by Jill Shalvis
“And Jacob?” she asked. “Don’t tell me he’s a cop too.”
His smile faded. “No. At least I doubt it.” He paused, then shoved his fingers through his hair. “He hasn’t been home in a while. A long while.”
There was pain in his gaze now, and regret. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and dropping the subject that was none of her business, directed her attention back to the wood.
“Need some help?” he asked.
Need? No. Want? Yes. But she’d never been good at admitting that. “I’m fine.” Tearing her gaze off of him she glared down at a piece of wood. She kicked it again, not once but twice.
No snake.
She gingerly picked it back up.
“You forget how to survive out here?” he asked.
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “What are you talking about?”
He gave her a slow once-over, gaze lingering on her bare legs, which had certain body parts leaping to life that had no business doing so.
“Loading wood in …” He looked her over again, and his lips quirked. “PJ’s and no gloves. Not the Lily I remember.”
“Well, if one thing’s true, it’s that I’m definitely not that same girl you knew.” She kicked the second piece twice too.
No snakes.
She picked it up, carefully, because Aidan was right. She should be wearing gloves. Spiders lurked in the wood stacks as well as snakes, and the last thing she needed was a bite. She carried the two pieces of wood up the stairs, nearly tripping when she heard his muffled snort of laughter behind her.
“Kiss it?” he asked.
Remembering her shorts, she felt her face flame. Ignoring that, and him, she moved to her front door, dropped the wood in a little stack, turned for more, and—
Ran straight into Aidan, who also had a full armload of wood. “Door,” he directed.
She had no idea how it was that she was both annoyed and yet turned on by his bossy, take-charge tone, but she obediently shifted aside and opened the door. Aidan carried it all into her place and neatly stacked it next to the woodstove. “More?” he asked.
“No.” She watched as he rose to his full height and felt her good parts quiver again. Dammit. “Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
The air between them thickened. “So,” she said. “You were surprised to see me.”
“Yeah. I was surprised to see you.”
“No one told you I was coming?” she asked.
He met her gaze. “No, though it would’ve been nice to hear it from you.”
“We hadn’t communicated since …” She trailed off. Since Ashley’s death.
No, that wasn’t quite true. He’d tried to get ahold of her after the service. She’d picked up one of his calls, and neither of them had known what to say.
The awkwardness of that conversation had stuck with her enough to cut the ties entirely.
“You got in to Boulder,” he said, referring to the University of Colorado’s pursuit of her. “Onto their ski team. A huge big deal.”
“Yes,” she said, trying not to grimace at the memory of being accepted into the one and only school Ashley had desperately wanted to ski for. It was guilt that had kept her from going, plain and simple. “So?”
“So you didn’t go. Instead you became a cosmetologist.”
She paused and arched a brow, going for a misdirect. “You think I’m beneath being a … cosmetologist?”
“I’m just curious about the transition,” he said easily.
“I decided Boulder wasn’t for me.”
“Why?”
She wasn’t used to the questions. It’d been a long time since anyone had gotten close enough to want to know about her personal life at all. Yeah, there’d been her ex, Michael, but it’d been more about work with him, and they’d never really gotten into each other’s pasts at all. And now she wasn’t sure how to answer Aidan’s question. “I was never a great student, we both know that.”
“Did you think Ashley would be upset at you for going?” he asked.
She had no idea how he did it, how he always put his finger right on her thoughts. Her private thoughts. “Maybe at first.”
“Lily,” he said with devastating gentleness.
“She was the one who wanted to go to college, Aidan. She was meant for it, not me.”
“Bullshit.” He was leaning back against the doorjamb, feet crossed, hands in his pockets, a casual pose, but there was nothing casual about his expression.
He didn’t like where she was going with this.
“I’m not stating an opinion here,” she said. “I’m stating fact.”
“So Ashley was smart,” he said. “So what? So are you. Boulder wouldn’t have accepted you otherwise. Tell me you’ve since realized that, Lily.”
She shrugged. “It took awhile, but after cosmetology school, I started working full-time at the spa, as low on the totem pole as I could possibly get, of course. That frustrated me,” she allowed. “I did all the grunt work and then finally was given more to do but didn’t get any of the credit for it. So I went back to school at night and took some business classes. By the end I was practically running the spa myself.” Not that she’d gotten credit for that either …
“I hope like hell it hurt them when you left,” he said.
So did she …
“Did you like it there?” he asked. “San Diego?”
She’d thought so. Until she’d come back here. She hadn’t realized in all those years that she’d never really felt like she was home. “I missed the snow.”
He chuckled. “Can’t tell by the car you’re driving.”
“Yes, well, you always were a car snob.” She paused. “And I don’t plan to still be around by the time I need four-wheel drive.”
“You just got here,” he said. “In a hurry to leave already?”
“I’m only here until a permanent job comes through. I’m looking at this as a little break.”
“From the bad press you mean.”
She sighed. She shouldn’t be surprised he’d heard.
His smile faded. “You get a bum rap, Lily?”
She met his gaze, extremely tired of dancing around this subject. “Are you asking me if I ratted out one of my clients for money?”
He shook his head. “I know you wouldn’t rat out anyone.”
The words, unwavering, sucked the air from her lungs. “You don’t know me anymore,” she reminded him.
“I know enough.” This was said with steely certainty.
The blind faith in her actually made her throat burn. Her eyes, too, and for a moment she couldn’t speak, afraid she’d burst into pathetic tears. “But it was me,” she said softly. “My boss asked me to leak it in order to get the salon’s name in the press. But it backfired and so …” She shrugged.
“And so you took the fall for it.”
She nodded.
“So your boss was a real stand-up sort of person, then.”
She’d thought so, at first. Michael had run the salon, been her friend, her sometime lover, and sometimes her boyfriend. And not only hadn’t he stood at her back, he’d fired her and then blacklisted her as well. “It’s actually done a lot,” she said. “Where a celebrity calls ahead and wants their arrival or departure noted in the press. It keeps them in the public eye and relevant.”
Aidan never took his eyes off of her. “So then why didn’t your boss come clean? She could’ve saved you a lot of problems by doing so.”
“He. Michael,” she corrected. “And I don’t know, other than Michael turned out to be someone other than I thought.”
He studied her a moment. “This guy was more than your boss.”
This startled her.
“Turns out I can still read you,” he said quietly.
“Lucky me.”
“So you going to tell me what’s wrong?”
“Other than I hate snakes and you saw me in my PJs? Nothing.” She lifted her chin and defied him to cont
radict her.
She should have known better. Like Ashley, he’d never met a challenge he didn’t face head-on.
He moved toward her, right into her personal space.
She took a step back and came up against the wall.
This didn’t stop him. He kept his forward momentum until they were toe to toe. And then while she was still standing there a little dumbfounded and also something else, something that felt uncomfortably close to sheer, unadulterated lust, he put his hands on the wall on either side of her head.
This both escalated her heart rate and stopped her lungs from operating. “Um—”
“You had your chance to tell me what’s wrong with you,” he said. “You passed. Now I’m going to tell you what’s wrong with me.”
Oh, God. Talking would be a bad idea. As for a good idea, she had only one, and before she could consider the consequences, she gripped his shirt, hauled him down, and kissed him.
He stilled for a single beat and then got on board quick, pulling her in, sinking a hand into her hair to tilt her head to the angle he wanted, and taking over the kiss.
The next thing she was aware of was the sound of her own aroused moan, and she jerked free.
The corner of his mouth quirked. “Did you just kiss me to shut me up?” he asked.
She blew out a sigh. “It made a lot more sense in my head.”
He grinned, one of those really great grins that made something low in her belly quiver. Needing some space, she pushed him, even though her instincts were telling her to pull him in tighter instead of pushing him away.
“Back to what’s wrong with me,” he said, still looking amused. “It’s you.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but he set a finger against her lips. “My turn,” he said, and lowered his head and kissed her.
And oh. Oh, damn … There were some men who just knew how to kiss, the kind of kiss that could send a woman reeling. The kind of kiss that could take away problems and awareness and … and everything. The kind of kiss that could shatter her into a trillion little pieces. The kind of kiss that somehow both calmed her body and soul even as it wound her up for more.
Aidan was that kind of kisser. Shocking, really, to also realize that in between their first kiss all those years ago and now, that there’d been nothing like it for her.
Aidan pulled back a fraction of an inch, opened his eyes, and stared into hers.
She stared back because wow. Good. So damn good, and for one glorious moment there she’d let her lips cling to his, let the memories of him and all that he’d meant to her wash over her.
And those memories had all been … epic.
Until the end.
Finding her sanity, she pushed him again. For a beat he didn’t move, just looked into her eyes.
And then, on his own terms, he stepped back.
She pointed at him. “That was …”
He arched a brow.
“Never mind what it was,” she said. “We aren’t going there.”
His smile was grim and utterly without mockery. “Agreed.” But then he hauled her up to her toes and kissed her again.
And again.
And only when she was a panting, whimpering mass of jelly did he finally let her go.
“What was that?” she managed.
“Hell if I know.” He shoved his fingers through his hair, looking uncharacteristically baffled.
She stared at him, a little startled to realize he was no more eager for this than she. Had she done what she hadn’t imagined she could, hurt him when she’d left? “Then we won’t make the mistake of repeating it,” she said, shocked to find the words hard to say. Once there’d been nothing she’d wanted more than him, and she’d really believed it could happen.
But then Ashley had died and Lily hadn’t been able to find her footing in an upside-down world. She’d walked away from Cedar Ridge and Aidan, and it had hurt nearly as much as losing Ashley had. She didn’t want to go through anything like that, not ever again. So she opened the front door in a silent invitation for him to leave.
He didn’t. He just met her gaze, his own hooded, giving nothing away of what he was thinking. “I know you’re so stubborn that you’ll freeze to death before asking for help,” he said. “But I’m going to ask anyway—do you need anything else?”
“No,” she said abruptly, and then sighed. “No,” she repeated, softer now. “Thanks.”
He held her gaze, shook his head, and then he was gone.
She closed the door behind him and settled a few hard-earned pieces of wood into the stove.
And that’s when she realized. She did need something—matches. But Aidan had been right, she’d freeze to death before opening the door and catching him on the way to his truck to ask if he had any. Nope, she’d have to relive kissing Aidan to keep her warm until she got to the store. The thought heated her just as well as any fire.
Chapter 8
Aidan’s cell went off in the middle of a really great dream where he had the kiss with Lily playing on repeat. And damn, she’d tasted as sweet as he’d remembered. It’d nearly killed him to pull away.
He loved the way she’d held still after, staring at him in shock and wonder, how her tongue had come out to lick her lower lip as if trying to make the taste of him last.
He’d had to force himself to let go of her. But in his dream he didn’t have to let go. And she didn’t push him away either. Nope, instead she pushed him down onto her bed and—
His phone buzzed again. Damn. Reaching out in the dark, he squinted at the screen. Incoming text calling him for an S&R—a missing camper.
He dressed and ran into Hudson at the front door, hair crazy wild, his eyes hooded from sleep.
“Hey, Princess,” Aidan said. “You look like shit.”
Hudson flipped him off as they jogged out to Aidan’s truck and hit the road, driving straight into a wall of fog in the still-dark morning.
“Zero visibility,” Hudson said, looking at his weather app.
“No shit,” Aidan said, looking out the windshield.
Hudson handed him a granola bar.
“What’s this crap?” Aidan asked.
“Just eat it before I cram it down your grumpy-ass throat.”
Aidan ate the granola bar. Not because of Hud’s threat but because he was starving. And when he was done he tossed the wrapper at Hud’s head.
Hud caught it without taking his eyes off his phone. Impressive. The guy had been a skinny and sickly eleven-year-old kid when his mother brought him and Jacob to Cedar Ridge. Char, suffering in her own right, had taken them in, since it was clear their mother wasn’t mentally stable enough to handle them. From that day forward Hud had followed Gray and Aidan around with hero worship in his eyes. Unused to any sort of outdoor lifestyle, he’d often ended up hurt and stuck indoors. Char, who’d loved them all equally, had a soft spot for Hud. She’d babied him, earning him the nickname Princess.
Hudson had grown a couple of feet and a whole bunch of muscle since then, but, to his eternal frustration, the nickname had stuck.
“You really do look like shit,” Aidan said.
“I was online all night,” Hudson admitted.
Aidan knew Hud had been searching in earnest for his twin brother, Jacob. Not that they’d found hide nor hair of him.