Chapter 17 Amelia
Amelia
Lost at Sea
In a tragic and unexpected event, Amelia Blaire and the brother of her late husband have been swept out to sea.
The Blaire family’s dinghy has been found, destroyed by the weather and the ocean.
No one could have survived. It is a tragic story of jealousy, anger, and the lengths we will tread to be a coveted member of a wedding party.
We mourn the loss of Amelia and the brother of Shiloh Blaire.
The family has declined to comment and has asked for respect and privacy at this time.
We are on site in Winterhaven and will keep you up to date with the very latest news.
—Hot Goss Magazine
Firelight danced across Hudson’s pale face as he slept. It gave me something to focus on as my entire body was wracked with chills as well. I didn’t think I had a fever, but I was cold all the way to my bones. I wanted to curl into Hudson’s heat, but what if that made his fever worse?
I dragged another almost-too-heavy-to-carry log into the fire and tucked myself into a ball.
Outside, the light was starting to fill the windows. Soon, I’d have to make my way to the other cabin, except I didn’t know where it was, or how I was going to have the strength to walk there. But for Hudson, I’d find a way.
I love you. The declaration came back to me, his words like the lever that starts a roller coaster on its racing spiral journey.
All the times he’d helped me. Dropped everything for me.
The way he looked at me when I caught him watching me.
How he’d been avoiding me lately and acting strange.
All the hints the team had dropped—and even Anita Blaire yesterday after breakfast.
Like the final clues in a book being put into place as the detective laid them out for a rapt audience, it all became clear to me what I should have seen all along.
Hudson Blaire was in love with me.
Or he was in a delirious fever state and didn’t know or mean what he was saying.
He moaned in his sleep, and I shook him awake, panicked suddenly at the idea of him not waking up. I needed advice from a doctor. I’m lucky I have a doctor with me. Even if he was half-unconscious and the person I needed a doctor for.
“Hudson.” I shook him again, and he wrapped his good arm around my waist. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” he slurred.
“Should I keep you awake? Or let you sleep?”
“Sleep,” he said.
“But will you wake up if I let you sleep?” I asked desperately. I shook him again, harder. “Hudson!”
He blinked a few times as if trying to focus on me. I saw the moment his eyes cleared. “It’s okay if I sleep,” he said, his voice husky. “We both need water.”
“I know,” I told him. “I’m going to go to the cabin and find us some.”
“No. I’ll do it.” He shifted to the side and winced. “Give me a minute.”
I leaned over him so I could see his whole face. He did look a little better than he had a few hours ago, but not well enough to walk a mile on a rough trail.
He reached his hand up and tucked a stray hair, stiff with salt and dirt, behind my ear. His fingers lingered at the nape of my neck, sending a strange, twirling sensation through my stomach. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered.
“I look like I almost drowned.” I tried to laugh it off, but I was cemented in place by how he was looking at me. Like he’d never seen me before.
“Thank you for worrying about me.”
Tears stung my eyes at the gentle gesture, but I was too dehydrated to cry. “Tell me you’re going to be okay.”
“I’m going to be okay.” But his voice slurred, one word bleeding into the other like a freshly inked paper getting wet.
“I can’t lose you too.”
“You won’t.”
“But what if we don’t get help in time and the weather never clears and something happens to you, and I’m left all alone—”
“Amelia.” He took my hand and brought my knuckles to his lips, kissing them gently, his action stealing the words from my mouth. “What if it all works out?”
“I don’t know if I have that kind of hope.”
“I have enough for both of us,” he said. “Your hands are freezing.”
“I can’t get warm.” My teeth were chattering now, from fear, but also from cold.
“I also have enough warmth for the both of us.”
“But your fever.”
“Amelia,” he growled. “Come here.”
I lay down and scooted close to him, immediately feeling his delicious heat as his good arm wrapped around my waist and tugged me closer.
Hudson’s breathing evened into the sounds of someone who was sleeping deeply, but I was wide awake, staring at the flickering shadows on the wall in front of me.
Obsessing over how thirsty I was warred with obsessing at how it felt when Hudson’s lips had grazed my knuckles. My ears burned remembering his soft touch, the small puff of breath across my hand, the gentle press of his mouth to my skin …
I wasn’t some teenager being touched by a boy for the first time. I’d been married and wildly in love with my husband. But this, this had been different.
Not bad different or good different.
Intoxicatingly different.
One of his arms was draped protectively over my waist, and the other was under my head like a firm pillow.
When we first got to the cabin, I hadn’t been in a head space to really consider what it felt like to be held by Hudson Blaire.
It was hard to get my thoughts to chill enough to analyze them like I might an essay or a poem.
Instead, it was a barrage of sensation—heat and burning, comfort and security, wild-heart racing and breath-stealing.
All emotions that didn’t make sense when put together, but also, I was experiencing them ALL PUT TOGETHER.
Along with a willingness to sell my left kidney for a cup of water.
And a deep longing to not be wearing only my underwear for this. At least I had on the solid black set. Boring. Almost like a swimsuit, except with its lacy trim, it very obviously wasn’t a swimsuit.
And neither was Hudson’s underwear, which I was doing a bang-up job of not looking at but, because my eyes work very well, I had noticed was also black. Like we’d color-coordinated this island hypothermia adventure.
It was a lot. Too much to think about to sleep, that was for sure.
Hudson wasn’t having the same problem. Oh, hey, let me confess my love and press a mind-blowing kiss to your hand, then sleep like a child after a long day at an amusement park. Or like a man who didn’t have a care in the world.
Meanwhile I had all the cares. Like, what would his lips pressed to my lips feel like? Of all the thoughts swirling to the top of my mind, that one was the most pressing.
I turned to face him. He stirred slightly, then held me tightly again as he fell back under the spell of deep sleep.
His face was as familiar as it had always been—the dark brown eyebrows.
The thick fringe of eyelashes I’d always been jealous of.
The sharp angle of his jaw. The stubble covering his chin.
The serious turn of his mouth. I wanted to run my fingers along the lines of his face, the same way I’d done on his palm.
Whenever I was feeling down, Grandma loved to take my palm in hers and tell me all the things she saw for me—great love, success, hard times but the help and strength to get through.
She’d warn me too—to open my eyes and really see the people around me.
It always made me feel comforted and loved in that baked-cookies-after-school kind of way, and I’d wanted to do the same for Hudson.
Well, that had backfired. It had activated his stoic, closed-off expression, while I was left awash in confusion. And an eensie-teeny-tiny bit of all-consuming desire. That was all. No big deal.
When I had met Hudson, all those years ago, I felt like he’d been a gift sent straight to me from my mom right when I needed someone the most. I’d even had a bit of a crush on him back then, but he seemed totally content just being friends, and so I was too.
Then I’d met Shiloh, and my sphere of vision narrowed fully on him.
Knowing Hudson like I knew him now, I realized that I had mistaken his reservedness for disinterest. He lived his life cautiously and thoughtfully, a rarity among the college students in our circle.
One of the most impetuous things he’d ever done was quit his job and move to Montana to help take care of me and Quinn.
I slid my arm around his waist and spread my hand along his side to feel his hot skin.
He normally didn’t sleep this deeply. One cry from Quinn, and he was in the hallway outside her room.
One buzz of his phone when he was on-call, and he was awake and heading to the hospital.
He’d exerted a lot of energy to swim and save me and then carry me here and build this fire, plus using all of his body heat to keep me warm.
He had given everything he had to save my life.
I wanted to pull him in, kiss him, and see how we both reacted. Like a science experiment. I had a hypothesis that the sensation I’d felt after he kissed my hand would be magnified by some unspecified and unmeasurable amount when it was our lips touching.
I was an English teacher, not a scientist, but it made sense to me.
What if I was wrong, though? What if Hudson didn’t have feelings for me, and when he said, I love you, he’d left off the part, like a sister.
Family reunions would be even more awkward than waking up in my underwear next to him had been.
“But what if I’m right?” I whispered as I stared at his mouth. I was three inches away from having the answer.
“Right about what?” Hudson asked, his voice low and scratchy with sleep. His eyes were still closed, and he was in that place between sleep and wakefulness before you were fully aware of reality.
“Everything,” I said to him. “And nothing.” My brain was starting to feel fuzzy with exhaustion, thirst, and hunger, like the ideas were there, but they were behind a mist, making it hard for me to grab onto them. I blinked a few times, but it did nothing to clear it.
“Hudson,” I said when he didn’t respond. “What would happen if we kissed?”
His eyes fluttered open. “I don’t know.”
“Should we try it?” My lips brushed his, lighter than a butterfly’s wing and yet somehow zinging through the fog in my mind in a way all the blinking in the world had failed.
“Kissing? Why?”
“For science,” I murmured.
“I thought you hated science.”
“My science teachers should have used kissing.”
“You wanted to kiss your teachers?”
I huffed out a laugh. “No. I want to kiss you.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?” I repeated to make sure.
“Amelia,” he said, his voice raspy. “I’ve wanted to kiss you my whole life.”
My heart skipped. “You haven’t known me your whole life.”
“Doesn’t make it any less true.”
I scooted closer to him and pressed my lips to his again, a little firmer this time.
His lips parted, and we were transported away from a dilapidated cabin in the woods with soggy clothes strewn about in the background.
We were floating instead in front of a cozy, robust fire, sparks encircling us like stars as heat licked through our veins.
His hand tightened on my hip. I drew my fingers through his hair and brought his face even closer, loving the friction of his stubble against my chin and lips.
I became aware of every nerve ending—where the tips of my fingers dug into the soft hairs at the nape of his neck.
How my cheek came alive when he drew his nose softly along it on his way to kiss my jaw and neck.
How my heart beat in tandem with his, the thumps a steady but racing meter to our mutual longing.
Hudson’s kisses moved back to my mouth, becoming shorter and softer. His eyes were shut, and his breathing ragged.
“I don’t want to wake up from this dream,” he whispered against my lips, so quietly, so faded, I almost didn’t hear him.
“It’s not a dream.”
“Hmmm,” he mumbled before falling back asleep.
Kissing Hudson was everything I was afraid it would be and more.
The experiment was complete, but I found myself wanting to try it again, with different variables.
What if we kissed standing up? Or when we were both fully hydrated and lucid?
Or under a full sky of stars? Maybe while cuddled on the couch and watching a movie?
Until I tried every scenario, and developed a measurable scale, this was an incomplete experiment.
But before I could do any of that, I needed to save Hudson. No matter what it took.