AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Sean stood at the corner of the tent and waited, filtering out the noises of the wedding guests behind him, the reggae music and the whooping and laughter. He was captured in a vision of Katie backlit by the sun, smiling. She kept throwing her arms around unfamiliar shoulders, laughing with strangers, bumping hips and brushing cheeks with women and men he’d never seen before. Her family. Her friends.
What had made Sean think he could take her away from these people? She had connections he’d never forged. Deeper roots, more extensive networks.
Some people were made to go through life pulling other people into their circles of light. Born with her energy, her outward focus, her inner beauty. Living loud and bold, stumbling sometimes but getting up again with a self-deprecating laugh.
Sean wasn’t one of them. But damn it, he wanted her anyway. Whatever good he was to her—his mind, his body, his appreciation—she could have it. He’d do whatever it took to deserve her.
When she returned to the tent with Carly, she held her dress above her calves and carried a pair of sandals in one hand. Her black dress clung tight, outlining the shape of her breasts, her small waist and narrow hips.
She must have seen him. There was no way for her not to have seen him. But she walked past him into the tent as if she hadn’t.
Chapter Forty-five
Rum. Food. Speeches. Katie worried the whole time she held the microphone that Sean would do something, make some grand gesture in the middle of her toast that would embarrass her. Or destroy her.
He didn’t, and her heart ached, and she understood that it was stupid enough to have wanted him to.
Go away, she thought.
While another voice inside her begged, Do something.
When she’d seen him standing along the edge of the seating area during the ceremony, she’d thought he was here for her. That he’d flown thousands of miles for her, desperate to fix what they’d broken.
She’d watched her brother marry the woman he loved, and the whole time, she’d been able to see Sean in her peripheral vision. The man she loved. The man she hadn’t been able to put away or forget about, despite her resolution in the office. Her chest hurt at the sight of him. Her knees hurt. Everything hurt and yearned and ached.
But he hadn’t approached her, hadn’t said a word. He was hanging around the fringes of the crowd.
He was working.
He’d come for the wedding. For her brother. To fulfill his promise to help out with the security, support Caleb on
this important day.
He hadn’t come for her.
The sun set, and the harsh planes of his face grew shadowed and mysterious in the rushlights that illuminated the reception tent. The guests drank to Caleb and Ellen’s happiness. Henry ate too many pastille candies off the tables and ran in frantic loops around the empty dance floor until he fell and hit his head and began to cry, and Ellen had to scoop him up to comfort him. Jamie leaned in toward Carly, whispering something in her ear that put a secretive smile on her lips.
Ellen and Caleb had their first dance, and then the bridal party joined them. Katie swayed back and forth on the small patch of floor the resort had plunked atop the sand with Caleb’s groomsman, an army friend named Rusty.
Rusty was flirting with her. He had an easy smile, but it seemed she’d lost her taste for easy men. It was almost a relief when Sean cut in long before it was polite and said, “Dance with m-me.”
His stony face. That forbidding mouth. He stood an inch or two taller than Rusty, but he had an intensity that made him seem much larger.
He’s not a safe harbor, she told her body. He’s the cliff face you crashed into.
But her body didn’t listen. There was nothing about Sean’s appearance that her body found frightening. Only the threat he posed to her scabby, traumatized heart.
“Do you want to?” Rusty asked.
“It’s fine. Thanks for the dance.”
In Sean’s arms, nothing felt familiar or safe. She was a mouse clutched in the hawk’s talons and lifted to a dizzying height. Any moment, he would drop her. Or eat her.
The song changed to an upbeat number, but Sean held her stiffly, guiding her in a shuffling circle to a rhythm that bore no relationship to the music or the mood of everyone around them. The soft fabric of her dress caught on his fingers and clung to his damp palms. He’d taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves. Heat radiated off him.
She tried not to soak it in. Tried not to admire the way he looked in suit pants and a cotton shirt, to admit she’d been sneaking glances at the trim shape of his hips and the breadth of his shoulders since she walked away from him, but it was as if his heat were melting her, incinerating her resolve and leaving only her body, which never had been able to resist him. When his lower hand shifted to splay across her lower back, there didn’t seem to be any room for pretense between them anymore.
Sweat beaded up along the bridge of her nose, and he brushed a knuckle along her cheekbone. “Katie,” he said. “K-katie.”
