“Yeah, I thought so.”
Then she turned serious, and whispered, “I don’t want anything to happen to you. I don’t want to get close to you and then lose you.”
Her voice was haunted and full of so much pain, but longing, too. He felt that longing and didn’t want to fight it. He only wanted to give in to it. To her. To how he felt with her. Her touch was some kind of magic. The way she talked to him like a massage. He was finally starting to say good-bye to the twisted, torn-up way he replayed and rewound and revisited his past, and it was because of her. Here, nestled together, he was keenly aware that she was the start of something. He didn’t want to wait any longer for her. He didn’t want to hold back any more.
“I don’t want to get lost. Except in you. I want to know you, Megan. I want to have more nights like this. Even if our time is limited, even though you’re leaving for Portland in a week, I want as much of you as I can have right now. I hope to God you want the same.”
…
When he said things like that, she felt stripped bare. As if her heart were beating outside her body. It scared the living daylights out of her, but she was so drawn to him, like he was air or breath. She couldn’t deny she wanted the same thing. She didn’t know how to reconcile these opposing forces in her—self-preservation versus taking a leap. But maybe he was right. You only live once, and anything can happen to anyone. Hell, she’d chosen a safe man before—an internet start-up guy—and look where that had landed. Then, if a guy like Craig—who had the safest job in the world selling books to happy people in a tourist town—could break his leg trying to save a kid and almost die, did her rules even apply? Maybe they’d been useful at one point, but perhaps she’d outrun them.
Maybe she’d been holding on to her fears when she’d actually outgrown them a while ago. She’d survived the loss of her father, she’d handled her mom’s depression, she’d extricated herself from a damaging relationship before it went too far. She’d moved on and through and past, and here she was on the other side.
There were a million ways to lose someone, and sometimes you lost them before they even left this earth. It was time to move on. To split from her past. To step forward, even in this small way, for this brief moment in time.
“Me, too,” she said, surprised at the strength of her declaration. “Where do we go from here? I’m only here for another week. I want the same thing, but I’m leaving soon.”
“We make the most of the time you have. It’s as simple as that. But we need to do right by Travis going forward. I’m seeing him at the firehouse tomorrow morning. We need to tell him. I need to be the one to do it, okay?”
She nodded. She understood the man code. She knew how these firefighters were and that wanting to date someone’s sister had to be discussed man-to-man first. “He’s in Monterey for that executive game and coming back late tonight. We have one of the final shoots for the calendar tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll talk to him then.”
She nodded, but nerves whisked through her. She fidgeted with the bracelet on her wrist, and that caught his attention. He gently lifted her chin so she was facing him.
“Hey,” he said softly, brushing his thumb along her jaw. “You worried about what he’ll say?”
“I just don’t want to let him down when he finds out I lied to him.”
Becker’s eyes were somber as he nodded. “I know what you mean. Trust me, I know what you mean. But I’m just going to tell him that this is real. This thing between you and me.”
“It is real,” she said insistently, placing her hand on top of his. The clock was ticking loudly; time was winding down, marching to the end of her stay here. Whatever was happening between them felt like falling for a city when you’re on a vacation. Wonderful, but short-lived, with the ending in sight before they began. “And since it is, we should make the most of it while I’m here,” she said, trying to keep the sadness that would come with good-bye far away from them.
“We should,” he said quietly as he reached for her hand. “And who knows what’s next. You’re leaving, and I can’t make promises, but no matter how hard we try we can’t stay away. So let’s see what happens while you’re here, and we’ll deal with you leaving when it gets here.”
She nodded crisply. That sounded realistic, and possible.
He leaned in to dust a soft kiss on her forehead, her nose, ever so briefly on her lips. “And now, I’d really like to spend this time you have in town with you instead of resisting you,” he said, and threaded his fingers through her hair. She shivered at his touch, sparks skipping over her skin at his words. “I want to take you out to dinner, and get to know you even better, and I want to hold your hand, and kiss you across the table, before I take you back to my house and get reacquainted with your exquisite body.”