Falling for Mr. Wrong(53)

“Maybe to other people. But we’re different. They can afford to make mistakes. We can’t.”

“I think you should go.” All of the pleasure of the day was gone. The muscles that had once been loose and easy tightened in taut bands around her neck and shoulders. “I’ll call you later, okay?” She started to walk toward the front door, hoping he’d follow without making a bigger scene. Hoping to salvage something of the moment.

His mouth tightened. “Fine. Do what you want.”

He stalked out of the house, temper reasserting itself as he slammed the door behind him

Kelsey sank down onto the couch, her legs shaking. Do what she wanted? That was a good joke.

“Kelsey?”

She jumped. Ross stood at the end of the hall, a towel draped around his waist. He looked dark and potent, a question lingering in his eyes.

“Hey.” She tried for a smile, jumped up, and grabbed the box that now lay in the middle of the room. “Bad time for UPS.”

He did not smile in return. She wondered how much he had heard.

“You should go ahead and shower,” she said, turning away from him to add the box to the stack beside the wall. “I really need to get back to work. I’ve got a million e-mails to return.”

“Kelsey—”

She cut him off with a raised hand. “Don’t,” she said, suddenly tired. “Please don’t.”

For a moment, the room was silent. Then the floor in the hallway creaked, and the door to the bathroom closed. She did not turn around.





Chapter Fifteen

Ross stepped over the mess of sleeping bags, water bottles, and headlamps, and zipped the tent flap closed behind him. He pulled his new fleece jacket over his head as he straightened. Thank goodness Kelsey had told them it would be cold at night, or they would have been woefully underdressed. The high temperatures in Denver had been in the nineties for days; now, it couldn’t be more than sixty.

“Are they asleep already?” Kelsey straightened abruptly. She had been reclining against a log in their makeshift kitchen area a few feet away from the tent. He wondered if she would have remained there, had she known the kids would be out so quickly.

“Dead to the world.” He smiled, rubbing his head. “I guess all that hiking finally caught up with them.”

It was Saturday, and they’d been on the trail since Friday afternoon. The first night, they’d pitched their tents a bare mile from the small gravel lot where they’d parked, in a clearing off to one side of the trail. The site was quiet and private, far enough off the highway to feel like it was smack in the middle of nowhere, but close enough that even the kids couldn’t bring themselves to complain about the walk in.

Despite the quiet, or perhaps because of it, the kids had had a terrible time getting to sleep that first night. After the thrill of the hike, the experience of cooking on a camp stove, and the fun of setting up sleeping bags and pads in their brand-new tent, they’d been wound up so tightly it had been well after ten before they’d been able to get to sleep. Kelsey had brought along her own single-person tent, and by the time Ross poked his head out of the large family one, she had disappeared inside it, cutting off any possibility of a private tête-à-tête.

He couldn’t say he was surprised. After the encounter with her father, she’d closed her walls so tightly she might have been a medieval castle—complete with moat. All the pleasure of the moment, all the giddy, delicious energy of their naked bodies, had disappeared when he heard her father’s angry words. Thinking Kelsey was confronting a burglar, he’d stopped on the way into the shower, ready to rush out, buck naked, in her defense. But his hand had caught on the door when he heard the conversation that followed.

Kelsey’s father, full of disapproval and anger.

Kelsey, sounding guilty, repentant. Shuttering her eyes afterward, making it clear that she had no intention of explaining what had just happened.

“It’s always hard to sleep the first night on the trail. The brain has to adjust to the quiet and the dark.” She tipped her head back to look up at the stars. Ross found himself copying her gesture, and he caught his breath at the beauty of it. A deep, pitch-black sky hung low over their heads, framed by shadowy pine trees. A dusting of stars brushed across the stretching darkness like the glitter Julia loved to sprinkle on her pictures. The only noise was the soft rustle of a nearby stream, and the breath of the breeze through the trees.

Had he ever been far enough from a city to escape the distant glow of its lights? Had he ever experienced this…absence…of sound? No, that wasn’t quite right. This place was by no means silent. But in his experience every moment had an underlying current of noise; distant sirens, honking horns, cars rushing past. Here, the world started with quiet and then added back the dim echo of water. Trees. Wind.