ELI TURNED ON the radio and sang along with some of the current country hits, ignoring the surprise on Reagan’s face that he was familiar with the lyrics. They drove for half an hour without talking, her leaning into his side, his arm around her shoulders. The night was a brilliant blue-black, the wind little more than a breeze. An owl swooped across the highway close enough to make Eli tap the brakes, but the bird was long gone by the time he even reacted.
“Where are we going?” she finally asked.
“Just hang tight.”
Highway 64 curved southwest and Eli slowed, pulling off the highway and up to a metal gate. He’d made sure Cade had pulled the key for him so he wouldn’t have to dig through the multiple keys on the key ring. Some nights, like now, it paid to appear like you had your shit together.
Gate opened, he drove through, locked it behind him and continued down the dirt road. A glance to the side showed Reagan twisting her hands in her lap, a wide grin splitting her face. “The river.”
“Yeah.” Her excitement was a huge relief—huge—and he found himself unintentionally speeding up, the washboard road rattling the truck’s rearview mirror so wildly it was nauseating. He didn’t slow down.
One mile of dirt roads later and two more turns west and he eased off the gas. The rush of the Cimarron River, relatively shallow here but fast moving over rocky areas and hushed in the deeper curve, spilled before them like a wide band of hammered silver in the moonlight.
She shifted to her knees on the seat, grabbed his face and kissed him senseless, all heat and a tangle of tongues. Fisting his hair, she pulled his head back and grinned. “I can’t believe you brought me here.”
His immediate erection said he should have brought her here that first night. He felt like a kid again, not a thirty-three-year-old lawyer. Smiling in answer, he dragged her across his lap, cradling her in his left arm while he stroked her face with his free hand. “Pretty as you’ve ever been, but more beautiful in the moonlight than my dreams do justice.”
“Careful, Covington,” she said, soft and husky. “Words that sweet’ll get a guy in my pants.”
“Any guy?” he asked, teasing a finger along her collarbone.
“Just one.”
He leaned into her, pulling her up so their lips met in a lazy kiss. He nibbled and suckled, whispering to her how beautiful she was, how long he’d dreamed of being here with her, the way the taste of her skin haunted him on sleepless nights—all the things he’d wanted to say to her from the moment he’d first seen her but hadn’t been brave enough.
But he understood now there simply weren’t any guarantees. Things could be going absolutely right and then the road could end and you’d find yourself in free fall. There wasn’t time to waste with her.
Tongues dueling, the taste of the hoppy beer she’d been drinking rolled through his mouth. Their breaths mingled. He nipped her bottom lip, then sucked on it, and when her head tipped back, he traced a line from the hollow of her neck to her chin with the tip of his tongue. Her every gasp, every plea for more—it all drove him crazy. But that wasn’t what this night was about. Not in its entirety.
Pulling away, he put a finger over her lips to stop her objection. “We’ve got all night.”
“Yeah?” One corner of her mouth curled up. “Cade lift your curfew?”
“Cade can kiss my ass. I’m out all night.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “If you’ll have me.”
She laughed. “Oh, I intend to have you, all right.”
“At least the seduction part of the evening’s plans are a go. Takes a lot of pressure off a guy.”
“Glad I could help.” She scrambled out of his lap and across the seat, pausing when she opened the door. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a pair of irrigation boots tucked between the cab and the bed?”
“Sit tight.” He dropped to the ground and went to the rear of the truck, pulling out blankets and a small cooler. “Dig the pillows out from behind the seat.”
“Pillows?” she called, the smile in her voice evident.
“Hey, growing up should count for something. In this case, it’s pillows.”
They flew at him one at a time, and he made them part of the bedroll. Then he went to the passenger side of the truck, reached around her to turn the music up a little, and, before she could object, tossed her over his shoulder. She screamed with laughter, and his heart beat so fast it hurt. So much had changed between them, but not this. Never again this.
He carried her to the lowered truck tailgate and set her down gently. “Stars,” he whispered, looking up.
She followed his gaze and sighed. “Do you know how many nights, in college in particular, I wondered if you were gazing at the same stars I was? It made me feel closer to you.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
He got them settled, her head on his shoulder, a blanket within easy reach to flip over them when the night cooled off. Laying his lips against her temple after fourteen years, he had the most concrete sense of what truly mattered, and it had nothing to do with old hurts or regrets or bad decisions.
They talked for hours, catching up on fourteen years of missing each other. Luke was noticeably absent from the conversation, and Eli was both grateful and curious. Stars filled the New Mexico night sky, so much bigger than he remembered.
What he’d never forgotten was the shape and warmth of the body beside him. He closed his eyes sometime after midnight and let his fingers, his hands, his mouth remember. Moving over her, he parted her thighs. She encouraged him closer and he buried his face in her neck.
He breathed her in, the smells of sunshine and warm skin and something soft that was simply her, had always been her. “You’re for me, Reagan. You’ve always been for me. And you always will.”
* * *
REAGAN’S HEART TRIPPED all over itself. Her hands paused in stroking Eli’s back. Hell, she might have stopped breathing. Terror ripped through her. Had he just...
His breath was hot against her skin as he lifted his head and nipped her earlobe. “Living without you has been like living without the sun. I did it, but I don’t want to go back to that, don’t want to do it again.”
She’d wanted this so badly for so long, but she was broken in too many ways. She didn’t know what to do. There were too many things to say and not enough words. She didn’t want to screw this up, didn’t want to—
“I’ve lived with my mistakes for fourteen years. No more. I won’t go another day pretending this is anything other than what it is. It’s never been anyone but you. Only you.”
She scrambled out from under him, pushing and shoving.
“Reagan?”
Barefoot or not, it didn’t matter. She leaped from the truck and took off running for the river. Rocks and grass scraped at her feet. She didn’t slow down. Memories chased her too hard and too fast. She was swift enough to outrun them. Almost. But what she had no hope of outrunning was the guilt she’d carried for more than eight years. The knowledge caught her at the same time Eli did.
“Don’t,” she pleaded, struggling to pull free of his grasp.
“Don’t what? Care about you? I can’t help it, Reagan. You’re the one. You’ve always been the one.”
She laughed almost hysterically, gripping her shirt and pulling. Her vision blurred with tears. Everything—her clothes, her underwear, her skin—it all felt too tight.
“If this is about Luke...” Eli swallowed hard and dropped his hand. “Did you love him that much, Reagan?” The question hurt to hear almost as much as it seemed to hurt him to ask.
The emotional floodwaters began to rise at an alarming rate. Reagan shook her head. “Don’t. Don’t bring Luke into this, Eli.”
“If you loved him that much, if what you had with him was more powerful than what we have, not just now but before...” He swallowed so hard she heard it. He moved away stiffly, his words a quiet offering filled with regret and respect. “I’ll take you home.”
Watching him walk away triggered something in her, something fierce and raw and terrifying. “Stop!” The single, shouted word halted him in his tracks.
“What do you want from me, Reagan?” He angled his head to the side, offering her the dark side of his profile. “You want to rub it in my face that I messed up so bad I can’t undo the damage? That I can’t—and never could—measure up to the county hero-turned-martyr? Job well done.”
Something in his bitter self-reproach resonated with her shame, and she found herself stalking toward him. He faced her just in time for her to plant her hands on his chest and shove. Satisfaction surged through her when he stumbled. “How dare you! How dare you! What we had—” The first sob ripped through her. “You left me, Eli! I wasn’t enough for you. Wasn’t enough to keep you here, to make you happy.”
He stood there stunned for a heartbeat before his voice was as raised as hers. “I asked you to come with me! You stayed. You didn’t love me enough to take a chance on me! And not once,” he hissed, “not once did you beg me to stay.”
“Don’t you get it? I loved you! Love shouldn’t ever have to beg.” Her eyes filled with unwanted tears. “You should have stayed because you loved me more than you hungered for the idea of escaping. But you didn’t. So I let you go.”
“And married everybody’s favorite son. Clearly you were brokenhearted.”
His vitriolic anger forced her back a step. But only because she had to have the extra room to release her own fury. “I was destroyed,” she whispered on a broken hiss. “I married Luke because I hoped it might exorcise your ghost. And I failed. I. Failed. Luke loved me.” She pounded a fist over her heart. “And you know what? I didn’t love him in return, not the way he did me. Not even close. And no one ever suspected. No one but Luke,” she screamed, beginning to shake. “I didn’t love him the way he loved me and he knew. He died with the certainty that the only man I ever gave my heart to was you.”
Sobs racked her body, the confession torn out of her, the history and truth like scar tissue ripped off a wound that appeared healed but had actually festered below the surface.
Eli closed the distance between them in three strides and wrapped her in his strong arms, ignoring her struggles. “He loved you, baby. I know how that feels, and I’m willing to bet that, if you could ask him, he’d tell you there was nothing in the world he would have changed about his life with you.”
“But you haunted me, Eli. Every time I turned around, you were there.”
“Did he ever stop loving you?”
She choked on a sob.
“Did he?” Eli demanded.
“No.”
Pulling her into him, they faced each other in the moonlight, the river the music to his declaration. “I understand how that feels.” He reached for the hem of her T-shirt and lifted. “Let me make up for the past, Reagan.”
“Don’t leave me again,” she pleaded. “Don’t walk out on me.”
“I don’t intend to.”
Closing her eyes, she raised her arms over her head and gave herself over to the moment. She needed the physical reassurance of him, needed him to lay claim to a heart he’d long ago abandoned.
It took a moment for her to realize that the turmoil that had kept her emotionally off balance 24/7 was gone. It was just the two of them in that moment.
Luke’s ghost was gone.