by Jill Shalvis
Aidan tugged off his jacket and wrapped her up in it. “Come on, I’ll drive you home.”
“Is Shelly your ex-girlfriend?” Not the question she’d meant to ask, not even close, but she hugged his jacket close and bit her tongue, not willing to take it back.
If Aidan was surprised by the question, he didn’t show it. “We saw each other on and off, mostly off, but she was never a girlfriend,” he said.
“So there’s no … relationship?”
“I haven’t had time to be in a relationship,” he said. “Now let’s go. I’ll come back to fix your tire and get the car to you.”
That all sounded good, but there was more sympathy in his gaze than she was comfortable with. “Why?” she asked.
He looked confused at the question, like it didn’t compute. And for a guy whose job was, literally, to help people, to save them from whatever situation they’d found themselves in, it probably didn’t compute. He was programmed to help people, to save their asses, no matter how pathetic the situation.
“Why would I help you?” he repeated slowly, obviously still baffled by her. “Because I can. Because I want to.”
But she didn’t want to need saving. Not by him, not by anyone. She did her own saving, thank you very much. And if she could’ve budged those lug nuts, she’d have changed her own stupid tire. “But I don’t need saving.”
“I hear you,” he said, calm and quiet, like maybe he was talking her off a ledge, and in some ways she supposed he was. “But it’s raining,” he reminded her. “And you’re wearing a pretty dress, which you’d get dirty changing your own tire.”
She looked down at herself. She’d almost forgotten she was dressed up. Her knees were a mess. And the dress was clinging to her thighs a little bit. Aidan’s clothes were doing the same now. He looked good wet. Too good.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing her hand, pulling her across the lot before she could think of stopping him.
When he pulled open the passenger door of his truck, she met his gaze. “Okay,” she said. “But I want to note that this isn’t a rescue. This is a favor that you’ll let me return.”
“Sure,” he said. “Just get out of the rain and in the damn truck.”
“No, I mean it, Aidan. You have to let me pay you back somehow.”
He dropped his head and muttered something beneath his breath about the entire female race being more stubborn than a pack of Kincaids. “Fine,” he said, meeting her gaze again. “You owe me a favor. Get in.”
“And you’ll let me repay you.”
One brow shot up.
“Say it,” she said. She was probably proving his point about her being stubborn, but she didn’t care. “Say you will, or no go.”
He gave her a long, hard alpha-man look she imagined usually worked for him, but she held her ground. It was the one thing she knew about him more than anything else—he was strong, inside and out. Strong willed, strong minded, and she needed to be the same to stand up to him.
Finally he let out a low laugh and shook his head. “You’re something else, you know that?”
“I do know,” she assured him. “And …?”
His gaze dropped to her mouth and his voice dropped too. “And I’ll let you repay the damn favor.” Apparently done indulging her, he practically hoisted her into the truck, then leaned in to do her seat belt for her, like that might keep her from running. When she was locked in, he came around to the driver’s seat and slid in behind the wheel. He shook his head and sent a myriad of raindrops flying before turning over the engine and cranking the heater. “You warm enough?” he asked.
That he cared enough to ask, coupled with his gruff voice, had her getting there. “Yes,” she said. “Thanks to you.”
“You have enough wood loaded in your place?”
“I do,” she said. Also thanks to him. “I haven’t used too much, I’ve been at work.”
“And apparently doing my mom’s hair while you’re at it,” he said, and spared her a glance.
“She looked pretty tonight, don’t you think?”
He grimaced. “Yeah.”
“And happy.” Lily shook her head. “I can’t believe you and Gray tried to sabotage her date.”
“She’s not ready to go out. She’s …”
“Feeble?” she asked dryly.
He sighed.
Lily found a laugh. “Aidan, she’s fantastic. Really.”
“She’s not ready for a man in her life.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“Why not?”
“Yeah, why not? She kicked your father to the curb a long time ago.”
“She’s … frail.”
“Because of her hip? She says it’s feeling better every day. Besides, that shouldn’t keep her from dating.”
“She doesn’t pick the right men.”
She stared at him a moment. “That’s her choice. You realize that, right?” she asked gently. “Doesn’t everyone deserve their own version of a happily-ever-after?”
“Yes,” he said meaningfully, and slid her a look.
“Oh, no,” she said. “We’re not talking about me.”
“We should be.”
“But we’re not.”
They drove in silence. Aidan handled his truck like he handled everything in his life—with easy, effortless confidence. It wasn’t fair at all. He pulled into the lot of her building, and Lily hopped out of the truck practically before he’d stopped. When she turned back to close the door he was there already standing before her, big and rock steady.
“In a hurry?” he asked, brow raised.
“Yes.” In a hurry to not kiss him again.
He smiled. He knew, the bastard, as proven by his next words.
“You don’t trust yourself around me,” he said, sounding way too pleased with himself.
“I trust myself just fine,” she said. “It’s you I don’t trust.”
He laughed, looking smug and … damn. Hot. Extremely hot.
“I’m serious,” she said. “You have this way of mowing over my roadblocks.”
“Are you referring to the present or the past?”
“Both.” She pointed at him. “But we’re not talking about it.”
“Why not?”
Because my sister was in love with you and I can’t … I can’t go there. “Do you think about her?” she asked before she could access her good sense and keep her mouth shut.
“Yes,” he said again, not having to ask who. “I think about her every time I have a call up on Dead Man’s Cliff.” He met her gaze. “And you, Lily. To be honest, mostly I think of you.”
She sucked in a breath at that. She’d thought of him plenty too. But somehow she’d never pictured him thinking of her in return. Shaking her head because it was too much, she took a step back.
He reached out for her, but she lifted her hands to hold him off and shook her head again. “Don’t,” she whispered. “I … can’t.”
And then she walked away. Or maybe ran was more like it, taking the stairs blindly. At the top, her fingers shook so badly she dropped her keys twice before Aidan gently nudged her out of the way and opened her door with his keys before bending to scoop hers off the floor.
“You have keys to my place?” she asked in surprise.
“I have keys to everything.”
Except her heart, she told herself. Nope, he was firmly locked right out of that particular organ. And he’d stay out.
Aidan watched Lily’s heart go to war with her head for a beat before gently nudging her inside.
She slipped out of his jacket and handed it back to him. “Thanks for that. And the ride. Lock the door on your way out?”
“I can’t leave you alone. Not on her birthday.”
“Yes you can. You just walk out the door.”
He gave her a slow shake of his head.
“And you call me stubborn,” she muttered beneath her breath, but he was fluent in Annoyed Female Speak, living with Kenna.
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br /> “Do you want to talk about her?” he asked.
“No. Not even a little bit.”
Wrapping his fingers around her upper arm, he pulled her back around to face him when she turned away. He tried to read her expression and went still with a gut-wrenching pit in the bottom of his stomach. “Does this have anything to do with me?”
A sound came from deep in her throat. Pain? Regret? Hard to say as she pulled free and took a step back, staring at him, clearly shocked. “No, of course not. I don’t know why you’d ask me such a thing.”
“Maybe because immediately afterward you took off,” he said. “And when I called you, you clearly didn’t want to talk to me. That was the last I heard from you for a decade until the junk food massacre in the convenience store.”
She closed her eyes. “It’s not you. It’s me. Ashley’s accident. It was all my fault, Aidan.”
This was somehow worse, the proof that Jonathan was right, that she did indeed blame herself. Feeling hollow at the notion that she’d been feeling this way for ten years, Aidan shook his head. “Why would you possibly blame yourself?”
“Because she was just trying to be like me!” She covered her face. “I’d climbed the face and hiked down and she couldn’t let it go until she’d done the same.” She broke off and swallowed hard before covering her mouth with a hand and closing her eyes. “If I hadn’t bragged about it—”
“Lily, that was your relationship with her, competitive to the core. What happened to her up there was an accident. A horrible, tragic accident. But it wasn’t your doing.”
Her eyes flew open, filled with surprise, and that just about killed him. Hadn’t anyone else ever told her these things? She was still staring at him when he took her hands in his and lifted them up to his mouth, where he brushed his lips over her knuckles. “Not your fault,” he repeated softly as it all clicked into place and made sense for him.
She’d left because of grief.
She’d stayed away because of guilt.
Not because of him. The knowledge at once changed things for him and also devastated him—for her. “Ashley was book smart but not street smart. We both know that. She didn’t have your logic skills, your ability to know your own limits. She was headstrong and self-centered and she did whatever she wanted—not thinking about the cost to anyone, especially you. You can’t carry around the responsibility for what happened to her, you just can’t. And more than that, she wouldn’t want you to.”
She pulled free and moved to the woodstove. “It’s June and I’m about to light a fire,” she said, her back to him. “Definitely not in San Diego anymore, Toto.”
Nudging her aside, he crouched before the woodstove and began to build her a fire.
“I can do that,” she said.
“I know.” He was expertly and efficiently crisscrossing the kindling, then adding the wood on top, doing what would have taken her a good half hour in less than a minute.
“You’re good at that,” she said, but it wasn’t his fire skills she was admiring. It was the easy way he was balanced on the balls of his feet, his pants stretched taut across what was surely the best ass in all of Cedar Ridge.
He rose and met her gaze, and she could feel herself blush because what if he could read her mind?
“I’m good at a lot of things,” he murmured.
Dammit.
“Now tell me how you can be one of the smartest people I know and yet really believe you were responsible for your sister’s death,” he said, switching gears with far more ease than she could. “What am I missing?”
She stared at him for a long beat. “The day before, I’d come home with a scholarship to the University of Colorado at Boulder and an invite to be on their ski team.”
“Prestigious ski team,” he corrected.
“Yeah, well, it was the last straw for Ashley after the attention I’d received in the recruiting process. And Boulder was the only place she’d ever wanted to go ski, so it was her dream opportunity and I got it a whole year before she could even apply.”
Aidan didn’t point out that Ashley should’ve been proud of her sister, so damn proud.
Lily shook her head. “I know what you’re thinking, and she would’ve been happy for me. Later. It would’ve come to her, really it would have, but in the moment all she saw was that I had something she wanted. I shouldn’t have told her like I did, I shouldn’t have—” She let out a low sound of regret. “We were already in a fight because she’d been bugging me to take her up to Dead Man’s Cliff and I’d refused. It was way too dangerous for her. She was only an intermediate climber at best, but she was determined to beat me at something.”
“Listen to me,” Aidan said. “All siblings are like that, okay? Hell, Gray and I nearly killed each other a hundred times over when we were growing up. Never mind the bad example we set for Jacob and Hudson.”
“This was different,” she insisted. “I knew the Boulder admission letter would hurt her. She got straight A’s through every single semester of high school in preparation and I …” She shook her head. “Didn’t. I didn’t get A’s at all. I wasn’t into school. I wanted to be outside.”
“On the mountain,” he said quietly. “I know. You were out there exploring every single day that you could, which was just about every day in the summer.”
She looked surprised. “How … how did you know that? I saw you a few times but … every day?”
He hesitated to tell her. She was like a bird with a broken wing, nursing her past hurts, afraid to forgive herself and be happy. He wanted to soothe, to help ease the pain, but wasn’t sure how to do that without losing his heart and soul to her. Again.
“Aidan?”
“Gray and I took turns going up after you,” he said. “Making sure you were okay.”
She gaped at him. “Why?”
“Because no one should be out there by themselves, Lily.”
“I was fine,” she said. “I knew what I was doing. I’d been out there hiking those mountains all my life.”
“It was your escape,” he said. “It was always mine too. We all got that, and no one wanted to impede on the only time you ever had to yourself.”
“But you watched me. Which means that I was never really by myself at all.”
He ran a finger along her temple, tucking a strand of wet hair behind her ear. He loved the silkiness of her hair and how when she was outside, it always caught the sun, a thousand different colors that he couldn’t possibly name. “No, you were never alone,” he said, purposely switching up the words.
She studied him, her eyes softening. “I didn’t ask for you to watch over me.”
“I know. I wanted to,” he said, and stroked a finger over her temple again. “I loved watching you up on the mountain, whether on the trail or taking years off my life when you went rock climbing. I saw the love of the place all over your face. We had that in common, Lily. I thought it was just a friendship only. And then that night at the dance when I kissed you and you kissed me back like I was the greatest thing that had ever happened to you …” He smiled a little at the memory. “Best day ever.” Lifting his other hand, he slid his fingers into her hair, letting his thumb lightly glide over her.
And damn, he needed to taste her again. Slowly, knowing she’d be stopping him any second, he backed her to the wall and then lowered his head.
She didn’t stop him.
Instead she gripped his biceps and tugged him the rest of the way to her, closing the distance to kiss him.
And kiss him …
Slow.
Sweet.
Achingly so.
He told himself he would stand there and let her have her way with him for as long as she wanted, but he underestimated the speed