Chapter Twelve

He’d meant to clean up and arrive on her doorstep looking a little less like he’d been running his ass off for the better part of forty-eight hours. But a quick shower and change of clothes had been the best he could manage, because he’d gone and done something impulsive—something besides haul her into his arms and take possession of her mouth as if he could suck every doubt out of her head with a long, thorough kiss—and ended up scrambling to get the details of a new plan in place.

Sadly, that plan didn’t involve delivering orgasms in her driveway, so he ended the kiss in stages, cupping her jaw, brushing his mouth over hers, lingering there for increasingly brief moments until she sighed against his lips and opened her eyes. “You’re late.”

He was. Five minutes. “You’re strict.” He kissed her again, hard and quick. “You can punish me. Later.”

One dark brow arched. “Careful what you promise, Maguire. I might hold you to it.”

As she spoke, she rubbed her palm over his cheek, and it occurred to him she’d never seen him unshaven before. At least not since going without a shave for more than a day made any discernable difference. Did she like it? He sure as hell liked the feel of her hand smoothing his jaw. “I’m at your mercy, once we’re through with today’s tour.” He took her hand and led her to the car.

“Speaking of which, what is on this afternoon’s itinerary?” She halted by the passenger door and tucked her phone into the pocket of her black, insulated ski vest. “Am I dressed right?”

He used the question as an excuse to inspect her, from the top of her sexy, bundled-up hair to the toes of her black-and-gray cross-trainers. True, he got a little caught up in the way her white thermal top clung to her breasts, but not so distracted he didn’t consider if it would keep her warm enough once the sun set. Probably, but he could if it didn’t. He opened the passenger door. “That works.”

“Great.” She climbed into the Rover, unknowingly treating him to a glimpse of long legs and her perfect, heart-shaped ass in skintight black leggings. Would she notice he’d only answered one of her questions?

As soon as he settled himself behind the wheel, she asked, “Where are we headed?”

That would be a yes. He reversed into a turn. “On a hike. Nothing too grueling.”

“Okay, fine. But where?”

“One of the new subdivisions. You’ll see.” There was no way to divulge their exact destination without divulging more than he wanted her to know.

Apparently going with the flow suited her this afternoon, because she just rolled her eyes and then combed the side of his hair with her fingers. “Looks like you had a busy day.”

He leaned into the rake of her nails against his scalp as she tried to bring order to hair he’d let wind dry after his shower because he hadn’t wanted to spare extra minutes to run a comb through it. “A busy couple days,” he admitted as he made the turn onto the main road. “I had a meeting in Virginia this morning with a special consultant, after coming off a full day of meetings yesterday.” Not to mention a shitload of personal business he’d sprung on himself in his effort to give her tangible evidence he was invested in this.

She scoured her nails along the back of his neck and sent a scalp-tightening chill of pleasure along his nerve endings. Only the fact that he sat behind the wheel of a moving vehicle prevented him from dropping his head and giving himself over to those roaming fingers. “Sounds important.”

“Hmm.” Her fingertip brushed his earlobe, and his cock twitched. “Some of it is. Some is bullshit. Politics. Money. Jockeying for position.”

“You thrive on the challenge.” Her hand retreated down his neck and across the top of his shoulder.

“I like it, most of the time,” he acknowledged. “I know it might seem counterintuitive, based on the guy I was until Uncle Sam got ahold of me, but I’m good at what I do. The planning, the logistics, and especially the execution. Acquiring those skills forced me to learn patience and get a handle on my reckless tendencies.”

Then again, he’d let his impulsive side off the leash in a major way over the last forty-eight hours. He glanced her way to find her giving him a hard-to-read look. “I know a lot of people around here expected me to end up like Derek. Can’t say I’m sorry to disappoint them.”

She skimmed her fingers along his jaw, just a fleeting touch, and then lowered her hand to her lap. “I’m proud of you,” she said quietly. “I always have been.”

Something in his chest warmed and expanded, but he simply took her hand, joined their fingers, and gave her a smile. “Always? Why Sinclair, have you been keeping track of me?”

She shrugged. “I might have heard a thing or two, from time to time. Mrs. Pinkerton’s cousin-in-law has a neighbor whose nephew works in the same nursing home where your mom works—or something like that. I’m never one hundred percent on her sources, but she seemed to know about every stripe and commendation, and then every promotion when you went private.”

“No personal curiosity on your part, then?”

She shrugged again. “I might have visited the Haggerty website once or twice over the years.”

“Just keeping tabs?”

Her smile dug a little indentation in her cheek. “Checking to see if you’d gotten fat and bald.”

He laughed. “Disappointed?”

“Extremely.”

“Well, I didn’t have Claudia Pinkerton supplying me with highlights from the adventures of Sinclair Smith, but I cyberstalked you, too, from time to time.”

“To see if I’d gotten fat and bald?”

He laughed and slowed to make a turn onto a narrow paved road. “To watch you establish your business, and grow it. I’m proud of you, too, baby girl.” He gave her hand a squeeze and then released it to take the wheel and steer the Rover as the road transitioned from paved to dirt. “You turned something you loved into a successful career. That takes talent and hustle.”

The road turned bumpy, but he risked a glance at Sinclair and found her blushing.

“Thank you,” she said. “There’s luck involved, too. I got some good visibility early on thanks to a sorority sister who married into a high-profile family. She asked me to design her rings and the jewelry she wore for the wedding. That parure I did for her is what really launched me.”

“You can’t underestimate the appeal of a good puh-roo.” What the fuck was a puh-roo?

“You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

She had him there. He could distinguish a ring from a necklace, but despite checking her website and social media posts, he didn’t know much about jewelry. Given everything he had on deck for this evening, he figured he might as well tell the truth. “Honestly, the entire time I stalked you I was only on the lookout for one thing.”

“Discount codes?”

“A change to your last name.”

She stilled. “You checked to see if I’d gotten married?”

He braked and eased the Rover to a stop at the end of the dirt road. Resting his wrists on the wheel, he turned to her. “Back in the day, when you wouldn’t answer my calls and returned my letters, my CO advised me I had no business trying to stay in contact a sixteen-year-old girl who clearly wasn’t feeling reciprocal. He told me to consider you the one that got away and let you get on with your life. I did, because a part of me had always figured it was only a matter of time before I fucked us up, and then—big surprise—I did, and obviously, you wanted nothing to do with me. But another part of me knew better. I ignored it. I shouldn’t have.”

She shook her head. “It’s ancient history, Shane—”

He opened his door to cut her off, because he didn’t want her to tell him it didn’t matter. Their history mattered, and tonight was about proving it to her. “We’re here. Ready to hike?”

…

Sinclair followed Shane past a sign announcing lots for sale, onto a parallel path of hard-packed dirt carved from the tracks of vehicles. Despite the evidence of human encroachment, vines wove around the trunks of mature trees and grew thick on either side of the trail. Back in high school, there had been no clear-cut walkway. No generous lots demarked by for sale or sold signs and corner-staked with little orange flags. It had been untouched woodland. These days, it no doubt merited Shane’s professional interest as one of Magnolia Grove’s newest future home sites. Did he remember following her into these same woods on a sultry May night to celebrate his eighteenth birthday?

Somewhere around here grew a willow tree with limbs that reached the ground and had provided the perfect shelter for her to give him gifts she couldn’t take back. Despite how everything between them had played out, she counted that night as one of the most special moments of her life. They were traipsing dangerously close to that sacred ground. The path veered, and she followed him around a bend. They walked past a fenced-off lot where a crew had assembled the frame of a large, two-story home. Her heart sank. Was the tree even around anymore? She didn’t want to sully the memory of that night with some haphazard tour of new construction.

“How much farther?” she asked when the path split again. Another half-built house came into view, along with some no trespassing signs. Nothing looked familiar. She was all turned around.

“Let’s go this way.” He stopped at one of the orange flags staked into the ground near a narrow opening between two pines and held some branches aside for her.

She hesitated. “The sign says ‘No Trespassing.’”

His slow smile belonged to an eighteen-year-old renegade. “There was a time when you were down for a little rule-breaking.”

Maybe he did remember. “Yeah, but we’re not kids anymore, and it wouldn’t look good for the city’s expert consultant to get busted for trespassing.”

The smile only widened, carving a groove beside his mouth. “Trust me, baby girl.” With that, he walked through the opening and disappeared behind the fringy overgrowth.

She danced with uncertainty for a moment. A woman who lived in the middle of nowhere knew her way around the wilderness, but they’d taken one too many turns while she’d been journeying down memory lane. The result? She wasn’t sure how to get back to the car. She did know the region was blessed with a variety of wildlife that hunted at dusk and might not be intimidated by a lone woman on an empty trail—raccoons, foxes…skunks. Something skittered in the roots near her feet. “Shane!” She dived through the opening in the pines, only to run into an unyielding wall of muscle and bounce off with a breathless, “Oomph.”

Quick hands caught her arms and steadied her. “It’s official. Something about this place makes you want to jump me.”

And that’s when she saw it—lights shining from under the rounded, drooping branches of a winter-bare willow tree. Their tree. Taller, broader, but theirs. Her heart stuttered. “Shane?”

He took her hand and led her along a grassy expanse toward the willow. “Remember?”

How could she forget? The lantern light glowed, telling her he’d not only planned to bring her here, he’d taken time to set the scene, but suddenly, she didn’t want to move. This spot held a special place in her heart, but it wasn’t theirs. It never had been. And coming back now, weaving through property markers and signs, only underscored the fact. “This is beautiful”—she gestured toward the tree—“but we can’t. There are laws. We don’t belong here.”

He turned to face her, but continued an unhurried backward walk toward the tree, pulling her with him. “We do. It’s mine.”

His words careened around in her head like bats, fast and hard to get a lock on. It’s mine. It’s. Mine. “What?”

“I bought the lot,” he said and held a curtain of willow aside to usher her into the cloistered space beneath. A red-and-black plaid blanket covered the ground, and an insulated backpack anchored one corner.

Her ribs shrank, forming a painfully tight cage around her heart. “Why?”

For the first time all night, he looked uncomfortable. “The day before yesterday, I was out here for a meeting. While Campbell and I looked over the map of parcels for sale in the subdivision, I realized this lot was up for grabs. Somebody would buy it. Build a spec house, or their dream house, or whatever. Maybe they’d remove the tree. Maybe not. It was none of my business. I spent half a second trying to bullshit myself into believing I didn’t care. I don’t have deep roots anywhere—and most of the time I’m okay with that—but not this time.” He looked down at the blanket, and she followed his gaze, practically seeing the ghosts of their former selves tangled together under the same encompassing limbs. “This place is important me. I needed to protect it.”

She braced a hand on the tree trunk and immediately remembered leaning against it, raising her lips for his kiss. “I… Wow. I don’t know what to say.”

He took a step toward her. “Say you forgive me, for not protecting you.”

Warning sirens blared in her head. He was merging past and present again, and it made a risky combination. Savannah’s words came back to haunt her. You haven’t given your heart to anyone else because the best parts are already spoken for.

All the parts of her heart she still held a claim to raced—trying to make a getaway. Instead she sagged against the tree. “Don’t…”

“Don’t what?” He stopped his slow advance. “We talked about what happened, now let’s settle it. You won’t trust me with your future until you forgive me for the past, and I’m not satisfied calling this a nostalgia fuck, and nothing more. Screw that, Sinclair. I want more. So do you. Trust me enough to forgive me for letting you go.”

She didn’t consider herself a cowardly person, but she battled a flight instinct so strong she actually visualized herself turning and running. Nothing lurking in the woods could be nearly as dangerous as the man in front of her, giving life to all her hopes, while at the same time embodying all her doubts. “I’m not the same girl I was ten years ago.”

He didn’t so much as blink. “And I’m not the same guy. Congratulations, we’ve both grown up. You were brave enough to take on the boy. Are you brave enough to take on the man?”

His sharp eyes dared her to respond. Silence was her only option, because there was no good answer.

He stepped closer, trapping her between the tree and his body. A smug little smile tugged at the corner of his lips. “You know you want to. We wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”

“You haven’t changed so much, Shane. You’re still a cocky motherf—” His tongue swept the curse off her lips. Another few seconds and he’d stolen her breath. By the time he raised his head, she had one leg wrapped around his hip and both arms clinging to his shoulders. She blinked her eyes open to find the smug smile firmly in place and wondered why her body still responded to it like a hormonal teenager after all this time.

“That’s no way to express your forgiveness.”

She gritted her teeth and willed herself not to give in to the urge to grind her hips against his. “I didn’t say I forgave you.”

“You do.” His expression went serious. “What’s it going to take to convince you to say it, Sinclair? Need me to say it first? No problem. I—”

“I didn’t do a damn thing requiring your forgiveness.” A little voice in the back of her mind whispered except…into the silence that followed, but she felt sure he wouldn’t call her on it. He wouldn’t dare

“Did you give me the benefit of the doubt? When you didn’t hear from me that summer, did you believe there was a reason I couldn’t get in touch, or did you lose faith in me?”

“I…you…” Her ability to construct a counterargument fled in the face of his quiet accusation, and bone-deep panic set in. The only thing more frightening than saying the words he wanted to hear was what might come streaming out of her mouth next. If she relinquished such a crucial stone in the wall of her defenses, would she be able to hold anything back, including feelings she’d banished for years? Feelings she’d have chosen not to have, if emotions worked that way. But here he was, slowly, surely stripping the choice away from her and asking her to trust him while he did it. She fought back the only way she could. She took a step back and shoved him away. “I don’t need this.”

Big hands caught her shoulders, stopping her retreat. A flex of muscles and she ended up plastered against his chest. “Yeah, you do,” he muttered and kissed her. Not hard. Not forceful. He simply brought her mouth to his, moved his lips over hers like he had all the patience in the world, and let her do the rest—as if he knew she would—and, God help her, she did. She drank deep, like a horse led to water.

Need immediately spiked, but her anxiety receded. Volatile as the chemistry was, it nonetheless felt safe. She knew what to do with physical needs—even ones this powerful. She embraced the power. Wanted the urgency. Wanted a driving desire so all-consuming it allowed for nothing else. No examination of feelings, and definitely no conversation beyond the occasional demand, curse, or plea. But when she gathered up a handful of his shirt and tore her mouth from his to pull it over his head, he broke her unstated rules.

“I forgive—”

“Shut up.” She reclaimed his mouth and shoved his shirt up his chest. The lure of his bare skin called to her, but she couldn’t abandon her post. She made do with her hands, touching every part of him she could reach—smooth shoulders, broad back, the hard planes of his chest, and the enticing little gulley chiseled down the center. She trailed her fingers lower, and his breaths turned fast and harsh in her mouth.

Her head went light from the forced synchronization. Luckily, there was more than one way to render a man speechless. She hooked fingers into the waist of his pants, popped the button, and lowered the zipper. He sprang right into her hand, hot, thick, and heavy. A groan rumbled in his chest, then another as she gripped his shaft and rubbed her palm over his wide, blunt head. A couple circles—not too hard, not too soft, exactly as he’d showed her all those years ago—and she coaxed forth enough fluid to make her palm glide.

She slid her other hand up his length, gripped the base with her lubricated hand, and began long, alternating pulls, adding a little twist at the end just the way he’d always liked.

He still did. His mouth crashed over hers, again and again, the kisses wet and reckless. Whiskers abraded her sensitive lips. Every other sensitive part of her body tingled in response, anxious to experience the same rough treatment.

Switching to a one-handed hold on his cock, she lifted him and cupped his balls. His shudder vibrated through her so deeply it might as well have been her own. No, he wasn’t a teenager anymore, but a man could only take so much. She wasn’t a teenager, either. She’d picked up a few skills of her own. Another hard pull—he groaned as she administered it—a feather-light brush along the nerve-packed zone behind his balls, and conversation would cease to be an option for him. Victory hovered within reach, so close she could practically taste it.

Which only left her all the more stunned when she suddenly found her arms dragged above her head and pinned there by a big, domineering hand.