“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fantastic,” she said around a sob. “I’m just…” She struggled upward and wiped her bleeding hands on her skirt. “I’m just wonderful.”
“Here, don’t do that. It’ll hurt worse.” Denison held her hands in his and studied her palms.
And to her utter annoyance and dismay, her body reacted to him, just as it had those years ago. From where he touched her, tingling warmth ran up her arms. It pooled at her shoulders, then flowed into her chest and down into her quivering belly. He looked up with a startled look in his gray eyes—eyes that seemed lighter than she remembered.
“You feel it, too,” he accused.
Anger snapped her spine straight, and she yanked her hands from his. “I don’t feel anything.” Ignoring her stupid tears that stained her stupid cheeks in stupid rivers, she stomped around him and tossed her purse into the passenger seat of her open-doored jeep, then slid behind the wheel.
“You can’t just leave without telling me why,” Denison said, suddenly at her door.
“Why what?” she said, swallowing her anguish.
“Why did you leave without saying anything? You were supposed to be here, with me, for three more days before you went back to school. Dammit, Danielle,” he said, clenching his fists on either side of her door. His voice dipped to a ragged whisper. “I was supposed to have three more days.”
She huffed and shook her head slowly. Why? Because he’d invited her to watch him play a show, and when she’d come to meet up with him, he had his arms around another woman. His lips on another woman. She closed her eyes against the pain of his betrayal. “You really can’t think of any reason why I would’ve left without saying goodbye?” You cheating rat.
Denison looked at her like he was lost and swallowed hard. “No.”
The look on his face, so raw and open, nearly doubled her over. Her chest hurt more than her scraped hands and knees. “I can’t do this right now.”
“Danielle—”
“I can’t! I’m not ready for this conversation. I’m sorry I ever came back.” She jammed the key and turned the engine, then pulled through an empty parking space and sped off.
She looked in the rearview mirror just once. Denison was standing in the middle of the gravel parking lot with his fingers linked behind his head, chin tilted back, agony written across his face.
Danielle had made the worst decision of her life moving back to Saratoga.
Chapter Two
In utter shock, Denison stood in the half-empty parking lot of Sammy’s bar eating a cloud of Danielle’s dust and wondering what the hell had just happened. Four years without a peep from the woman, and all the sudden, she was back, riling up his bear just like she had once upon a time. He ran his hands up the back of his scalp and flung them in front of him.
He’d almost gotten over her.
Brighton snickered a silent laugh from beside him like he’d heard his lying thoughts.
“Shut up, man,” Denison grumbled to his brother.
Of course Brighton would find this amusing. He’d sworn off a mate since he was a cub. Denison had played that game until he’d met Danielle, fresh out of her first year of college for the summer, working an internship for some environmentalist group up in the mountains near Saratoga.
One summer, and his bear had chosen. Too bad she hadn’t chosen him back.
Denison bit back a curse and twitched his head. “Let’s grab our stuff and get out of here.” Preferably before that asshat Matt came back with a couple of his Gray Back buddies and began a crew on crew brawl in a parking lot of inebriated humans.
Matt Barns was an old not-friend and definitely due for an ass-kicking, but not here, and not tonight.
The toe of Denison’s work boot faltered on a stone sticking out of the gravel, and he fought the urge to rip it from the ground and chuck it against the lone tree that sat between here and the main drag in town.
Four years ago, he’d imagined meeting up with Danielle again. After a few months with no word from her, he’d known she wasn’t ever coming back. She’d gone back to college and begun a new life that didn’t include him. But that hadn’t stopped him from visualizing what one more hour with her would be like, what he would ask, and if she still loved him. Well, apparently he’d done something wrong, but damned if he knew what. “Freakin’ women.”
“You done for the night?” Ted, the bartender, asked.
“Yeah, we’re gonna cut out early. We’re gonna try to beat rush-hour.”
Ted chuckled at the joke and waved them off. Rush hour didn’t exist here in this small town, and it sure wasn’t a problem out on the winding road from here to the Asheland Mobile Park where he and Brighton lived. The worst traffic he ever found was a family of raccoons taking their sweet-ass time to cross the road on occasion, but other than that, he was lucky to pass another car on the two-hour drive back.