Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HAZEL
By seven that night, I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or worried. Tucker hadn’t come home at the end of his shift. Or called. Or texted.
I tried to go with insulted. Easier on the pride. I took a shower, stole another of his perfectly soft T-shirts from the load in the dryer that he still hadn’t folded, and since I hadn’t done laundry, also grabbed a pair of light-blue boxer briefs. I had no shame, and he had great taste.
But something felt off. Tucker didn’t flake. Or forget. Was he frustratingly direct and brutally honest, with a moral compass you could set your watch to?
Yes.
So, if he’d changed his mind and didn’t want to do dinner, he’d say so.
Worried it was then.
I knew he was just waiting for me to run, like I tended to do. Not because I was afraid of work or people—it was the only way I ever knew how to breathe when things got too heavy. I’d been running since I was a kid, long before Tucker Colburn ever tried to save me. Leaving wasn’t about not caring.
It was about surviving.
I didn’t know why, but something pulled me outside and through the woods. When I caught a faint telltale glow of a lantern up high in the trees, my chest squeezed tight.
No sound, no movement, but I felt him.
It felt an odd déjà vu from the times I’d come out here to hide from the world. I ached at how bad his day must’ve sucked to send him out here, alone.
I stopped beneath the canopy of the tree. “Hey,” I called up. “You good?”
Silence.
I looked around. No rope ladder.
Seriously?
“Real mature.” I muttered something about splinters and bad life choices and started climbing. Clearly, he was in a mood. Rare, for him—Ryder was the Colburn with the sulks.
At the top, I found Tucker sitting against the back wall, head back, legs sprawled out in front of him, palming an expensive-looking, nearly full whiskey tumbler in his fist, the bottle at his side.
He wore an ancient T-shirt that hugged his chest and arms. Jeans so faded and threadbare, they clung in all the spectacularly wrong places for my self-control. Old running shoes. Hair damp, messy, like he’d showered but couldn’t be bothered with anything beyond fingers and frustration.
Her Fluffiness was curled in his lap, still, staring up at Tucker with a concerned look on her little furry face.
My heart gave a sick lurch. Something was wrong. Bad wrong. And Tucker, being the brick wall he was when he didn’t want to feel, looked carved from stone.
So I went with what worked best for us: sarcasm. “Hi, Haze,” I said in a mock baritone that didn’t come close to his low, rough, stupidly sexy one. “I’m good. What’s up with you?”
“Hazel.” He barely breathed my name, and with it, a warning. But nothing more.
His face was carefully blank. The kind of forced, hollow nothing that meant everything.
Reticent, stoic alpha-male mode activated. I tried not to sweep my gaze over his whole tall, gorgeous, emotionally constipated self and failed spectacularly.
His eyes were already on me. Dark. Scorching.
Yep. He was most definitely feeling some sort of way.
“Thanks for pulling up the rope ladder; that was helpful,” I said.
A dark chuckle escaped him. “Maybe I wanted to be alone.”
“I’m going to choose not to take that personally.”
“You should assume more things are personal, Hazel.”
I stopped directly in front of him and nudged his shoe with mine. “I could’ve died. I’m out of practice climbing trees.”
He flinched. Actually flinched.
Shit.
Something awful had happened on one of his calls.
With no idea how to help, I lowered beside him and nudged his shoulder.
“I’m not going to ask if you’re okay,” I murmured, knowing damn well he wouldn’t open up about whatever it was until he was good and ready.
“And it’s clear you don’t want to talk, so…
” I pulled a deck of cards from my pocket.
“I’ll even give you a leg up since I just fleeced my dad. ”
Nothing.
“All right.” I tried a teasing tone. “Strip poker. Final offer.”
His head turned slowly, some base masculine part of him reacting to my offered distraction.
“Tucker,” I breathed. “What’s wrong?”
He lifted a broad-as-a-mountain shoulder. “Shitty day. House fire out in the sticks. It was bad.”
“How bad?”
“A woman’s in the ICU, burns over most of her body. Not expected to make it through the night.” He closed his eyes. “Single mom. Two kids, who right now are sitting with a distant relative, waiting to see if their mom’s going to make it.”
My heart cracked wide. I could only imagine what this had stirred up inside him. Because there’d been a time when Tucker was the person sitting in the ICU with his siblings, waiting to see if their mom was going to make it.
He dragged in a breath. “We found her curled over her youngest. Shielding her with her body. Like she knew. If we’d been two minutes sooner, we could have gotten her out before seventy-five percent of her body burned.”
I pressed a hand to his arm. “You did the best you could.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know you.”
He stared at me for a long beat. One corner of his mouth quirked slightly. “You think so, huh?”
“I know so.” I drew a deep breath. “You can’t focus on the ones you lose, Tucker. You have to focus on all the ones you save.”
He tipped his head back to stare at the towering canopy of valley oaks overhead and the night sky that peeked through. “My biggest fear is that I can save all these strangers, but when it comes to the people I love, I…can’t.”
“Hey.” I slipped my fingers into his, anchoring us both. “You were young when your mom got sick. That wasn’t on you. No one could’ve saved her.”
He shrugged. “Fears aren’t rational.”
Boy, didn’t I know it. “You know what my biggest fear is?”
He turned his head to look at me.
“That you’ll eat all my Hot Cheetos.”
He snorted. Shook his head. Almost smiled.
That nearly undid me.
His fingers brushed my thigh, lingering just long enough to make me forget how to breathe.
“I’m afraid I’ll always be judged by my past,” I added, quieter now. “That I’ll have to change to be loved, and I’m not sure I know how.”
Tucker
I laced my fingers tighter around hers. I knew I was in bad shape. I hadn’t wanted to see anyone; I didn’t want to talk. Fuck, I barely wanted to breathe.
Luckily, my dad was spending the night at Kiera’s, which made her my favorite sibling at the moment.
While I normally didn’t mind wrangling Hank, I was grateful not to have to argue with the man who could express a full TED Talk with just one syllable: Ah.
As in, Ah, why do I have to wear underwear?
And Ah, why isn’t a party-size bag of chips considered a balanced meal?
All I wanted was a cold beer, edible food, and eight uninterrupted horizontal hours with no questions from Team Ah.
And something to take this bone-deep ache from my chest before I had the promised dinner with Hazel, something to make me feel human again.
But she’d come looking for me. And had found me. I met her gaze, my own intense. “Nobody who matters will ever judge you.”
She gave me a get real look, which on a different day would’ve made me smile. She might be down, but she was not out.
Silence settled over us. Comfortable. Familiar.
And the pain reverberating inside me dialed down a notch.
One thing about Hazel, she understood space. How to give it, how to sit inside it without making it feel like pressure. She just…was. Sitting beside me, wearing one of my vintage firehouse T-shirts that was slipping off a creamy shoulder, bare legs folded beneath her, looking criminally sexy.
Her Fluffiness, having ditched me for Hazel, sat smugly purring in her lap like she was the world’s most judgmental chaperone.
My cat shot me a look. You’re welcome. I preheated her for you.
“Did you steal more of my clothes?” I asked.
“Since they’ve been in the dryer for days, I figured they were abandoned and needed a new home.” She ran a hand down the shirt. “Hope you don’t mind.”
My mouth went dry and my brain short-circuited. She looked like home. My past, my mistakes, and the one thing I’d never stopped wanting—all wrapped up in one.
I offered her my glass. Anything to give my hands a job besides touching her.
“That shirt’s a collector’s item,” I said casually.
“Oh yeah?” She ran a hand down the front again, fingers brushing where my name sat faded across her chest. “What makes it collectible? The ratty collar? The ancient logo?”
“My name across your breasts.”
She stilled like a deer in the headlights. “You’re…better at flirting than I am.”
All thoughts of food and sleep vanished. Just looking at her, I felt…lighter. And wide awake. I smiled. “Is that what we’re doing? Flirting?”
She took a sip from the tumbler, grimaced. “Maybe.”
“You fixed my railing. And the back steps too.” The repair was flawless, but that was Hazel. Selective with what she cared about, but when she picked something, she gave it everything. “You planning to bill me?”
“Oh, you’ll pay. You do realize you need new casing on the east side of the house?”
“Yeah. We had a hell of a winter. A tree came down and did some damage. And you should be careful. You keep fixing things, people are gonna start thinking you like it here.”
Her expression flickered, just for a beat. A crack in the armor. “I wouldn’t want to ruin my brand.” She shifted, and the shirt rose up her thighs.
Suddenly, there was only one thought in my brain, a question. “What are you wearing underneath my shirt?” Please say nothing…
She flashed me a quick peek of a pair of my boxer briefs riding low on her hips, and my brain flatlined.
“You okay?”
“Just trying to survive the sight of you in my clothes.” The air between us shifted—thicker now, hotter. The hunger she stirred up in me hadn’t gone anywhere, and now it had teeth.
She stretched her legs out in front of her, took another sip of the whiskey. “You ever think about what you would’ve done? If you’d gone with me that night?” She said it softly. Carefully. Like she knew the question might crack something inside me.
It did.
I took the glass from her and set it down. Then came up on my knees.
Between her thighs.
“I think about it all the time,” I said.
Her gaze locked on mine, open and raw.
“It haunts me,” I went on, running a finger down her throat and along her shoulder, bare where the shirt slipped down to her elbow.
She gave a husky, mirthless laugh. “Yeah. Same.” Then shook her head. “Ignore me. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s the storm. Static electricity.” She twirled a hand near her ear. “It does something to my brain. Makes me say stuff I shouldn’t.”
I caught her hand. “Don’t talk about the woman I’m crushing on like that.”
Her mouth fell open in surprise.
With a grim smile, I shifted, sitting with my back to the wall, tugging her into my lap so that she was straddling me.
I wrapped her up tight, holding on to her, not sure I could let go even if the world were on fire.
Then I buried my face in her beautiful, silky, wild hair.
“I’ve got this ridiculous, insatiable need to be near you,” I murmured. “Always have.”
She didn’t pull away.
Neither did I.