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“I was more inclined to a god on Mount Olympus,” he said, and she shot him a dubious look over her shoulder. A look that sent arrows through his body. His heart.
“You were such a nerd,” she groused.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged out of the backpack and opened it up, pulling out a blanket and some food. He wished he had wine, but he’d have to make do with two bottles of water. “Pretending to be a god makes sense for a kid who felt like he had no control in his life.”
“Listen to you,” she said. “All Oprah about your childhood.”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far, but…you were right. I’m never going to have a real relationship with anyone if I kept pushing them away or leaving them.”
The atmosphere on the roof changed and he could feel her anxiety, see it in the set of her shoulders under that red sweatshirt.
It was now or never, and as much as he wished he had more than an apple in his nervous stomach, as intricate a seduction as he’d planned, he knew he couldn’t let this moment go by. He’d let too many moments go by, blind and dumb to them.
“I’m coming back to the ranch,” he said. “After the meeting with the university, I’m coming back.”
She hung her head and his heart ached for her, it really did, but he wasn’t going to be pushed around by her fears anymore.
“It’s my home, Mia.”
“For how long?” she asked.
“For as long as you’ll have me.” These last few days with his father had started to unravel the mess of his childhood.
The things he’d thought were real—that his father didn’t love him, that his mother’s hate and rage were somehow his fault—he knew now were false.
Except for Mia. Mia had always been real. Mia was joy in a world of cold science.
“I love you,” he said, and she jerked as if he’d shot her.
But she didn’t turn.
“I lived my whole life in little compartments,” he said, keeping his distance, knowing if he touched her she’d find a way to run. So he stood back and hoped his words would do the job. “I had work. I had the past. I had you. And I kept everything separate. Simple. I didn’t think about the past or you when I thought about work, and I let work take over my whole life.”
“Because it was easier,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed, watching her for clues. But she was unreadable. And he wanted to feel hope, joy even, that he’d told her how he felt. That he’d pushed away some of the chains of his past, but her stoicism wouldn’t allow it.
Panic started a drumbeat in his head.
“But I want it all,” he said, pushing on anyway. “I want a full life. A real life. I want you and my work to occupy the same place. To co-exist.”
“How is that going to work if your work is all over the world?”
“I don’t know what my work is going to be, Mia. Maybe I’ll stay here and fix irrigation systems.”
She scoffed. “Like that will make you happy.”
“You make me happy,” he said, and then, because he couldn’t not touch her any longer, he curled his hand over her shoulder, feeling the heat and the bone and muscle that made up Mia’s body. But he felt none of her heart. None of her love.
She was closed off to him.
“You don’t believe me,” he said, and it wasn’t a question. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” he said. “I’m sorry I left. Trust me when I tell you I didn’t know what I was leaving behind. I didn’t know I was leaving the better part of myself, the laughter and the love. I didn’t know I was leaving behind my best friend and my family.”
She turned and stared up at him, dry-eyed and doubtful.
“I’ll prove it,” he said, grabbing hold of the challenge with both hands. He pulled off her hat and tossed it on the ground at their feet. Slowly and gently he untangled the ponytail from the nape of her neck. The breeze picked up her hair, blew it around her head. A lusty contradiction to the stone-cold look in her eye.
“You don’t scare me,” he whispered. She thrilled him. Excited him. And if his words didn’t get the job done, he had other ways to convince her.
Mia was a lamb headed to slaughter and she wouldn’t have had it any other way.
The kiss was a long time coming. He took his time, breathing whisper-thin words against her skin like love and home. Words that wound around her like a spell.
Don’t believe, she warned herself.
And then he kissed her and she couldn’t help it. This was Jack holding her. Jack, her husband, telling her he loved her. How could she not at least hope? How could she pretend to be unmoved?
