Chapter 21 #2
“Seduce you?” He laughed, bitter. “Yeah. When she found out you were back, she got it into her head that I’d be less of a
pain in the ass if I came over here and ‘had some fun for once.’ Also her words. Definitely not mine.”
She opened her mouth, fumbled for her voice, and tried again. “What do you mean, ‘for once’?”
He kept his face aimed at the fire, but a blush burned high on his cheeks. “Yeah. So. I don’t know why I can’t keep my mouth
shut around you.”
“What do you mean, ‘for once,’ Nick?”
He wouldn’t look at her.
Suspicion laced around her rib cage and pulled tight. “You must have someone,” she ventured. “Right?”
He cleared his throat, then dragged a hand down his face. “I mean, not really. No. Not in a long time.”
A weight hardened in her gut. “So, wait. Exactly how long has it been since you’ve . . .”
“What?” He finally looked at her, cutting a glance that sliced her to the bone. “Had sex? Made love?”
She flushed. “Yes.”
“Well, which one? They’re different. If you’re asking how long it’s been since I’ve had sex, the answer is six incredibly
long and lonely years. And the last time I made love . . . well, that was right here. With you. And it was just the once.”
She stilled, her breath a nonsensical whirl. A dagger, poison-tipped with longing, slid into her heart. She . . . couldn’t
be hearing this right. “I don’t get it,” she stammered.
“I think I put it pretty plainly.”
“How could you go that long without being touched? How?”
The black of his eyes seemed, impossibly, to deepen, the air around him crackling with a heat more aggressive than the fire’s.
“What do you want me to say, Aubs? Do you actually want the truth? Do you want me to say I don’t want anyone’s hands on me
but yours? Do you want me to tell you my heart still stops beating when you’re around? You want to know that even though I
thought you were beautiful when we were kids, now you’re so fucking breathtaking that just looking at you hurts? Especially
when I get to see you like this?”
Oh, god, where had all her oxygen gone? “Like . . . this?”
“Yeah,” he continued, as if he hadn’t just reduced her to a chaotic whirl of disordered heartbeats. “Not that there’s anything
wrong with the power suit thing. But when you’re like this, in pajamas and no makeup, I see you for what you are.”
She searched his face while the world fell down around her. “And what am I?”
“A beautiful, incredible genius.” His voice thickened, like honey swirling through gravel. “Someone who’s going to save the
world. Someone who’s ten times the human I’ll ever be.”
Her lips parted. She couldn’t breathe. “Nick. That’s not true.”
“It is.”
“It’s not.” For all that his words had poured into her like rains sweeping across a desert, she needed him to see. She needed
to give back, to make him understand how singular he was. “You’re miles beyond what most people could ever hope to become.
You’re honorable. Pure-hearted. Generous to a fault. Not to mention one of the smartest people I know. The total package.”
“No.” He scoffed and scraped a fingernail across some invisible stain on his jeans. “I’m just some guy who makes steel and
reads a lot. I don’t save people’s lives, with or without math.”
“You do, though.” Fire ran rampant in her bloodstream. “You saved Paige’s life. You know that, right? That first day out at
the farm, before I realized she was yours, I couldn’t get over how much she adored her dad, how much she worshipped him. And
when I found out it was you . . . It took my breath away.”
“What? Why?”
Her palms throbbed, and she fought the urge to reach out. Oh, if she touched him, she wouldn’t be able to stop, not after
what he’d just said. “Because. Your dad gave you nothing, but you were stronger than that. Than him. You grew up and gave
everything you had to the luckiest little girl in the world, even though no one had ever shown you how, and Paige grew into
an incredible person because of it. And that’s real. That’s absolutely pure. So much more than me matching up kidney donors.”
Nick’s breath rushed out of him. He blinked, his eyes as bright as polished onyx. “Is that really how you see me? As . . .
a father? A good one?”
“Yes,” she breathed. “Absolutely yes. And looking at you hurts, too. It always has.”
He scrubbed his hands through his barely there hair and sniffed, long and hard. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Aubrey didn’t realize she’d leaned in until he scrambled away and went to the window. He leaned a palm against the wall and stared out through the sleet-slicked pane.
“What?” Her question came out half broken. “What is it?”
He breathed hard, the carven lines of his back heaving. “It’s you. This. It’s so fucking hard, Aubs. Being around you. Hearing
you say this shit to me.”
An ache rose in her throat. After a moment of indecision, she rose and went to him, reaching out. “Nick, I—”
He spun and seized her in one sudden motion, pressing her against the wall, hemming her in with his sheer size and himness. His hands skimmed down her sides until his thumbs seated themselves against her hipbones.
Her lungs emptied. Nick stared down, caging her in, so close she could taste the heat of his exhales. When her chest finally
inflated again, it filled with plume after plume of his searing scent.
“What’re you doing?” she whispered.
“Something incredibly fucking stupid. Something you should definitely tell me not to do.”
When she didn’t protest, his grip tightened. His chest rose and fell, his breath frantic in the silence.
Electric heat churned in her belly. Slowly, ever so slowly, she inched her trembling fingers upward until the tips grazed
his abdomen.
He hissed in a breath. “What’re you doing?”
“Touching you,” she whispered. “Someone should.”
“No,” he said, but he sounded like a man starved. “I’ve gone without for a long time.”
The sentiment hollowed her out. But he leaned closer—unconsciously, almost, as if his body were pleading with her without
his permission. Muscle quivered beneath her fingertips, a confession he refused to let cross his lips.
She answered it. She grew bolder, her hands roaming over his wet shirt to explore the planes of his chest. She traced the ridges of his neck and tunneled her fingers through the shorn dark silk of his hair.
When he released a shuddering exhale, she reached beneath his shirt to map his body.
She charted the divots along his ribs, the hard lines of muscle that dived toward his jeans.
Then she worked her way back in the other direction, dragging her fingernails up his sides.
Down again. Up. Around. Everywhere she could reach.
Nick angled his face past hers and panted in her ear, hot and ragged. Something finally broke in him. He fisted her hair and
yanked her head to the side, then set his teeth against her throat.
Heat raced down her spine, splattering into a molten puddle at the bottom. His breath lashed fire across her skin.
“Someone should touch you,” she repeated, on a gasp. She murmured it over and over, chanted it to him, and the incantation
drowned out everything else, even the pop of sap-soaked firewood and the whisper of sleet on glass.
Because honestly, someone needed to appreciate the long, smooth columns of muscle flanking his spine, the way the groove of his abs hugged a dragged
finger. Someone should worship the solid expanse of his chest and the faint dusting of hair that charted a course down from
his belly button.
Nick rasped a sound of pure hunger against her throat, then pressed his lips to the tender flesh there. She gave herself up
to an endless shiver. She should stop this, but instinct thieved away rational thought. All she wanted to do was climb him,
bite him, lick, suck, grab . . .
His mouth withdrew abruptly, leaving her gasping and empty. She glanced down to find her fingers snared in his waistband.
She’d undone the button of his jeans and taken hold of his zipper.
He muttered a curse, then gripped her shoulders and lowered his forehead to hers. “Aubs, you can’t. If I stay here . . . If you . . . If we . . .”
A whimper slid from her lips. “What, you don’t want me?”
He made a broken sound. “Of course I do. Fuck, are you kidding? You’re what I want most. I’d ruin myself ten times over just
to have you again. Even once. I’d break myself to pieces and thank you for it.”
Her voice nearly deserted her. “But?”
“You’re with someone,” he said, hollow. “And after what my dad did . . . I can’t. You know that. I can’t even be the other
half of someone else’s equation.”
Each word chipped a jagged piece from her soul. She had no idea how they’d gotten like this, pressed up against a wall together.
She only knew she wanted more.
Was that so wrong?
Maybe. She honestly didn’t know where the line was, with Gallant. A part of her had tied itself to his letters, but Nick’s
nearness awakened something, a force as everlasting as the one that bound her to the earth.
She would never, she realized, not feel this way.
Yet opening this door again would mean closing another she’d only just discovered. One that might lead to her best shot at
happiness, because she couldn’t stay in Henderson. She couldn’t give up her dream job, or walk away from her database project,
not even for Nick. If she did, she would wither. Slowly but surely, the light that had burned so brightly in New York would
fade to ashes.
“You’re right,” she whispered. She hated it, but he was right.
“I know.”
Still, he didn’t retreat. His hands found her hips again, pulling her flush against him. Want crackled under her skin like
a living thing.
“I need you to do something for me,” he finally said.
His pleading tone nearly broke her heart. “Anything.”
“Tell me that guy’s name. In New York. The one who stole your job.”
She tried to reassemble her composure. How could he be thinking of that right now? “What? Why’re you asking?”
“You know why.”
She hesitated, but only for a moment. “It’s . . . David. David Ballard.”
Nick repeated the name. “Thank you,” he said, then released her and stepped back.
An abyss opened within her as she sagged against the wall. Only the unguarded longing in his eyes kept her legs beneath her.
She memorized the hawklike planes of his face, the way his brows tapered to points, as if they’d been shaped, only she knew
they hadn’t, because they’d always looked that way. “Nick, I don’t—”
“I never fell out of love with you,” he said roughly. “I never will. But I can never leave Paige. And you can’t stay here.
I wouldn’t ask that of you even if I deserved to. What’s more, you have someone else, now. And the last thing I want to do
is screw that up.”
Just like that, he was gone, and the agony of his absence stole all the air from her lungs. The front door opened and closed.
Outside, an engine roared and faded.
Only when the truck’s rumble melted into the susurrus of falling sleet did she let herself slide down the wall.
Then she gathered her knees to her chest and sobbed.