“Lauren Dawson? Come in, Lauren Dawson.” Tavish had arrived at work today intending to press her more after she’d bolted from his apartment last night. They’d made eye contact at a morning staff debriefing but she’d run off the second the meeting ended and had ignored his text messages. Much like she was ignoring his end-of-shift radio pages.
Maybe she was avoiding him because she was afraid he’d be angry over her sharp parting shot. Maybe it was a measure of self-preservation. Either way, he wasn’t mad—she had a right to call him out on his flaws, and he got her need to protect herself. It only left him more determined to prove that he loved her and wanted to try for a solution. They both needed to figure out how to have a balanced perspective on their hometown. He wasn’t the only one who had a messed-up tie to the town. Lauren wanting to help her family was one thing. Being petrified to leave home was another. And her eyes had snapped with real fear yesterday.
Pressing the push-to-talk button, he repeated his page. She was scheduled to be doing safety checks at the river-rafting base camp, well within transmission range. He leaned back in his seat, picking up the list Lauren had left taped to Zach’s computer screen. Back when they were married he might have called it a honey-do list, but they hadn’t been married long enough to get into the habit of her making him lists and him pretending to complain about it.
The domestic picture made him smile, even though they weren’t even close to finding that together. His efforts to chip away at his issues with Sutter Creek hadn’t been enough for her so far—her rejection last night had made that more than clear. Had left him feeling emptier than he knew possible. The desolate look on her face had been enough to make him want to start digging a trench in her front yard. Prove he wasn’t going anywhere, even if he couldn’t believe he had that in him. Of course, she would have made it easier to tell her all of this had she picked up her phone one of the ten times he’d called her since she fled, leaving him with a pot full of spaghetti sauce and a heart full of regret.
About thirty seconds passed by before his radio crackled. “Lauren Dawson here. Is that you, Tavish?”
“Yeah. Uh, this is an open channel, but your cell seems to be off. Would you meet me for dinner at the hotel lounge?” Time to step up further. If she could show him a little patience, he’d be willing to go for a longer trial period.
The radio sat silent for way too long. After she’d given him enough time to knit a sweater, she replied, “I’ll see you at six.”
He heard every second tick by on his watch until it finally read six o’clock. He arrived at the lounge early, having gone home to shower and change into a pair of dark jeans and a checked dress shirt. Settling into one of the wing-backed chairs at a table for two, he studied one of the deer-horn-chic chandeliers.
The minute Lauren walked into the room wearing a casual, swirly, hot-sauce-red dress, his heart stopped.
“Look what you’re missing,” the dress screamed.
Message received, Dr. Dawson.
Heads turned as she traveled through the room. He stood and pulled out her chair.
“Tavish.” She sat and crossed her legs. “Thought we covered everything we needed to last night.”
“We covered it. But we didn’t make any decisions. You ran off after making some awfully hypocritical claims.” He tried to look her in the eye but she kept her gaze on her water glass as he sat. “As if I’m the only one who’s committed to my job at the expense of our relationship.”
Squaring her shoulders, her eyes snapped. “You have five minutes to convince me I want to order something for dinner.”
No guarantee she’d stay even if he managed an argument worthy of one of his mother’s closing statements. Better to make his point in the limited time she was giving him rather than wait and hope she’d let him buy her dinner. Unraveling the thick cloth napkin from his cutlery, he laid it over his lap. “You know, I never really think about it, but I guess you own part of this place, don’t you?”
“Yes. Ten percent. Twenty-five of the new holistic health center that’s opening next month.” She glanced at her thin gold watch. “Four minutes, thirty-two seconds.”
“And you’re sure you enjoy being a doctor more than working for AlpinePeaks?”
Her eyes flashed. Not anger, though. Fear. “Medicine is me. And you’re down to four minutes,” she snapped, a poor attempt to cover up her obvious discomfort. She sank into her chair as if trying to blend with the navy-striped upholstery.
Impossible in that dress. Not that she needed to be wearing anything specific to stand out to him.
“The baby’s the most important priority, and I fully intend to make my work schedule predictable,” he said. “I’m willing to do a test run before the baby arrives, too. See how long I can stay in town before getting the urge to hop on a plane. I’ll stay in town until I head for Phuket in the fall, and will come back when my contract is finished. We’ll see where we stand. But I can’t be the only one who gives, who sacrifices. You have to consider your choices, too.”
Lauren blinked her mossy-gold eyes, the moisture in them almost forcing him to slide off the chair and fall to his knees. Her brow lowered and her lips pressed together. She sat there for a few seconds, staring at him hard enough to etch a laser dent in his forehead.
“And which of my choices would those be?” she bit out.
He pressed his lips together. She hadn’t been willing to listen when he’d tried to argue that her dad and Cadie were grieving less than last year, so a different tack might be best. “I remember your mom being a compassionate woman, Laur. Had she lived, do you really think she’d have expected you to stick to a teenage dream?”
“It was her dream, too.”
“Was it? Or was she just humoring what she likely thought was an in-the-moment passion?”
She covered her mouth, one hand crossed over the other, and let out a muffled, tearless sob.
The noise cut right through him. He was too far away to reach her, didn’t know if she’d want him to anyway. “What do you need, Pixie?”
Squeezing her eyes shut, she fisted folds of the red fabric of her skirt. “I need to give those papers to my lawyer.”
Wow. He’d gotten more than five minutes, but the answers he’d hoped she’d give eluded him. He’d hoped some more compromise on his part would prompt her to take even a tiny step toward him. Seemed he was out of luck there. What was it going to take to loosen the grip that Sutter Creek had on her?
* * *
Friday morning, Lauren got to the WiLA office early. She hadn’t been able to sleep more than a sweaty patchwork of dreams and haze. Add in her pregnancy-induced craving for naps, and she was dragging her feet as she entered the office.
Yawning, she settled at her brother’s desk and shifted papers around, staring at a few columns of numbers before recognizing her sleep-deprived uselessness. She’d screw up all her efforts to organize the winter first-aid inventory if she tried to do anything number-related. Instead, she opened a web browser on her brother’s computer. Spending ten minutes getting caught up on royal family gossip was completely justified.
At 8:22 a.m., Tavish strolled in with his camera bag slung over a muscular shoulder. A pair of mirrored aviators managed to keep his hair sticking up only four, instead of six, ways to Sunday. Dark charcoal water splotches marked the gray cotton of his T-shirt and his khaki shorts looked to be completely soaked through. Only his flip-flops looked dry. His smile was so wide it sucked all the administrative boring out of the room. She wished she could keep that level of energy in a jar for the days when life stole the grin from her face.
“Felt like a swim?” she asked.
He met her cocked brow with a sheepish smile. “I slipped on the edge of a bridge and ended up waist high in the creek.”
“On which trail?” Clients taking headers into creeks wouldn’t be the best for business.
“Summit.”
She narrowed her eyes, no longer worried about people slipping and falling. “All the bridges on Summit have rails. And they were all intact yesterday.”
“I might have been sitting on the railing.” The corner of his mouth turned up. “It was the only way to get the right angle of a pair of dragonflies hovering over a rock in the middle of the creek.”
“Did you wreck your camera?”
“I’m like a cat. I always land on my feet with my camera hand in the air.” He demonstrated with an exaggerated pose.
“You are kind of catlike.”
“Graceful?”
“Elusive.”
A faint shadow crossed his face. “Ouch.”
Heat splashed Lauren’s cheeks and the back of her neck. “Sorry. Not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?” Caution edged his tone.
“I was referring to your wanderlust, not your personality.”
His earlier demeanor that had shone 120 watts of vibrancy into the room dimmed. “Right. Anyway, I need to ask a favor of you.”
“Of course.” Anything to make up for insulting him, for accusing him of being something he wasn’t.
“I scratched myself. I was hoping you’d clean it up for me.”
“Okay.” Did her voice shake? Please, no.
Tavish looked at her funny.
Gah, her okay had for sure vibrated.
“You don’t have to, Laur. I can go to the clinic.”
She shook her head. “Of course I can do it.”
“You sounded—”
“I’ll do it,” she insisted.
She led the way to the red-cross-labeled door at the end of the hall. Flicking on the light, she motioned him in. “Lie facedown on the cot.”
The room suffocated her like a mouse hole. A stainless-steel counter and supply cabinets lined one wall; the cot, the other. Tavish settled himself along the length. Lauren glimpsed blood-soaked gauze and her stomach turned. She would love to blame morning sickness, but nope.
On his stomach, Tavish propped himself up on his elbows, straining the shoulders of his T-shirt. She snapped on a pair of gloves, would have preferred reacting to his hard muscles rather than his cut calf.
“I hope this habit of me being attacked by errant branches and you having to patch me up stops after today,” he said.
“Me, too. Wouldn’t want any more scars on you.” Would prefer to never see his blood again, was more like it. She really hated...
No. You’re fine. Swallowing, she slid a thick pad of sterile dressings under Tavish’s calf to absorb the saline she planned to use to clean out whatever lay under his bandage.
She peeled back his makeshift dressing. Objectively, his cut wasn’t bad. Through the lens of her nerves, though, she had to resist the impulse to dart from the room. “God, you’re a bleeder.”
“Yeah. Always makes it look worse than it is.”
Whenever a real emergency hit, adrenaline kicked in, masked her fear. Times like this were what killed her—plenty bloody but lacking the life-or-death chemical surge.
Metallic saliva flooded her mouth. She clicked into automaton mode: clean, dry, dress. A bead of sweat trickled from her temple along her jaw.
“All done,” she whispered. She grabbed his old dressing and the dirty under-padding. And she had no time to do anything except spin, aim for the sink and lose her breakfast.
Head hanging over the basin, forehead pressing against the cool metal tap, she turned on the water to wash away the evidence. She hadn’t been uncontrollably sick from handling a wound since the first weeks of medical school. She’d trained herself not to react. Why had it changed?
Don’t ask a question you don’t want the answer to.
She glanced at Tavish and rested her forearms on the counter edge.
He sat straight-backed against the wall with mile-wide eyes. “Morning sickness?”
“Yeah.”
His expression flattened. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not.” She bit the edge off the not.
“Try again.”
Lying required too much effort. “Blood makes me sick.” She let that hang in the silence as she rinsed her mouth with water from the tap.
He stood and took her in a tight embrace. Her clammy forehead rested against the skin of his neck. His river-dampened clothing cooled the heat of embarrassment from her body.
“Does this usually happen when you’re working?”
“No. I learned to control it. It’s just come back over the last month or so.”
“Because of the baby?”
She’d love to blame being pregnant, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. “No. It’s the stress of the partnership.”
He exhaled through pursed lips. A faint whistle rode the stream of air. “Lauren.”
The warning tone singed her pride. “I’m dealing with it.”
“How?”
“I find the closest toilet.” She smiled out her humiliation, pressed dry lips to his cotton-covered clavicle. “It’s funny, you know...”
“I don’t see you laughing,” he murmured.
“Not funny ha-ha, funny hmm.” Tracing her fingers through his hair, she said, “I’ve had thousands of good days in my life, yet it’s the bad ones that have defined who I am.”
“That’s not unusual. I wouldn’t be who I am today without my father having bolted.” His words came out so matter-of-factly, she’d have missed his decades-old pain had she not been peering at his face.
“Exactly. And my mother’s death clarified so much for me. Everyone started to say how much I was like her, and how tragic it had been that she’d died so young without really having been able to put her mark on the medical field...”
He sat down on the cot and pulled her onto his lap, rubbing her bare knee with one rough hand. “Those two things aren’t connected.”
“Sure they are. That’s what pushed me to become who I am.”
“But it doesn’t mean you can’t change. If medicine doesn’t make you happy, then you should try something else. You were going to give up the clinic to work internationally. Maybe you need to change fields entirely.”
Her spine drew up. She met the encouragement in his gaze with what she hoped was confidence. “I can’t just find a new career. Yeah, I was going to give up the clinic for the sake of our marriage. I’d convinced myself my mom would have been okay with that. But I was wrong.”
“How can you be so sure?” His voice was so low she could barely hear it.
“I make a mark for her, Tavish.” Working at the clinic, holding their family together—filling in the cracks that had formed when her mom had died.
He stroked a calming hand up to her shoulder blades. “You need to make a mark for you, not for everyone else.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“There you go, lying again.”
The murmured accusation sneaked under her skin. She squeezed her eyes shut, but not before moisture gathered at the corners. “I can’t let my family down any more than I already have.”
He wiped at her cheeks with the pad of his thumb. “Letting yourself down is the bigger crime.”
He was making way too much sense. She hugged her rib cage. The vain attempt at shoring up her throbbing middle fell short. A cavernous ache spread from her chest into her limbs. “I can’t be that selfish.”
His arms stayed firm around her, as if he could sense how close she was to stumbling backward and curling into a ball on the cot. “Are you going to expect our child to be a doctor?”
“No.” She pressed the pads of her thumbs against her eyes. “Of course not.”
“So why would your mom—”
“I told you yesterday!” Her heartbeat raced. “It’s about my expectations for me.”
“Can’t those adjust, Lauren? Parenthood’s kinda the ultimate game changer.”
“Are you finding it that way?” she retorted.
“Yeah, I am.” Awe brightened his beautiful face. Acceptance and happiness she’d never expected from him. He’d made the commitment to stay for the summer and didn’t seem to be regretting his decision at all. He’d proved he could change. So why couldn’t she do the same?
She clamped down the thought. Tavish changing meant him trying to be a good father, a good partner. But the changes he was suggesting she make would be the opposite. Following him around the world would mean less stability for their child and would make it impossible for her to support her family. Scrunching up her face, she sighed, but it came out more like a wheeze.
He blanched and dropped his hand to her belly. “You feeling okay?”
“Baby-wise, yeah.”
His obvious relief came out with a long breath. But he didn’t take his hand away. Spreading his fingers low on her stomach, he kissed her forehead. “Never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I’m so damn impatient for when I can feel our baby move inside you. To have you get so big that your bump gets in the way when I sneak a kiss.”
Petals of pleasure—from the naked vulnerability he showed, from the rush of joy of the intimate touch—bloomed through her body. She settled her hand over his, wanting to savor every second of having him connect with their child.
With her.
Her opportunities would be limited. And that sucked. Only having him with her for six months of the year, dealing with weeks, months maybe, of Skyping and sleeping next to an empty pillow, sounded miserable. But less miserable than having him sleeping in a separate apartment when he was in town to visit their child. She didn’t know how to deal with him being away from her. Arranging visitation, though, dropping off the baby at his apartment and going back to her big house alone... So much worse. She couldn’t meet him halfway when it came to the clinic, to her family. So to compromise at all, she’d have to learn to deal with missing him. To give him a chance to leave and, like he’d said, trust him to return. She made sure her smile tinted her tone when she said, “I thought we’d agreed you weren’t going to sneak kisses.”
“No way can I stick by that promise,” he growled. With his hands on her waist, he spun her until she straddled his lap, groaning as she rolled her soft center against his hardening length.
“No way would I want you to keep it.” She cursed the barrier of their shorts, layers of fabric keeping her from blissful fulfillment. Bracing her hands on his rock-solid shoulders, she closed her eyes and rolled her hips, welcoming the heat from the tantalizing friction of their bodies.
Curving a hand under her ass, he dug his fingers into the hair at her nape. His mouth singed the flesh over her pulse as he laved the tender place. “This has gotta be for more than a day, Lauren. I can’t do more back-and-forth.”
“Neither can I.”
A deep groan rumbled from his lungs, vibrated against her ribs. “There’d better be a lock on this door. Wrap your legs around me.”
She did. And he lifted her effortlessly, took a step forward. The snick of the dead bolt sounded, and then they were back on the cot and his fingers were scrabbling at the hem of her work polo. “I like you in teal,” he said. “It brings out the green in your eyes. Makes me want to grab my camera.” He lifted the shirt over her head and dropped it on the foot of the cot. Her bra followed suit. “But I like you better like this.”
Cupping her breasts, he drew his tongue around one peaking nipple and then the other.
“Tease,” she complained, pressing her fingertips into his upper arms as tantalizing pressure built at her core.
“Patience, please.” He grazed his teeth on her nipple. Her breasts tightened under greedy pulls and sucks from his slick mouth. The rough-but-tender caresses of his hands coaxed a flood of desire through her body. It pooled in her veins, weighed down her limbs. But she had to touch him, too.
Two seconds of effort on her part had his shirt joining hers on the cot. “Lie down.”
He stilled with his mouth over her breast. “Sorry?”
A gust of breath carried the word, cooling her wet nipple and sending shivers along her spine. “On your back. Lie down.”
A raw flare lit his eyes and he obeyed, ripping off his sandals and sliding out of his shorts as he went. He was all hers, gold-shot, tousled hair on the white pillowcase, long body stretched out on the gray wool blanket. Beautiful, lean muscle and taut skin that she got to use for her own purposes. For his pleasure. He had thrown her off by kneeling in front of that picnic table the last time they were intimate. And she wasn’t going to kneel—not today, anyway—but she was going to play.
Her shorts and shoes hit the floor, but she left her panties on. Her heart raced at the thought of him discovering how wet they’d become from having him kiss her breasts. Climbing on top of him, she lined up her swollen flesh over the ridge of his sex. Way fewer clothes between them without their shorts on, but even her panties and his boxers were too much.
Resting her hands on his abdomen, she played slow, silent piano over the cut ridges. “You took unapologetic advantage of my emotional state the other night. Had me like putty in your hands.” She smirked at him to make sure he knew any advantage was freely given. “Question is, can I torture you into a similar state?”
“You can, Pixie. Anytime you want. Except...” He took her hands off his belly and brought them to his mouth, worshiping her palms with his lips. “I want to love you right this time.”
He tugged on her arms, and she collapsed on his chest. Inhaling deeply, she filled her nose with his sultry, masculine scent. Bliss. “I don’t remember complaining. If anything, I got the better deal.”
“I disagree.” She heard his smile. “Making you fall apart is about the best thing I get to do in life.”
So why on earth was he so insistent that being around her all the time was such a problem? She checked the thought. It wasn’t being around her; it was being around home. Hopefully his staying for half the year would be enough for both of them.
Rucking a hand into her hair, he flipped her gently onto her back, hovering over her with all his delicious bulk, his eyes smoky with need. “This is more what I had in mind.”
“You on top?”
“No, you in my arms.”
She melted at that, at his tender kiss. Their mouths fused, nipping and licking and tasting. He had both her panties and his underwear off in less than a blink of an eye.
With his weight on one arm and that hand tangled in her hair, he slid his other palm down the center of her torso until his fingers dipped over the bud of her arousal. “How’d you get so wet?”
It was probably pregnancy hormones in part, but mostly him. “You’re good at this.” She tilted one side of her mouth and reached to stroke his erection.
He released a groan so loud she shushed him—they were at work, after all—but she kept moving her hand, savoring velvet skin over rigid shaft.
He froze in place, his hand cupping her mound. She ached for the smallest movement. She twisted against his hand as she continued a slow rhythm with her own.
“I—Lauren. Please.”
“Please stop? Please more?”
“Please you.” He shuddered back to life and slipped his fingers down farther, into her. Her center clenched, begging him for more. “This.”
She nudged him, guiding his body over hers, and his hips between her thighs until he was fully seated and they were both panting.
It was too much. Too good.
Too good to be true?
Wrapping her legs around his powerful hips, she silenced the thought and rode the ecstasy until her mind was blank.