world. Pretty soon, I’d come up with at least a dozen different variations for what could’ve happened differently. And most of them involved tech that doesn’t actually exist, intel I didn’t have. One impossibility after another. Because the reality was that there wasn’t anything I could’ve done differently. Because I’m not God.”

  Those silver-green eyes shone with empathy.

  “Yeah, you were right about that, too.” He grimaced. “Knowing it doesn’t make it any easier to live with. It doesn’t changed what happened. But writing about it like that…it let me be God in some small way. And I found myself taking the strongest scenario of the lot and following what happened to those men, if they’d lived.”

  Her thumb stroked the back of his hand, a soft, soothing rhythm. “Did it help?”

  “Some. I was always into adventures and scifi as a kid, and it turned out I had an aptitude for writing it. Since it meant I could set my own hours and avoid people, it seemed like the ideal job.” He sighed. “Or it did. You aren’t the only one struggling with writer’s block.”

  “That’s why you came up here? Same as me?”

  “Something like that.” He thought of Ty and wondered how his buddy was holding up. But he wasn’t ready to talk about the funeral or the ghosts it had stirred up.

  “Well, you were a hell of a plot doctor for my book. Maybe I can return the favor. Where are you stuck?”

  “I have to decide if I can keep going.”

  “With the current book?”

  “With any of it. I’m three books deep and the war they’re fighting isn’t over. I’m not sure it’ll ever be over.” Because he didn’t know if his own ever would be. “The fourth book is dragging because I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know if my hero can keep fighting it. I don’t know if I can keep fighting it. So I’ve been considering that maybe he goes out in a blaze of glory and I wrap the series.”

  Catching the look of distress on her face he squeezed her hand. “That’s not some kind of metaphor. I’m not considering suicide. I just think maybe the writing thing has run its course. It started out a way to figure out how my men could’ve lived, and ended up being a way to sort of let them live on. That part was good. But it hasn’t exorcised those demons, and I’m not sure putting all my thoughts and memories of that shit on paper—even with lasers and spaceships—is a good thing. Keeps them…too close for comfort.”

  Ivy was quiet for a long moment. “Maybe the answer lies in not trying to rewrite the past but in writing a different future. I don’t know your story or the context for your hero, but maybe in order for you to leave the war behind, your hero does, too.”

  Harrison frowned. “Just have him walk away? What the hell would that even look like?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s the third option that doesn’t involve staying in the fight or making the ultimate sacrifice. It gives you room to write more stories. If that’s what you want to do.”

  The idea of it circled around the back of his brain as they finished their meal. Did he want to write more stories? If he wasn’t writing about the horrors of war, he didn’t know what stories he would tell. But as he helped Ivy on with her coat and offered his arm to escort her back out to the Jeep, he knew the only story he was positive he wanted to continue was theirs.

  Harrison stayed quiet on the drive back to the inn.

  Ivy worried he was too much in his head. Maybe her questions had pushed those things he’d been trying to forget to the forefront. Her heart twisted at his unexpected decision to open up to her, at the knowledge of what it had to have cost him. She understood his reticence. Who would want to talk about going through hell? And yet, clearly the experience was still with him. He’d been living with it, by turns circling around it and attacking it head-on. And none of that had quite helped him accept it. Maybe nothing would but time, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to help.

  Her gut said he shouldn’t be alone tonight. She was the one who’d circled into that territory and brought it up. He’d said himself she was a good distraction. She could do that much for him, at least. Keep him in the now, with her. So when they got to the inn, she reached out to take his hand.
“Come up.”

  For a moment, she thought he’d demur. Then his fingers closed around hers.

  He followed her quietly up the stairs. They didn’t run into Pru’s family or any of the other guests. Ivy unlocked her room, letting them inside. A single lamp cast a gentle glow over the room. The flowers she’d arranged in the vase before they left for dinner made the air smell sweet. Laying her purse beside them on the desk, she locked the door and turned to Harrison.

  His focus was very definitely on her now. She liked how he watched her, as if she were the center of everything. His true north. It was fanciful and romantic, but it made her feel beautiful and sexy and simply more than she was.

  Moving into him, she laid hands on his chest, rising to her toes to brush a kiss over his lips. Just the barest whisper of a touch instead of the greedy gulps they’d shared before. She didn’t want to rush. Her hands slid inside his coat, stroking up and over his shoulders to push it off. He tugged her closer by the front of her coat, his fingers making short work of the buttons and repeating her gesture, sliding his hands down her spine and pulling her against the length of him.

  All that warmth and strength was intoxicating. So was the taste of him as he took the kiss deeper, dipping his tongue into her mouth. Ivy lost herself for seconds, minutes, as her tongue stroked against his. Then he was peeling down her dress and following it with his lips, trailing them over each newly exposed inch of skin.

  She could never get tired of this.

  Because she knew he was apt to take over and she wanted her fill of him before he did, she fought her way through the haze of lust to unbutton his shirt, stripping it off and sliding up his undershirt so she could press a kiss to the smooth, warm skin of his chest, over the heart that beat thick and fast to match hers. His chest rumbled with a groan of pleasure and his hand slid into her hair, holding her there for a long moment.