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Her face fell. “He fell asleep? Should I leave?” The full moon was shining down on her, making her face look almost ethereal.
“No.” His response was almost immediate. “You should come in. He might wake up again.”
She rolled her lip between her teeth, nodding. “I would like to check on him, if that’s okay with you.” Aiden stepped aside, letting her pass him in the doorway. She brushed against him, and his body responded to the soft touch. Did she know she had this effect on him?
Nick was in the first bedroom on the left. She peered around the doorway into the gloomy space, lit only by a nightlight on the far corner. Aiden stopped behind her, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder. Her breathing was still rapid, as though she still hadn’t caught it yet. He could feel her lean back into him, her slight body pressed against his muscled torso. “I’m sorry if he’s been a pain,” she whispered. “He doesn’t normally have nightmares.”
“He’s not a pain,” Aiden whispered, his lips close to her ear. “I felt bad because I couldn’t console him. He wanted you.”
“He’ll be devastated if he can’t stay over again. He was so excited to spend ‘man time’ with you.”
“Why wouldn’t he stay over again?” Aiden frowned.
She turned to look at him, her body twisting against his. “I thought he might be too much for you. He doesn’t have a lot of sleepovers. Only with a few friends. I know kids aren’t easy, and you haven’t had much experience with them. Plus there’s the peanut allergy. That additional responsibility always puts people off.” She grimaced. “Not everybody has your patience.”
Aiden winced. “There’s only one way to get experience, and that’s by doing it. I like having him over. I like spending time with him. He’s family.”
Her face softened, the same way it always did when she spoke about her son. “He likes spending time with you, too.”
He could feel the muscles in his arm twitch. He wanted to hold her, to touch her the way he’d touched her on the boat. The sensation of her soft skin against the rough pads of his fingers had felt like heaven.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked her, his voice low and rough. “Maybe you could hang around for a bit to make sure he doesn’t wake up again? That’s if you have the time.”
“Coffee sounds great.” She followed him to the kitchen, where he filled up the coffee pot and pulled out white ceramic mugs he kept in the cupboard over the stove top. From the corner of his eye he could see her lean on the counter, her eyes hooded with worry. He wanted to smooth away the lines between her brows. She worried constantly about her son, he knew that much. Maybe it was time somebody took some of the burden off her.
He gestured for her to go through to the living room while the coffee pot spluttered away. By the time he’d poured the hot liquid into the mugs – followed by a dash of cream, the way she liked it – she was sitting on his cream leather sofa, her bare legs curled up beneath her. She was staring out of the window to the beach beyond, her eyes taking on a faraway look.
He slid the mugs onto the coffee table, sitting down next to her. Was he too close? It was hard to tell, especially when he never felt close enoug
h.
Aiden wasn’t sure when his interest in Brooke had gone from being purely friendly to wanting more since their reunion. Maybe it had never been about friendship. From the moment he’d seen her saving the dog it had been as though something inside him was switched back on. A long-neglected fire that had somehow sparked back into life. And now it was burning him from the inside out, and the only person who could stop it was her.
“I love this view,” she said, her voice soft, as she lifted the mug to her pink lips. “You must sit here and stare out of it all the time. It could never get boring.”
Aiden shifted in his seat, following her gaze. “I’d forgotten how beautiful the coastline is. Funny how being away for so long can dull things in your mind. Like a faded photograph.”
She took a sip from her cup. “Did you miss this town when you left?”
He felt his stomach tighten. It was hard to think about those days, let alone talk about them. “There were aspects that I missed, yes.” He looked at her over the rim of his coffee cup. Her eyes were trained on his, her lips pressed together. “But I was angry.”
“At my father?” she asked.
“Mostly, yeah. But at the whole town, too, even though it hadn’t done anything wrong. But growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, it gives you a chip on your shoulder, you know? Too many people look at you as if you’re worth less than the dirt on the soles of their feet.”
“I never looked at you like that.”
He tried to swallow down the lump in his throat. He never talked about this stuff. Never. Now he was breaking all the rules. “I know you didn’t. And I never blamed you, not for one minute. But if we’d stayed and your father had told everybody what he was threatening to, they all would have believed him. My mom did nothing wrong, but he was going to make her pay the price for our mistakes.”
Her eyes glistened. “I wish I’d known. I never would have let him do that to her. Or to you.”
He shook his head, feeling the fire light up again. “You wouldn’t have been able to stop him. Nobody could. He has this sense of entitlement that lets him mess up other peoples lives.”
“The way he messed up mine,” she whispered.
That stopped him in his tracks. He put his empty coffee cup down on the table, turning to face her. A lock of hair had fallen over her eyes. Without thinking, he brushed it from her face, tucking it behind her ear. “He did what he thought was best for you.”
“He sent you away,” she said, her voice strained. “He lied to me, he hurt me. If it hadn’t been for him…” She squeezed her eyes closed for a moment. “God, I won’t go down this path. Not again.”
