Chapter 12
With those six words, Sloan took Joanne’s entire history and turned it on its head. The past thirteen years had seemed like an inevitable course of events, every decision forcing her into another situation where she had no control over what would happen next.
She stared out her window as they drove into the dark campground, the winding road white with salt residue and flanked by snow-covered evergreens. They came to a small parking lot and Sloan got out to register, her eyes fixing on a fallen tree at the edge of the forest.
Once, she’d stood tall as those trees, believing in herself and the possibilities.
But she’d married David in a blind leap of desperation, needing an escape route from her home life and grabbing on to him like a life preserver in a storm.
There’d been nothing but emptiness after Sloan left, no hope for any improvement in the future.
At least with David, there’d been a chance.
She could see now, she should have been stronger, should have stood tall on her own instead of marrying him to escape. But David’s offer had played off Sloan’s rejection in her mind like the perfect cure for the hole in her heart. Life had taken away one man but had given her another.
How foolish she’d been.
Her eyes burned, but she held the tears at bay, refusing to bend under the weight of this revelation. Sloan had come back for her. He had loved her, after all.
The words were crushing, making her feel like she couldn’t breathe despite the air that filled her lungs and rushed out again. It was such a shame, a waste, an ironic twist of fate, and she wondered what terrible thing she must have done to deserve it.
She ached to hold on to him, to fall apart and let him shore her up like he used to, to have him tell her everything would be okay, to lean into his body and take strength from it.
But she couldn’t do it. That kind of weakness had knocked her life off course, the desire to be protected forever paramount over the desire to stand straight and tall.
She had to do better this time. Her life and her children’s lives were at stake. It was time to be brave, even if that meant being alone.
The driver’s door opened, the cold air blowing in as Sloan sat down.
“Only two other campers in the whole place. We’ve got half the lake to ourselves.
” He drove to a three-sided shed some fifty feet up the road, a lighted wreath gracing its peak and the inside stacked high with firewood, and got out again.
Her mind worked to pull up the date. December eighteenth, seven days until Christmas. She couldn’t even wrap her head around the idea that it was Christmastime.
“I don’t see why we have to stay here,” said April. “Who goes camping in December?”
Joanne forced a lightness into her tone she didn’t feel. “We have a Winnebago. It seemed like a good idea.”
“Not to me.”
Jo squeezed her eyes shut. “Let’s just make the best of it, okay?”
“Why are we even with this guy?”
“Who, Sloan?”
“No, the other strange man you hunted down then brought with us back to Chicago.”
Joanne turned around. “He’s helping us, and I, for one, am very glad he’s here.”
April bobbed her head. “Yeah, I could tell when you two were talking.”
So, that’s what the attitude was about. She’d overheard their conversation. The very last thing Jo wanted to do was talk about her love life with her eleven-year-old daughter, but apparently she needed to do it anyway. “Are you upset about something you overheard?”
April rolled her eyes and looked out her window. “Forget it.”
Sloan finished loading wood and they drove to their campsite. “I’m just going to level out the camper,” he said.
“Can I come?” asked Lucas, bounding up from the back of the RV.
“Sure thing, sport.”
Jo considered getting out, too, just to avoid a run-in with April, but didn’t act fast enough.
“So what was he, like, your boyfriend? This is the guy you told me about.”
Shit. There was no way around this mess. She needed to go straight through. “Yes.”
“Is he still?”
“Of course not.”
“But you wanted to marry him instead of Dad. Because that’s no big deal,” she added sarcastically. “I’m sure everybody’s mom married their second choice of a husband.”
She hesitated, unsure of exactly where this was going and suddenly feeling like she was walking through a minefield. “It’s complicated, April.”
“Doesn’t seem complicated to me. You had very strong feelings for him when you were young. I totally get that, because I’m young and I have strong feelings, too.”
“So, that’s what this is about. I was not eleven at the time, young lady. Sloan and I didn’t start dating until we were fifteen.”
“Which is, like, a whole thousand days older than I am, so a totally different situation. Right. I couldn’t possibly understand real feelings a thousand days before you did. Oh, wait! Yes, I could, because I’m not a little kid anymore.”
Joanne rolled her eyes. “I am so not up for this right now.”
“Well, I’m sorry if my timing isn’t convenient, Mother.”
The patronizing tone in her daughter’s voice had Jo spinning around and pointing her finger. “Look, me falling in love at fifteen is not the same thing as you professing your love to a complete stranger on Instagram!”
“He is not a stranger!” She held up her phone.
Jo grabbed the device. “Absolutely ridiculous.” She scrolled through the applications.
“Give that back!”
“Did you already install it? Who am I kidding, it was the first thing you did, right?” She shook her head, irritation with herself far greater than her annoyance with her child. She should have realized April would go right back to her conversation at the first opportunity.
There it was, the familiar icon winking back at her, and with a frustrated jab, she deleted it. “You just lost your phone.”
“Mom!”
Sloan pulled open his door. “All set.”
She kept yelling at April. “Clearly, you can’t be trusted. I’m so freaking angry right now.”
“What’s the matter?”
Jo hopped out of the camper, desperately needing to get away from her daughter before she exploded.
Lucas was arranging logs in the fire pit, Christmas music already playing on a small boom box, and she turned on Sloan.
“You realize it’s, like, thirty-five degrees out here? Isn’t it a little cold for a fire?”
“Almost forty.” He smiled. “You watched me load the firewood. What did you think I was going to do with it?”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
Lucas whined, “Can’t we please, Mom? Sloan says we can make s’mores.”
Just like camp! The boy was so excited, and some part of her resented that Sloan was mister fun and games, while she was the fun ender, afraid for their lives. “Fine. Sure. Whatever.”
Sloan touched her back, and she jerked away.
He furrowed his brow. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just go ahead and make your fire.” He crossed to Lucas and instructed him on how to stack the logs so the fire would get plenty of oxygen.
David would have made the fire himself or been such a perfectionist about how it should be done that the activity would barely have been fun for Lucas.
But Sloan had a way with the boy that clearly said he understood children, and the difference between him and the man she’d married was like salt pressed deep into a festering wound.
She turned away, needing space but unable to go back into the camper without another run-in with April. “I’m going for a walk.”
“Wait.” Sloan handed Lucas a lighter and showed him where to light the fire, earning the boy a pat on the back and a proud smile. “Great job, kid. Grab the marshmallows out of the back of the camper.”
Joanne barely resisted the urge to scream. Sloan jogged to her. “I’ll come with you.”
“I don’t want you to come with me. I want to be alone.”
“What happened? Did I miss something?”
She huffed. “April and I were fighting, then you’re out here with your father-of-the-year routine, and I’m about to lose my shit.”
“What? You’re mad at me? What did I do?”
“God, just leave me alone.”
“Lucas,” he called. “We’re going for a walk. Keep an eye on the fire.”
“What part of leave me alone did you not understand?”
He put his hand on her back and guided her away from their campsite. “If you’re pissed at me, I’d like to know why.”
“I told you why!”
“Because I’m being nice to your kids?”
“Yes. And the s’mores, and the fire-making lessons.”
“That makes no sense at all.”
“It makes perfect sense.” She swatted his hand off her back. “And stop touching me.”
It was her fight with April that had set her off, her insecurities as a parent that had really gotten her going. But how could she make him understand? She pushed the words past the knot that had appeared in her throat. “David would never do that.”
“Touch you?”
Heat crept into her cheeks. “No. The way you helped Lucas make a fire. He wouldn’t do that.” He said nothing, the steady rhythm of their footfalls the only sound. “He wasn’t good with the kids. He was easily frustrated, and when he got frustrated, he got mean.”
“To you, too?”
“Sometimes. Not like my dad did.”
“What happened in the camper just now?”
She blew out air. “Which part? The part where she overheard our conversation or the part where she installed Instagram on her new phone?”
He winced. “I thought that might happen.”
“It’s my own fault. I wasn’t watching her phone as much as I should. By the time I found the conversation, things had gone too far. They’re talking about meeting up. They call themselves boyfriend and girlfriend.”
A chill went through her and she instinctively moved closer to Sloan, her elbow brushing his as they walked. “Then I came outside, and you were running a Boy Scout meeting for my son, and I felt like a bad parent.”
“You’re not a bad parent.”
“I need you to do something for me.” She stopped walking and he faced her.
“Anything.”
“Don’t be nice to them, Sloan. It isn’t fair.” What she was asking might not be fair, either, but if she was going to make it through the next part of this journey, she needed to lay some ground rules. “They just lost their father, shitty though he may have been. I need you to back off.”
“How is it unfair to be kind to them?”
“It will just make it harder when you leave. Did you see the way Lucas was looking at you back there?”
“We were just making a fire.”
“No, you were creating a relationship with a vulnerable kid who’s so desperate for paternal affection I could cry.”
He lifted his hand and touched her cheek. “Jesus, Jo. Why the hell did you stay with this guy?”
She pulled back as if she’d been slapped. “I didn’t. We were separated just over a year.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“What difference does it make?” She turned away, walking in the opposite direction.
“Don’t walk away from me. Talk to me, Buckley.”
She spun around. “What do you want me to say? That I spent my entire adult life with a man I didn’t love?
That marrying him was the biggest mistake of my life?
That he was more like my father than I could ever have imagined?
Fine. I said it. Now stop rubbing my nose in it.
Stop asking me questions I don’t want to answer.
Stop asking me for details, and for God’s sake, don’t ask me why I stayed with him. You weren’t even there.”
“I should have been.”
She was breathing heavily, her bottom lip trembling.
They stared at each other in the dim light, a cold breeze blowing softly between them.
So much time, so many mistakes. But there was heat in his stare, and desire swirled to life in her belly.
It was as if, by admitting the truth to him and to herself, she’d knocked down the barrier she’d been fortifying against him.
Sloan.
She ached with a visceral need for this man and was struck by how different her desire for him had become over time.
She was a grown woman now. Experience, heartache, and loneliness had left their marks.
She understood passion in a way she hadn’t back then.
She longed to feel the weight of him between her hips, holding her down.
To taste the salt on his gleaming skin, to smell his spicy scent as he took control of her body.
He closed the distance between them, his hand slowly moving to grip the swell of her hip, and her breath hitched as blood rushed to her most sensitive places.
She wanted him to kiss her, but he didn’t move, those damn eyes fixed on hers.
She knew instinctively what he needed, and she lifted her hand to his chest, the puffy nylon of his jacket separating her from what she really wanted to touch.
Slowly, she slid her fingers to his warm neck, lightly trailing her nails up and into the softness of his hair.
His head came down and he kissed her, his mouth at once familiar and new, the taste of him exactly as she’d remembered. She pressed her chest against his as his arms came around her, holding her tightly in place as she opened her mouth to his.
I came back for you, Buckley.
Words couldn’t change the past, but they could soothe the wound left in its wake. All these years she’d thought he didn’t love her; now she was in his arms. She fitted herself more tightly against him, desire and need demanding more.
A growl came from deep in his chest, a primal sound she recognized from their youth, and her breath came fast and hard. He trailed kisses down the column of her neck and nuzzled her ear, a sensation she hadn’t felt since the last time they’d made love so long before.
She wanted all of this man, and she wanted him now. Her conscience nagged at her to think of the children, and she could have wept for the loss of freedom that came with motherhood in that instant.
Kisses would have to do.
She unzipped his coat and slipped her hands inside, the heat of his body on her hands like slipping beneath the covers of a lover’s bed. He did the same, their jackets open to each other and the sensitive flesh of her nipples raking over the hardness of his chest through their clothes.
He turned them around, a tree pressing into her back as he continued his assault on her good judgment. One hand slipped beneath her shirt to cup her breast through her bra, and she lifted her leg around him.
“Jesus, Jo,” he ground out against her, his hardness pressing into her heat. She reveled in the feel of him, the hem of her coat up high and the bark of the tree digging into her back.
“Mom?”
They jumped apart. Lucas stood some fifteen feet away, his brows crumpled together and an accusing stare shooting from his mother to Sloan and back again.