RaeAnne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry Summer\Woodrose Mountain\Sweet Laurel Falls (106 page)

Were they really talking about the weather, with all these
currents that sparked and hissed between them? She racked her brain to come up
with something else to say and blurted out the first thing that came to her
mind.

“What was in the little box you carried out of your father's
place?”

He was quiet for a long moment, his gaze fixed on their route,
and she wasn't sure he was going to answer. Was that a rude question? No. Nosy,
maybe, but not rude.

“A few mementos of my mother's, apparently. Journals and
keepsakes. That's what Harry said it was, anyway. I only had a brief glance at
the contents before you and Sage came back. For all I know, maybe underneath the
few things of my mother rest the still-beating hearts of all Harry's business
rivals.”

Despite her scattered emotions, she had to laugh. “Look at
that. You made a joke.”

His mouth turned up at the edges. “I've still got a few jokes
left in me.”

“You always used to know how to make me laugh,” she said
softly. “I'd forgotten that.”

“Lately I seem to be remembering a whole slew of things that
have slipped away over the years.”

His words were pitched low, intense, and a subtle sense of
intimacy seemed to wrap around them like tendrils of smoke.

She knew she was being cowardly when she deliberately changed
the subject. “When do you start work on the recreation center?”

“Right away,” he answered. “The city council wants tentative
plans within the next six weeks or so. I'm heading to Singapore this week and
will work long-distance from there, then hit it hard when I return.”

“This will be a really valuable addition to Hope's
Crossing.”

“You think?”

“Claire and the others at String Fever have tried to bring the
town together through the Giving Hope Day and other fundraisers, but I'm not
sure it's been enough. When the tourists overwhelm the year-round residents by
ten-to-one some winter weekends, it's tough to form a community. A recreation
center might be just the thing to help people connect with their neighbors.”

“That's a pretty heavy expectation to put into one
building.”

“I'm sure you're up to the challenge,” she said.

“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” he said with a half
laugh, just as he realized with some surprise that they had already reached
Sweet Laurel Falls.

* * *

T
HEY
COULD
HAVE
WALKED
in any direction. Was this a
conscious choice on her part? She wasn't sure, she only knew that the night she
and Jack had walked here after Christmas seemed like the beginning of this sea
change in their relationship.

The warmer temperatures of the past week or so had begun to
melt the ice. Already the water was beginning to make channels and rivulets over
the face of it, and in some spots the ice had completely cracked away, shattered
by warmth and the force of the current.

She wasn't quite ready to face how very much like that spill of
water she felt, half-frozen but beginning the painful process of thawing. Layla
was gone. She couldn't change that, nor could she give such little honor to the
memory of the vibrant girl her daughter had been by curling up and wishing to
die along with her.

She took a seat on the small bench near the bridge that spanned
the creek and gave Puck the deceptive freedom to wander at the limits of his
retractable leash, sniffing at every rock and tuft of grass peeking through the
remaining patches of snow.

She loved it here. The stars, the city, the sound of the
trickling water. She inhaled the cool night air and tried to relax—an impossible
effort, especially when Jack sat down beside her and stretched his long legs
out. Loath to reveal just how much he unnerved her, she drew in a deep breath
and worked hard to relax taut muscles.

“So,” he said after an awkward moment. “How long do you think
we should keep ignoring what happened before dinner?”

“Oh, I was thinking ten or fifteen years ought to do it.”

He gave a rough, surprised laugh, shifting to face her. “It
seems only fair to tell you I'm more attracted to you than I ever was when I was
a stupid teenage kid.”

Her stomach muscles contracted as she remembered the heat of
that moment in the kitchen and, worse, that stunning, irresistible
tenderness.

“Fair? What's fair about telling me that?” she muttered. “What
am I supposed to say?”

In the full moonlight, his features looked vaguely saturnine.
“You could tell me to go to hell. You could tell me not to waste my time or
energy. You could tell me you were completely unmoved by what happened and it
was like kissing that really ugly statue of Silas Van Duran in Miner's
Park.”

Now, there was an idea. Though it would be a blatant lie, maybe
that's what it would take to discourage him, to keep him just beyond that nice,
safe perimeter she had maintained since divorcing Chris Parker. The words
wouldn't come.

“I can't,” she whispered instead.

“You can't what? Tell me you didn't enjoy that kiss? Or let me
kiss you again?”

Her heartbeat pounded a heady rhythm and she didn't answer,
only gazed at him in the light of the moon. It seemed the most natural thing in
the world when he reached out and pulled her against him. He was warm in the
cool of the night, and she wanted to burrow into him and never move. Jack was
the most solid thing in her world right now. How had that possibly happened?

“What are we going to do about this?” he murmured.

“Why do we have to analyze it? Can't you just kiss me?”

He gave that rough laugh again that seemed to sizzle through
her. “Why, yes. What an excellent idea.”

His mouth descended and he tasted sweetly of chocolate and
orange with the sultry undertone of wine, and she felt like that waterfall, with
currents swirling warm and strong through her, breaking away the ice of the past
year in great chunks.

“I've been fighting this since I came back to town,” he
murmured, his breath stirring her skin. “Damned if I can understand the pull you
have over me.”

Should she be flattered or insulted by that? “What can I say?”
she shot back, her voice husky. “I'm a femme fatale and spend hours a day trying
to come up with new ways to lure men into my clutches.”

“Whatever you're doing works, at least with this man. I haven't
been able to get you out of my head for weeks.”

“I've been the same since you came back,” she admitted.

He gazed at her for a moment, heat sizzling between them, then
with a low sound he pulled her back into his arms.

They kissed for a long time, there in the moonlight beside the
waterfall, and Maura felt something else that had been missing for far too
long.

Peace.

The yip of a dog finally brought her back to a sense of time
and place, and she realized she was practically on Jack's lap. Puck, on the
other hand, sat some twenty feet away, the retractable-leash handle dangling in
the dirt beside him.

Had she really been so distracted by the kiss that she had
completely let go of the leash, heedless of her responsibility to her pet? Sweet
Laurel Creek wasn't very deep or wide here, but if a tiny shih tzu like Puck
were to fall in, it might as well be the mighty Missouri. Beyond that, the dog
could have wandered off into the night and encountered all kinds of dangers, and
she would have been too busy making out with Jack to pay attention.

Though she really, really didn't want to, she managed to slide
her mouth away from his.

“Puck, come back here,” she ordered. “Right now.”

The dog gave a quizzical look, as if he considered this a fun
new game, and was gearing up to bolt, until Jack simply said, “Puck. Come.”

The dog immediately scampered over to them, so close that Jack
could scoop down and pick him up. He handed the dog to Maura, and she cuddled
his cold little paws on her lap, suddenly grateful for the distance the dog
provided.

He sat back on the bench, though his fingers remained entwined
with hers.

“Logically, some part of me keeps telling me I should still be
furious with you for keeping Sage from me all these years. When I think about
everything I missed with her, I still sometimes want to pound my fist through a
wall. But then the other part of me sees her now, pregnant and alone and facing
all this uncertainty and all these painful choices, and I have to wonder how the
hell you can even stand to look at me, knowing I left you to deal with
everything by yourself.”

She drew in a shuddering breath, stunned at the depth of
emotion behind his words. “It's done, Jack. We both made mistakes. For what it's
worth, I forgave you a long time ago for not…not loving me enough to stay.”

He stared at her, and beneath her hand she could feel his heart
beating strong and fast. “Not loving you enough? Is that what you thought? It
killed me to leave. I punched in your number at least once a day that first
month, but I always hung up before the call could go through.”

“We would have been lousy together back then. Over the years,
I've wondered what would have happened if you had ever returned my calls. You
would have come back and insisted we do something stupid and shortsighted like
get married, and we would have been miserable together. You would have dropped
out of school to support us and probably gone into construction or something.
You certainly never would have become an architect. Eventually you would have
hated me for stealing that dream from you.”

“Maybe.”

“Anyway, we can't go back and change anything. I'm not sure I
would, even if I had the chance.”

He was silent for a long time, petting Puck almost
absently.

“You know,” he finally said, “one of my first jobs out of
graduate school involved a lot with this really spectacular view of the ocean
near Monterey, but also an ugly, dilapidated building that had been built right
after the Second World War. It was poorly planned and constructed with shoddy
materials. We figured out right away the structure couldn't be saved. But we
also figured out the one good thing about the whole lot, besides the view, was
the foundation. It was still sturdy and as strong as when it had been laid down
decades ago. Do you know what we ended up doing?”

“No.”

“We tore the whole structure down and rebuilt something new and
beautiful on the same foundation, a boutique hotel that consistently wins design
and hospitality awards.”

“Jack—”

“I think we have something sturdy and strong here, Maura. I'd
like to see what we could build on that foundation.”

Panic began to filter through the soft haze of desire that
surrounded them. She eased away from him a little on the bench.

“Or we could forget tonight ever happened and go back to the
wary sort of peace we've managed to achieve since you came back to Hope's
Crossing.”

“Why would we want to do that?”

She sighed, feeling like an idiot. “I can't… I don't do this
well.” She gestured back and forth between the two of them.

He raised an eyebrow. “From my perspective, you do it very
well.”

“That's not what I mean. I've had two serious relationships in
my life—what we had together all those years ago and then my marriage. I ended
up making a mess of both of them.”

“I can't speak for your marriage, but you certainly didn't do
anything to mess up our relationship. We were both young and stupid. I blame
that more than anything. How long have you been divorced again?”

She sighed. “Officially, eight years. But our relationship was
rocky long before then. His touring was hard on us, but more than that, I wasn't
the sort of wife I should have been, probably because…”

She stopped, horrified that she had almost revealed to him that
her marriage hadn't worked out in part because some measure of her heart had
always belonged to Jack.

“Because?”

“Chris and I were never a very good match,” she said, which was
true enough. Just not the whole story. “Logically, we were perfect for each
other. We both loved music and poetry and talking about books. He was so great
with Sage that I really thought we could make it work, but…I guess our marriage
was never strong enough to deal with all the challenges of his life as a
musician. We didn't have that strong foundation you were talking about.”

She really didn't want to talk about Chris right now—and not
with Jack. “That's not really the point here. We were…were talking about
us.”

“I would like there to be an
us,
Maura. I loved you once. Since I've been back, I'm beginning to remember all the
reasons why.”

She closed her eyes against the soft seduction of his voice,
against the fierce need to lean into his words and into him. “It's been twenty
years. We're totally different people. We're kidding ourselves if we think we
can just pick up where we left off, as if all those years and all the mistakes
and all the…all the
pain
never happened.”

“I don't want to go back. What we had was exciting and
wonderful, but you're right, we're different people. I'm not that moody kid with
the mountain-size chip on my shoulder anymore. I'm a man who has suddenly
realized he spent twenty years looking for something. It's one hell of a kick in
the teeth to find out what I needed was right here where I started.”

She trembled, seduced by his words in spite of herself.
“There's the difference between us. I'm not looking for anything. I lost my
daughter less than a year ago. My other daughter is in trouble in the most
old-fashioned meaning of the phrase. I'm empty inside, Jack. This last year has
been a fine and terrible hell I could never have imagined.”