With This Kiss (29 page)

She’d hoped she could go into this relationship knowing the score, knowing what was possible, and come out on the other side having had a taste of something sweet and lovely. But Sean had known better right from the start, hadn’t he?

He’d predicted her broken heart.

And then he’d kissed her… and those predictions hadn’t seemed to matter as long as he was close.

Sean started his car and pulled away from Main Street. The air was tense, filled with her longing and his reticence. He hadn’t told her where they were going, just that he had a surprise for her. She assumed it had something to do with the festival.

They were driving through the heavily forested part of Route 10 when he pulled into a narrow gravel driveway.

“Where are we?”

“My property.”

She shifted in her seat in surprise. “I didn’t know you owned property on the lake.”

“I bought it a few years ago.”

She should have guessed, knowing how much he loved Emerald Lake, that he’d always planned on coming back
here one day. For all the problems he had with his family, how could he resist?

Despite the earlier awkwardness, hope moved through her that maybe, just maybe, he’d make that full-time move back here sooner rather than later. If he stayed in town, and they continued to date, it wasn’t completely impossible that he could fall in love with her one day, was it?

Knowing her heart was running away with her brain again—in a tremendously stupid and pointless direction, no less—she was just on the verge of vowing not to let it happen again when the trees opened up.

“You have a plane?”

The first hint of a smile came back to his lips. “A float plane.”

She swallowed hard, felt all the air begin to press and squeeze out of her lungs.

“Oh.” She worked to get control of her lungs, to get her stomach to stop cramping to absolutely no avail. “Your plane takes off and lands on the water?”

“Now that the ice on the lake has melted, I was able to have it delivered.” Sean’s hand was gentle on her chin as he turned her face to his. “Come up in it with me, Rebecca.”

She blinked at him. “This is your surprise.”

“I want to take you flying.”

“I—” Her mouth was dry, so dry her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. She closed her eyes, whispered, “I can’t.”

“Rebecca, look at me, sweetheart.”

She made herself open her eyes, tried not to see the plane in front of them, floating there at the end of his dock, taunting her.

“You are strong. Determined. Something like getting in a float plane shouldn’t break someone as full of resolve as you.”

“It will.”

“It won’t. I know it won’t.”

“How can you know that?”

“Do you trust me?”

More than she should.

With everything, including her heart.

Still, she could barely get the word out. “Yes.”

“We’ll just climb in. Get used to the feel of the seat, the belts, the way the world looks from a front-row seat in the sky.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“It will be.”

And then he leaned over and kissed her, softly at first, but the passion that burned between them was never far from the surface. Her nerves, her fears, all started to melt away as their tongues danced. She reached for him, threaded her hands into his dark hair, and somehow he pulled her onto his lap and she was lost to everything but how much she wanted him.

Before she realized it, he’d opened the door and she was standing on the sand in his arms. He took her hand in his to lead her over to his plane.

“How am I supposed to think straight after a kiss like that?”

“You’re not.”

“You tricked me.”

He didn’t look the least bit guilty as he maneuvered them across the sand and toward the dock.

“I did.”

And then, just that fast, he had her sitting in the passenger seat of the small plane.

“See. It’s not scary at all.”

Even though she didn’t want to believe him, he was right. The console had a lot of buttons and switches and gauges, but she supposed it wasn’t all that different from sitting in Sean’s expensive car.

And yet, she still didn’t think she could do it.

She could feel him staring at her, taking in her panic. Finally, he said, “I wait all day long to make love with you. Do you know why?”

Oh god. No one had ever spoken like this to her. She couldn’t get her mouth to form the word
why
but Sean didn’t let that stop him from telling her his reason.

“I’ve never seen anything as beautiful in all my life as you are when you let go in my arms.”

The remaining tension pooling in her gut, her limbs, melted away as he said, “Ever since we met, I’ve seen how much you love learning new things. How you love adventure. Even fighting for the festival has been fun with you.” He looked into her eyes, held her gaze. “Maybe it’s just me being selfish. But I want to see you up in the air with me. I want to see the wonder in your eyes when you see the lake from the clouds for the first time.”

If this wasn’t love, she wasn’t sure she knew what love was.

She took a deep breath. And said, “Go.”

He didn’t wait another second, didn’t give her time to change her mind.

They started to glide across the water and she let out a little squeak as they suddenly climbed into the sky.

Just as her lungs were shutting down again, Sean
reminded her, “One breath at a time. Just one, Rebecca. Just give me one.”

She could do that, couldn’t she? Just one breath. And then another when she was done with that first one.

She wanted to pinch her eyes shut, wanted to pretend she was anywhere but in an airplane, but the dark blue of the water, the light blue of the sky, the faint wisps of clouds, the dark greens of the forest were all starting to make their way into her brain.

Snippets of beauty came at her like a flashing video screen, one after the other, so magnificent that she could still hardly breathe.

And that was when it hit her: she was up in the clouds in a tiny plane… and she wasn’t dying.

Instead, she was more alive than she’d ever been before.

“Thank you.”

She hadn’t realized she was crying until she said the two little words.

Trying to take it all in—the magnificence of the lake and mountains and sky—her words were blurry with her tears of joy as she agreed, “It’s even more incredible than I imagined.”

Sean was silent beside her, but she could feel that something had changed inside the small space. Turning to him, she saw that he was looking at her with such tenderness, such wonder, her heart actually skipped a beat.

“No one has ever cared this much about me,” she told him then, as they flew through the sky. “No one has ever made me face my fears like you just did.”

She was stunned that he understood her so well, that he knew she’d not only survive the flight but would relish it so completely.

In so many ways, Sean knew her better than she even knew herself.

No one had ever had so much faith in her before. She’d trusted him with her embarrassing secret, that she was too much of a wimp to get in a plane, and instead of turning it against her, instead of finding her weak, he’d found a way to help get her through it.

His tactics might have been unorthodox—no one had ever kissed her fears into submission before—but it had worked. Mostly, anyway, she thought as she gripped the door tightly and tried not to think about falling out of the sky.

How could she possibly let him know that she had faith in him, too? And that he could trust her with his pain?

“Are you scared now?”

She took a breath, looked around her again, then smiled. “Yes.”

He frowned. “You are?”

“I am. But it’s a good kind of scared.”

“A good kind of scared?”

“I’m scared that I’ve wasted too much time. I’m scared that there are too many beautiful things out there for me to possibly fit into one lifetime.”

She gathered up all of her courage to say one more thing.

“And I’m scared about what I’m feeling for you.”

N
either Sean nor Rebecca said anything else during the rest of their aerial tour of Emerald Lake. She held her breath during the landing, but it was just as smooth as the takeoff. Rebecca knew she was spoiled by having Sean as her personal pilot. She trusted him in a way she’d never trusted anyone else.

He helped her out of the plane, his hands on either side of her waist. They stood together like that for a long moment, staring into each other’s eyes, before he had to move away to secure his plane to the dock.

She was waiting for him on the beach, sitting in the sand with her legs curled up beneath her arms.

“You belong here, Rebecca.”

She felt it, too, such kinship with this small town deep in the Adirondack Mountains. That was why it had hurt so much when Mr. Radin accused her of trying to destroy the land with her festival.

“I feel like I should warn you,” she said when he sat down beside her in the sand. “Since you decided to take me on that flight, I’ve decided it’s time to have a really
serious talk. Just in case you want to make a run for it through the trees.”

He didn’t smile at her comment, but she wasn’t smiling either. “I’m not running, Rebecca.”

She reached over, took his hand in both of hers, turning it in her hand so that she could trace the lines in his palm.

“I never expected you to come into my life. All those years I knew Stu, all the years he spoke to me about his amazing older brother, I never realized just what you would mean to me one day.” A thousand times more frightened than she had ever been of flying, Rebecca had to force herself to look Sean in the eye. “I’ve fallen for you.” She sucked in a shaky breath. “Hard.” Fear had her saying, “I know you warned me not to but”—she laughed with the air she had left in her constricted lungs—“you sure make it hard for a girl to keep her heart to herself.”

“Rebecca.”

She squeezed his hand with hers. “No. Please. I didn’t just say all of that because I think it will get you to say it back to me. I just—” She brought his hand to her lips, pressed a soft kiss to them. “You’ve become my best friend, Sean. And I need to tell my best friend that I’ve fallen in love.”

Women had claimed to love Sean many times, but never like this. No one had ever bared her true soul to him.

And no one had ever put her heart in his palm and given him the chance to crush it so easily. So completely.

Unbidden came a flash of what it’d be like to have Rebecca by his side from this moment forward. As a wife, in his arms every night. As a business partner, running lakefront inns across the Northeast together. As the
mother of their children. She’d be warm and loving… and a fierce protector—and proponent—for all of them.

He brushed away the tears that fell down her cheek. No one had ever meant as much to him as this beautiful woman sitting beside him.

Her eyes searched his face. He was afraid she was looking for something neither of them would ever find.

God, he hated hurting her. Hated it with every fiber of his being.

“All my life I’ve looked at things I want from every angle and only when it made sense did I go out and get it. But the way I’ve wanted you has never made sense. Not when you’d been in a relationship with my brother. Not when you wouldn’t tell me why he left or where he was. Not with you working for me. Not when I know you’re looking for something I can’t give you. But in the end, all that seems to matter was how much I want you, Rebecca.”

“And you got me.”

“No, sweetheart. You’re so much more, so much bigger than any one man could possibly hold on to.”

“How can you call me sweetheart in one breath and tell me not to love you in the next? You want to love me, don’t you, Sean?”

More than anything he’d ever wanted.

And still, he couldn’t say the words.

His heart was twisting in his chest as she said, “I taught you how to make the inn’s beds. Maybe I could teach you how to love me, too.”

Sean wished it were that easy.

He kissed her, had to kiss her, then, because she was so sweet. And so honest in every moment. Even the ones where she could be hurt the most.

Especially those.

If he couldn’t give her the love she deserved, he at least owed her an explanation why.

“When I was fourteen years old, I found my mother in bed with someone. Not my father.”

Rebecca didn’t gasp. She didn’t exclaim. She simply reached for his other hand and moved them both to her heart.

“I should have been in physics class, but I’d forgotten my football helmet and had aced the quiz the day before, so the teacher let me skip out for a few minutes.”

He’d never said these words aloud to anyone. All these years, he’d thought it was because he had to keep his mother’s secret.