Chapter 15 First
First
WALKER
Itry to play it off casual anyway. “Don’t look so surprised. Nobody ever told you that?”
“No, actually.” A crooked smile. “You’d be the first.”
I thought there was nothing left of my heart to break. But those words, that look in her eyes… that puts a crack right down the middle of it.
This woman who gives everything she has to my son, to her mother, to every person in her orbit, and nobody has ever thought to give her those words back.
The distance between us is down to two feet now. Maybe less. I could reach out and touch her, easy.
“You committed to that job in New York.” My voice is a little rougher now. Testing the waters here. “Is that commitment ironclad?”
Some desperate, reckless part of me wants to know if there's any world in which she stays. If there's any version of this summer that doesn't end with her driving away and taking whatever's left of my peace of mind with her.
“I signed a contract,” she says.
“Contracts can be broken.” I pause. “What would it take? For you to break it?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers.
I wait. Wait for a tiny sliver of hope to hang on to.
If there’s a future path where she stays, everything changes.
She's not the nanny anymore. She's just Sadie.
Sadie, the siren, pure temptation beneath the moonlight.
Sadie, who just told me nobody has ever called her easy to love, when the truth is I can't imagine how anyone who's spent five minutes with her hasn't said it daily.
I've been holding myself, and her, at arm's length. The reasons were solid when I made them. She's leaving, she works for me, it would be wrong. Every one of those reasons is still technically true.
Every one of them gets harder to remember by the second.
She falls silent. I get the sense there’s a decision being made inside her now, a door opening that she usually keeps closed.
She reaches past me for the whiskey glass again. Her shoulder presses briefly against mine as she does it, warm despite the water, and she stays close when she takes a sip. Close enough that I could count the water droplets on her skin.
“My daddy up and left when I was ten,” she says, not looking at me.
“Told Momma the thrill was gone and left with his suitcase and his mistress in our family car. He worked the oil fields and he made the money. When he left, his parting gift was seventy five thousand dollars in gambling debt. We lost everything.”
Her free hand is moving slow circles through the water at her side. “Momma had to get a job, but she had no work history, so all she could get was a crappy one. We moved from a nice little house to a rundown double-wide, and that’s where we stayed.”
I think about ten year old Sadie living through that. Another splinter in my heart.
“I swore to myself I'd never let that be my life,” she tells me. “That I would work hard and have a real career and stand on my own two feet. I swore I'd never rely on anyone else to take care of me. That job in New York is my ticket to that life. The kind I've been dreaming of.”
I don't say anything because she's not looking for anything except to be heard. So I listen. I hold still in the water beside her and I listen.
She lifts her chin. It’s a gesture I've come to know. Sadie steeling herself. Sadie unafraid of anything.
“Yes,” she says. “Contracts can be broken. But that job is a vow. A vow to myself.” Her eyes hold mine, steady and clear. “And I never break my vows.”
That makes two of us.
I lean back against the pool wall and look up at the sky. A whole galaxy of suns, and none as bright and fierce as the woman beside me.
I'm not going to be the thing that stands between Sadie Sullivan and her dreams. Even if watching her achieve them means watching her go.
She's leaving at summer's end and she just told me why she has to. There's no version of this where I get to ask her not to. Not unless I want to be a selfish prick, and I’m trying like hell not to be that guy anymore.
I push off the wall and swim a slow lap to the shallow end and back, putting some water between us, giving us both a moment to breathe.
When I come back, she's drifted to the pool edge. Her arms are up on the ledge as she leans against it, hair wet against her back.
“You know what I've been wondering?” I say, treading water. Guiding us back to safer territory.
“What?”
“If I’d look good with a mullet.”
She bursts out laughing. Just like that, the weight of that deep talk lifts off the both of us. She laughs until she has to press the back of her hand to her mouth, shoulders shaking.
“You could probably pull it off,” she gasps, “but I’m begging you not to. As the person who has to look at you every single day, please don’t do that to my eyes.”
“Why not?” I pretend to be insulted. “You like it well enough on that foreman that wants to take you out.”
She nudges my shoulder with her foot. “No mullet, Walker. Promise me.”
I reach up and catch her ankle.
Our eyes lock as my thumb moves in a slow stroke along her delicate ankle bone there.
She doesn't pull away.
So I do it again. And again. A slow, light caress, back and forth, my thumb tracing the same path each time, unhurried, like we've got all night.
“I promise, darlin,’” I murmur.
The silence after that feels thick the way good things do. Richer. More depth to it.
She's leaning on the ledge. I’m holding her ankle to my shoulder, close enough that I could turn my head and press my mouth to the inside of her leg.
I don't. But I think about it.
“Walker.”
“Mm.”
“How long has it been?” A pause. “Since you've been with someone.”
Her question startles me. Maybe the whiskey’s loosening her tongue too.
I consider deflecting. But hell, why start now? Too much truth has come out already tonight, for both of us.
“Three years,” I say. “Give or take.”
It only started feeling like an eternity since she came into my life.
“Since before the divorce, even?” she asks.
“Since around the time things went bad. Which was a while before the divorce was final.” I look up at the stars. “After, there was learning to be a single dad. And the move. And the ranch.” I pause. “And I just didn’t… I didn't want to, before.”
“Before what?” she asks. Barely above a whisper.
Before you, of course. Not that I say it. But from the way her breath catches, the way her eyes search mine, she knows.
My thumb makes one more slow stroke along her ankle, and I hear her breathing change.
She pushes off the ledge and comes towards me.
Her legs wrap around my body as her hands land on my shoulders. Her eyes are all blue fire in the swimming pool light. Her skin is soft and her body is warm and lush beneath my hands.
“Three years is a long time to be lonely,” she murmurs.
It’s been a long time since I’ve held a woman. And this one, the one I want more than anything I can ever remember wanting in my entire life…
Fuck, she feels so good, wrapped around me like this. It would take hardly anything. Just tug her panties to the side and I could slide right inside her. Make her mine.
“Yeah,” I say. “Long damn time.”
She's still wrapped around me, legs hooked at my back, and I can feel every inch of her against every inch of me. The water isn't cold enough to put out the fire inside me. Nothing is.
Her thighs tighten around me under the water and I have to stop myself from gripping her hips and grinding her against my rock-hard cock.
I rest my hands on her waist instead, fingers flexing with the effort it takes to keep my touch light.
Her lips nearly brush my ear as she leans in. “I’ve been lonely too. Sometimes I just want someone to hold me. Kiss me. Touch me.”
Let me be that man.
The words claw up my throat and I have to literally bite my tongue to keep them from spilling out.
“You deserve that,” I say instead.
Her eyes drift to my mouth.
“I've waited this long,” she says. “I want it to matter, you know? I want it to mean something. I want it to be with someone I… someone I trust, at least. Trust to care about me. Trust to make me feel good.”
Her hands have drifted from my chest up to my shoulders, and her fingers curl in, like she's steadying herself. Or maybe like she doesn't want me to go anywhere.
She bites her lip and looks at me with those big blue eyes I could drown in.
“Someone,” she says, “who already knows me.”
The space between our lips is nothing. An inch. Maybe less. I can feel the warmth of her breath. See the water glittering on her eyelashes.
Her eyes are on my mouth too.
I could close this distance. Make every year she waited worth it.
I summon every reserve of willpower I have and force myself to say, “That’s the whiskey talking, darlin.’”
“Maybe,” she whispers. “But that’s what I want.”
She’s killing me. I don’t know if any man has died of longing before, but I could be the first.
“If it were me who took your cherry…” I start, voice barely more than a rasp.
Fuck. I shouldn't even be thinking it.
But I am. I’m thinking about it in vivid, tortuous detail.
“If it were me, I’d kiss you through it,” I murmur.
I let my mouth find the curve of her neck. Not a kiss. Just my lips dragging slow along her skin, feeling her pulse jump under my mouth. “I'd take my sweet time.”
She makes a soft sound and tips her head back slightly, giving me more. I take it. My mouth trails down to her collarbone, her shoulder, tasting salt and summer skin.
“I'd put my hands all over your curves.” My palms slide from her waist down over the flare of her hips, squeezing once, firm. “My mouth too.”
I should stop there. Should keep it safe.
My hands keep moving. Cup her ass through the wet lace and pull her hard against me. Hard enough that there's no pretending anymore, no question about what she's doing to me. She gasps at the contact, hips rocking forward against my cock, and, fuck, nothing has ever felt better.