Mackenzie left the job interview feeling better than she had in a week. Or a lifetime.
She had thought she could do this whole live-with-the-pissed-off-husband-and-make-things-work thing, but she was beginning to realize that the Gabe she had fallen in love with as a teenager was not the Gabe who could so heartlessly reject her.
But hey, she had changed, too.
The kind lady she had met with at the temp agency seemed to think she’d have no problem placing Mackenzie in a temporary position at the local nursing home. Mackenzie had explained that she’d be leaving in about two months. The lady laughed, saying most people didn’t last that long at the nursing home, anyway.
Years ago, that comment would have scared Mackenzie off. Now, however, it made her eager to accept the challenge.
Gabe didn’t want her. She couldn’t let that be the end of her world, no matter how quickly the blood flowed out of her heart.
After a long afternoon visiting her kitties at her mom’s empty house, she dragged her butt back to Gabe’s house. She didn’t want to. She really didn’t want to. But she had entered an agreement, and she’d uphold her part of it. No matter how sadistic the agreement turned out to be.
Mackenzie reheated some leftovers (enough for Gabe, too). She carried her plate to the living room and settled in with a magazine. When Gabe came home, she said a polite hello while he ignored her. There may have been a grunt, she wasn’t sure. She filled her belly and pretended his indifference didn’t hurt.
He went to bed without a word. She didn’t even have any tears left to cry.
She was too excited for the job she would begin the next day.
Several minutes later, when she couldn’t stop smiling after receiving the text from the temp agency, Gabe flipped on the overhead light.
“What are you so smiley about?”
She shrugged. Really wasn’t his concern, and she had no interest in being deflated.
“You think this is funny, don’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you check your email?”
She shook her head, her fingers itching to check on her phone. Something had him riled up, and she was dying to know what it was.
But she refused to beg for information.
“Your damned mediator guy. Has he been asking you for updates?”
Her cheeks reddened. “He’s not my mediator guy. He’s our mediator guy. And yes, he has. Hasn’t he been asking you?”
“I’ve been ignoring his probing.”
“The paper we signed clearly stated that we’d check in with weekly updates. I didn’t want to be in violation of the agreement.”
“Yeah, yeah. He so kindly sent me a copy with that part highlighted.”
“So what’s the problem? I told him the truth, but I told him we remained committed to the process.”
Gabe gripped the doorframe, squeezing it tight enough that she imagined it shattering into a pile of splinters.
“The problem, Mrs. O’Brien—”
She hated how he stressed her married name. The way it sounded so sordid, so dirty, so despicable on his tongue.
He continued, “Is that he is now insisting that we have a date night once a week. And we need to submit proof.”
Blood drained from her face, while her heart began to thunder. Her nerves were lightning, coursing through her body and threatening to both electrify her with hope and kill her with the intensity.
“What? Why?”
“He claims it’s a new thing this imbecile judge is trying. All about preserving the family.”
She couldn’t tear her eyes away from his face as it hardened and intensified. He was mad. Really, really mad.
“He didn’t give a shit about the fact that we don’t have a family to preserve.”
Pain threatened to cripple her, but it was old pain and she had worked her way through it. Or so she had thought.
Hearing him throw those words in her face stripped away the scar tissue and made the ache raw. He may as well have punched her in the face.
He didn’t back off. “Was this your idea? Did you make the suggestion to him?”
The words took a moment to worm their way through the fog of her brain.
His accusation stung.
And pissed her off.
“Excuse me?”
Gabe let go of his grip on the frame and, eyes drilling into hers, stalked toward her. He looked every inch the predator. And she knew if she didn’t act fast, she was about to be consumed.
“Why would I make that suggestion? You think I’d want to be chained to you any more than I already am?”
He stopped in his tracks, blinking as if she had caught him off-guard.
“You’re safe from me, Gabriel. Whatever I had hoped to find back here is long gone. I’m not hunting for it anymore.”
Unable to bear the intensity of his stare, she tossed her magazine to the side table, liberated herself from the tangle of the blanket, and stormed out of the house before she spent her last bit of mercy.
***
Mackenzie fell into the sofa, thoroughly and delightfully exhausted after a crazy busy shift at the nursing home.
The residents had earned their crochety reputations, but Mackenzie loved every second of assisting them, even if they spent a lot of time trying to drive her away.
There was no sign of Gabe, other than his car in the driveway. She felt her shoulders relax—she wasn’t sure she had energy to fight with him.
She tiptoed into the bathroom, prepared herself for bed, then started to drift off at the exact moment that Gabe decided to stumble into the living room, startling her awake and forcing her heart into a gallop.
He was bathed in light from his room, but she couldn’t make out his facial expression in the shadows. His posture seemed different. Unsteady. Slouchy.
And he stared at her. As if he were waiting for her to say something.
She had nothing to say. He had made it all extremely clear.
He didn’t want a relationship with her. They weren’t a family. She had failed.
And though she didn’t expect him to forgive her just because she reappeared at his door, she couldn’t get past the fact that he couldn’t be bothered to ask why she had left in the first place.
She tried to make her breathing sound like sleep-breathing so he wouldn’t suspect that she had noticed him watching her.
He didn’t go away. Instead, he stumbled further into the room.
The smell of beer overpowered the normally delightful smell of Gabe. Her Gabe.
No. Her Gabe didn’t drink. Her Gabe had made a vow not to, knowing the hell she had gone through with a father who put drinking beer ahead of the well-being of his family.
But this Gabe—this obviously intoxicated, disrespectful Gabe—settled himself on the floor next to where she slept. Where she had previously felt safe, if not wanted.
He brushed the hair away from her closed eyes. She melted a little, but only out of habit. His touch had a way of soothing her, of making her feel loved, even if it was an illusion.
His fingers drifted down her cheek, pausing at the corner of her mouth. She resisted the instinctive urge to kiss his fingertip, but her lips twitched at his tentative touch.
With what seemed like great reverence, Gabe ran his rough thumb over her bottom lip. Her mouth flooded with saliva, but she fought the need to swallow, not wanting to alert him to the fact that she was awake.
If she opened her eyes, she’d kiss him.
She couldn’t do that.
He was drunk, and she was handy. She had made her desire for him known, but he had, in turn, made his disdain clear.
“I’ve missed you, Kenz.”
Her body warred with her brain as the words she had wanted to hear washed over her, veiled by the odor of the alcohol.
The beer was speaking, not Gabriel.
Tears prickled her eyelids, but she kept them shut, praying no evidence would leak out.
His forehead leaned against hers, and her heart threatened to revolt if she didn’t give it what it so badly desired.
As she pretended to sleep, Gabe placed kisses on the tip of her nose, across her cheeks, and at the corner of her lips—the sensitive juncture where he had so often tickled her senses alive and made the rest of her body weak.
“I hate myself for wanting you so much.”
At his pained tone, her eyes opened, meeting his directly and without a trace of sleepiness. His were bloodshot and gloomy, as if he had escaped the worst sort of torture and desperately sought comfort from his abductor.
She wanted to be the one to soothe him, to comfort him, to drive away the pain of their shared past.
But she also wanted to thunk him over the head with a frying pan, and the longer he looked at her like he wanted to consume her and then spit her out in disgust, the quicker the frying pan of her fantasy went from stainless steel to cast iron.
“Mackenzie.”
The longing returned to his slurred speech, and he fumbled his fingers through her hair. She closed her eyes, pleasure rolling down her spine and into the swollen juncture between her thighs. She could give him what he wanted.
Except tomorrow he’d hate her more than he already did.
If he couldn’t want her when he was sober, she couldn’t allow this to continue.
His lips fell to hers, and there was no hesitation on his part. No slurring, no fumbling. As if their kiss was committed to muscle memory, he exerted the precise amount of pressure needed to elicit the greatest sigh from her.
She could almost ignore the putrid taste of the beer on his tongue when it was ensconced in the otherwise deliriously appealing scent of Gabe.
Her hands lifted to his chest, and feeling his hardness beneath her palms nearly made her hesitate.
But this was wrong. All wrong.
She shoved against him, easily knocking him away considering his state of inebriation.
He looked at her through hooded, blurry eyes. He said nothing.
She rolled over on the couch and covered her head with the blanket, hoping beyond hope that he couldn’t hear the sobs she tried so hard to stifle.
When she finally heard him shuffling away, she started to get up. She had to go after him. To tell him she wasn’t pushing him away.
She made it halfway across the room before she realized that her reassurances would be lies.
Because as much as she had wanted Gabe when she had made the decision to come back to Healing Springs for their seven-year anniversary, she had to admit that she didn’t want the man she was beginning to know.