Wedding At the Riverview Inn Page 14

  “Are you going to?”

  She shrugged. “Depends.” These were the words she’d been scared of saying. These were the stupid steps toward ruin.

  “On what?”

  “On what Daphne was doing here.”

  There. She’d said it. She couldn’t take the words back. They couldn’t pretend the pink elephant that breathed desire in the middle of the room wasn’t there.

  “I broke it off.”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason you’re not going to dinner with Marcus.”

  The air crackled and hissed and practically smelled of sex. Six feet away from him and she knew he was hard, just as he’d know she was wet.

  Oh, I love it. She loved him this way. Loved and hated him.

  “Why’s that?” she asked, cocking her head and playing her part, devastating though it would be.

  He pulled on the fabric and stepped toward her, reeling her in and chasing her down, and she let it happen. She wanted it. Waited for it. Then there it was.

  His lips, moist and hot against hers. This kiss wasn’t tentative or careful, it was pained and angry. It was the unleashing of a thousand repressed kisses, a hundred long nights and dozens of mornings wishing he was there.

  He wrapped her up in his arms and the silk, held her so close she couldn’t move and she wouldn’t have if she could.

  “You’re ruining my life,” he said against her mouth, before biting her lips aggressively, the way she loved. His words stung, particularly since he was such a part of the rebuilding efforts of her life. But thought dried up and blew away as the temperature between their bodies flared.

  She arched her hips against his, felt the ridge of his sex beneath his jeans and her body turned to mercury against his.

  “What are we doing?” she asked as he pushed her against the table. “What—”

  “I don’t care,” he muttered against her throat, his hand sliding up her thigh to her hips. “I don’t want to stop.”

  Yes. Right. No stopping. She opened her legs and he stepped between them, their dance as familiar as if they’d done this yesterday. His hands fisted in her hair and she sucked on the skin of his throat, used her teeth on his ear and every groan, every sigh and hiss from their lips threw gasoline on the fire between them.

  The uncomfortable clearing of a throat behind Gabe didn’t stop them. Barely slowed them down.

  “For God’s sake, son, you’re in the dining room!” Patrick’s hoarse bark doused them like ice water and Gabe stepped away, his hand on her elbow. She rose from the table and turned to pick up the banner, blushing like a sixteen-year-old, but she couldn’t move, thanks to being wrapped up in the silk. She struggled her way free.

  “Hi…Dad.” Gabe said, smiling. They’d been caught making out by his father and Gabe was smiling.

  Which, despite her general embarrassment and confusion, made her smile, then, oddly enough, laugh. Gabe watched her sideways and his lips twitched before he laughed, too. Patrick watched them as though he’d stumbled down the rabbit hole.

  “You two are nuts!” Patrick said. “You always have been.”

  “That explains a lot,” Gabe murmured, bending to help her pick up the material.

  “You better know what you’re doing, Gabe,” Patrick said. “Because I remember what you were like the last time you guys wrecked each other, and I don’t want to see you that way again.” Patrick left, muttering and stomping his way to the kitchen.

  That sobered Alice and she searched Gabe’s handsome face for some twitch of emotion. “What were you like?” she asked, their faces so close she felt his warm breath on her cheek.

  “A mess,” he said and swallowed. “I loved you, Alice. I wanted to make it work.”

  His words flayed her, paralyzed her. Tears trembled on her eyelashes and she wiped them away before they fell.

  “I can’t…” He sighed. “I can’t go through that again. This—” his hand swirled between them “—whatever this is between us, it’s not a second chance. I can’t survive a second chance, not if it’s going to fail.”

  “Me, neither,” she said.

  Neither one of them asked why it would have to fail, though the words nearly leaped from her mouth.

  “So?” His eyes bored into hers. “What was that?” he asked, referring to their kiss and near-tabletop lovemaking.

  “It was good, Gabe.” She smiled and stroked his cheek. “Maybe it’s better to say goodbye this way, to end our relationship like this rather than the way we did five years ago.”

  “You mean the plate fight?”

  “We did some damage.” She nodded. “But I think what we had deserves better than that.” She got lost in the depths of Gabe’s eyes, lost there among the swirl of affection and memory of desire, just barely contained.

  “I need—” He covered her hand with his, the rough skin on his palms sending sparks through her body.

  Me.

  Us.

  To get naked. To kiss you. To love you.

  “I need some time to think.”

  She pulled her hand free of his. Part of her hurt knowing that she was so toxic, such a risk, that involvement—even only physical—was not something anyone took lightly. But part of her understood and appreciated the chance to think. “And I need time to hang these silks.”

  The cool air blowing between them vanquished the last of the fire they’d built with their bodies.

  “You need help?” he asked.

  “I do, but that’s why your dad was here. He volunteered to help me get the lighting up and ready.”

  “I’ll send him back in.” He tucked his hands in the pockets of his worn jeans and spoke louder in a near yell. “I’m sure he and Max are listening on the other side of the door.”

  “We can barely hear you!” Max yelled through the kitchen door, confirming Gabe’s words. “You need to speak up!”

  Alice felt emotion pulse through her body, longing and gratitude and regret that she no longer had a permanent place with these men.

  “Bye,” she whispered with a smile she knew would seem sad, but she couldn’t pretend otherwise.

  “Bye.” He nodded, turned and left her alone with silk the color of his eyes ruined with her tears.

  She and Patrick stayed up late building frames for the material. He’d been persistent with his questions, which she knew were born of concern, but she dodged them as best she could.

  “I don’t want to see you two hurt again,” he said.

  “Me, neither.” She bent the thin light strips of pine in an effort to make the silk billow like waves. But all the wood did was crack. She swore and removed the splintered wood from the frame.

  “Are you still in love?” he asked and Alice hung her head backward, examining the ceiling so she wouldn’t have to look at her ex-father-in-law’s knowing face.

  “In love?” she asked the ceiling. “I don’t know. I still love him. I think he still loves me, but that doesn’t mean things will work,” she said. “We loved each other last time, too.”

  Patrick grunted and hammered the finishing nails into the left corner of the six-foot structure. “I loved his mother,” he said.

  She sighed in relief. Finally the heat was off her and Gabe.

  “I loved her so much that when she left I hated her.”

  “I know that feeling,” she said, having experienced it for a number of years.

  “I loved her so much that I hated her and I wanted her punished.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “So when she asked to come back I said no.”

  “That’s about—” She looked up at him, her stomach in her knees. “What?”

  “She asked to come back, twice. Well, three times.”

  “When?” she whispered.

  “Three months after she left, then a year after that and now.”

  Her head reeled, she sat hard on her butt. “Do the boys know?”

  “They know she’s been in touch recently,” he said and s
hook his head. “But not about her earlier letters.”

  “What?” She hardly knew what questions to ask, where to start. “Why?”

  “Why?” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Because I was a fool. Because I was scared. Because I was angry. Because, the truth was, life got easier without her. With just us.”

  I’m scared, her heart spoke. I’m scared of Gabe breaking me all over again. And she’d spent much of the last decade being angry.

  God, I’ve wasted so much time.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked him.

  “What can I do? She wants to see them and the boys will barely even talk about her.” He shrugged. “I don’t want anyone to be hurt.”

  “What about you? What do you want?”

  “I want my family together.” His voice cracked and he hammered at the frame as if it were an animal trying to eat him.

  “You should do it. Tell her to come here,” she said, bold and gutsy because she’d be long gone. “Gabe and Max need to deal with what their mom did to them. They need to hash it out or forgive her or scream at her or whatever. But everyone pretending there’s not this giant mom-size hole in their lives is getting a little ridiculous.”

  Patrick stared at her, then tipped his head back and laughed. “Right, and where will you be during World War Three?”

  “Behind locked doors in Albany,” she said with a smile.

  Patrick set down his hammer, pushing himself up with much groaning and creaking knees. “You know,” he said, “there are other holes in Gabe’s life. Watching the two of you pretend that you don’t still feel things for each other has been pretty ridiculous.”

  “Well—” she felt a blush ignite in her neck “—obviously we’ve stopped pretending.”

  “I’m not talking about sex.” Patrick helped her to her feet and patted her shoulder. “I’m talking about the love that’s running you two ragged.”

  Emotion surfaced and bobbed in her throat and she busied herself stacking the lightweight frames and supplies along the west window. “It’s too hard,” she said. “It’s too hard to go back.”

  Patrick’s eyes were liquid with compassion. Suddenly, she saw everything he hid behind his smiles and teasing. He was a man with a broken heart, living with one eye on the past.

  “That’s what I said years ago when my wife wanted to come home,” he said, brushing his hands clean of sawdust and memories, “and I’ve never regretted anything more.”

  Patrick’s words haunted Alice as she grabbed her flashlight and fleece jacket and headed back to her cabin. The heavy shadow of the Catskills made an already dark night even darker and not even the glimmer of a star broke up the ebony velvet of the sky. The moon was hidden behind trees and clouds.

  Without the flashlight, Alice literally could not see her hand in front of her face.

  She tripped over a tree root and barely caught herself before landing on her stomach in the dirt.

  Such a difference from her illuminated and neon existence in the city and stranger still that she didn’t miss that life, her car or her house. She did miss Felix, but really that was all.

  Which didn’t bode well for her return to it.

  Her flashlight illuminated the front of her cottage, the closed door, the chair she’d placed on the small stoop.

  Gabe sitting in that chair.

  She stumbled again, her thumb hitting the button on the flashlight and the slice of light it provided vanished.

  The night breathed.

  “Gabe?” she whispered. He didn’t answer but she heard the scuff of his shoe against the concrete, could feel him a few feet away. “What are you doing here?”

  “Thinking.”

  Her heart tripped, and her skin, forgotten and cold, sang while it flooded with heat. Her eyes adjusted to the shadows and her body sensed his in the darkness.

  “And?” she whispered, taking the small step up to stand near him.

  “And I’m done thinking.”

  13

  He reached out of the black night and folded her into his arms. His lips, despite the dark, unerringly found hers and all the confused desire between them fused into something new, different.

  Dangerous.

  She dropped the flashlight and wrapped her arms around him, tugged at the blond curls at the back of his neck and did all she could to climb into his skin.

  He peeled the fleece from her shoulders and where the cool air should have chilled her he warmed her, lighting fires under her flesh. He cupped her shoulders, laced his fingers through her hair, kissed her neck. Her ear. Her lips again.

  She groaned, pulling him closer, tighter. And he picked her up, her feet dangling over the ground, and spun her so her back hit the outside wall of the cottage.

  “I’ve dreamed of this for so long,” he muttered, yanking at the hem of her shirt and sliding his hand along her spine, up to her neck, then he held her still, immobilized as he devoured her mouth.

  “Me, too.” She sighed when he released her. She didn’t bother with his shirt. Years of celibacy, years of remembering this man and his particular brand of fire, the way he could make her loose and crazy with just a look, made her bold and she reached for his belt.

  With her fingers clumsy, her brain fevered, memory saved her. There were no years between them. No fights.

  Just this.

  His buckle clanged open and she undid the zipper, sliding her hand in between warm cotton and hot flesh. He gasped, groaned and shoved her against the wall. His chest hard against her, his lips open on her neck.

  He bit her. She squeezed him, then he laughed—the devil’s laugh—and the fire in her belly, across her skin, buried in her sex blazed hotter.

  The contention in their marriage had seeped into their bedroom and sex had become a game of control between them. By the end, neither one of them gave themselves freely.

  “This,” he murmured against her skin, his breath tickling her ear and lighting her up. “This was something we always got right.” He yanked open the top of her pants, the button flying off into the night. And his fingers, rough and big and so familiar, brushed her skin, the curve of her belly, the scar of the emergency C-section, the damp curls between her legs.

  She saw stars on a starless night. The world spun and fell apart and Alice held him to her as hard as she could.

  * * *

  Gabe rolled his head to look at the open window that was letting in all the cold air. Alice’s body, pressed naked against his on top of the covers, was covered in goose bumps.

  I should get up and close that, he thought. Or we should get under the covers. Something.

  But moving—any movement—required herculean effort. And it might make Alice move away and, frankly, nothing was quite worth that. Not yet. Even cold and pressed against him, he didn’t want her to move.

  They had a limited number of these moments and he planned on making them last as long as possible.

  And he did not plan on examining those feelings any further.

  “Hey.” Her voice was a raspy croak and he smiled hearing it.

  “Hey.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “Yep.”

  He felt her swallow against his chest. She turned her head and her chin dug into his ribs. He knew she was looking at him. “Do you want to stay?”

  He stared at the ceiling, at the pine wainscoting that had cost him a fortune but had made the cabins something truly special.

  “Gabe?”

  He was a careful man, he took calculated risks and he never—well, not since getting involved with her the first time—made a move without weighing the costs.

  What would I lose staying?

  What would I gain leaving?

  His head was too stupefied, too blurred by orgasm, to do the math.

  “I’m freezing,” Alice said, her voice getting a little harder, her chin digging a little deeper. “So, if you’re staying let’s get under the blankets.”

  He lifted his head
and smiled. “You always were good at the postcoital conversation.”

  She grinned and rolled away and he got infinitely colder.

  Better go, his head said. Better get out of here before things get worse. Messier. Because they always do with her.

  But she pulled down the duvet and in the shadows he could see the delicious curve of her breast, the swell of her hip and the scar bisecting her belly into top and bottom.

  She would have been the mother of my children.

  Thoughts of those babies, the boy and girl, who had been born too early, who were so small, the size of his palm, with their perfect eyelashes and paper-thin toenails. The babies he’d carried to Alice and they’d baptized with their tears before letting the nurses take away, while Alice screamed in her bed, had been banished long ago to places in his head he refused to visit. Doing so made living possible. Made recovering and getting on with his life easier.

  But what was the cost? The rogue thought surfaced, from places unknown. What was the cost of doing that?

  “Gabe?” she whispered, her hand fluttering awkwardly over that scar. “What’s—”

  He sat up, leaned forward, wrapped one arm around her thin yet strong back and pressed his lips to that scar, felt the small ridge under his tongue.

  She gasped, dropped the blanket and put her hands in his hair, hugging his head to her belly.

  He jerked the blankets down and pulled her into the warm envelope of the bed, his lips traveling from belly to breast, his tiredness forgotten, his reasons for leaving vanished.

  “Gabe? What’s—”

  “No talking,” he said, taking refuge in the sex they shared, like he always had. He wrapped his hands around her wrists, holding them against the bed and loved her the only way left to him.

  “I’ve got a lot of work to do,” Gabe said the following Saturday while he and Alice waited for her parents to arrive. “Really, there’s the gutter situation on cabin five and I really should return Mrs. Crimpson’s e-mail about the—”

  “I told you,” Alice interrupted with a laugh. Gabe’s insecurity was actually pretty endearing right now, drunk as she was on sex and coffee. “You don’t have to be here when my parents arrive. I can show them around myself and we don’t need you for the meeting about what stations they’ll staff at the wedding reception.”