AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I crowd them out,” he continued explaining. “The bad guys. Someone who would take advantage of the city funds and allow his or her palm to be greased by those who want special treatment. If I’m in office, those guys aren’t.”
She’d never thought of it that way.
“Last year my sister Stefanie helped me organize a fund-raiser for adoptions for families who couldn’t conceive.” He tilted his head, a teasing spark in his eye. “Or can you also find something wrong with my supporting orphans, too?”
No, she really couldn’t. And that was the problem. She couldn’t vilify him, which meant liking him again. And liking him could lead to...
Nothing.
She would never allow her liking him to lead to anything more. The risk was too great.
“Look, we don’t have to make peace with what happened between us, Mimi,” he said, reading her mind, “but we do have to live together for an evening. Can we table the discussions revolving around the topics we argue about? Focus on the ones we agree upon?”
“Is there one?” She finished her wine and sent a longing look at the bottle, wrestling with the idea of sinking into the reprieve of a second glass.
“We agree on two topics so far. Pie. And wine.” He tipped the bottle over her glass and poured. She admired his strong fingers and tanned skin. How could a man’s hand be sexy?
Because it’s attached to the rest of him.
Right. Good point.
“I’m going to start a fire,” he said. “Sit up a while. The bedroom on the top floor is where I’m staying, but feel free to take your pick of the others.”
* * *
Chase left Miriam to her...whatever was going on with her, and finished stacking the firewood and kindling in the hearth.
She’d vanished down the hallway, declining his offer to carry her suitcase or show her around.
“I assume the bedrooms are the ones with beds,” she’d quipped.
Once the fire was crackling, he stayed where he was on the rug, kicked off his sneakers and reached for his wineglass. All the tableau was missing was a sleeping golden retriever sitting by his red-and-white-patterned socks.
Mimi had been gruff and short with him at the same time she’d been kind and hesitant. He could guess she would have preferred to come stomping in here and read him his rights, but she’d never been able to be truly cruel. He wondered if that’s how she thought he’d treated her back when they split. Cruelly.
Seemed crueler to him at the time to drag her away from her family and the lake town she loved and into a world of politics and oil—both of which she’d hated then and was clearly no fonder of now.
When he’d first spotted her on the video at the gate, he hadn’t believed his own eyes. And when she’d climbed from her truck while he stood in the frigid snow watching her advance, he’d made a decision then and there.
She wasn’t leaving his house without fully understanding where he’d stood all those years ago. She wasn’t the only one with an axe to bury.
He’d lied to her earlier when he said there were two topics they agreed upon. There was a third area where they’d excelled. In bed. Or, on the beach. In the car. He was equally sure they’d be able to navigate that particular act without fail now, and in a variety of locations.
Underneath her need to put him in his place, her high chin and straight shoulders, was the soft, warm woman who’d rested against his side. The giving, loving woman who’d opened up an entirely new world to him. Mimi wasn’t a hookup—she never had been.
And maybe that’d been the problem. They’d taken each other seriously in those stolen summer months. And when her roommate was out of town, he’d stayed the weekend, allowing himself to linger in the moments between Mimi’s deep, quiet breaths before the sun had come up. He’d stumbled into a rare and precious woman, and had never found a replica.
Yet it’d all been a fantasy. And like all fantasies, destined to end.
When it came time to take her home to Dallas to meet his family, she’d shrunk against him. Dallas wasn’t where Mimi belonged. She belonged somewhere surrounded by leaves and streams, not concrete and steel and glass.
By the time she’d met his parents and he’d felt the turgid chill coming off his mother, the fantasy had crumbled to dust. Not only did Mimi not belong in Dallas. She didn’t belong with him. And he’d have seen that clearly had he met her any time other than during the lakeside summer vacation. His head hadn’t been on straight and Mimi... God, Mimi. She’d been lovesick. It’d nearly killed him to do what was right for her and damn his own heart.
But he had.
He was twenty-six at the time and no more able to know who he wanted to spend forever with than what corner of politics he’d end up occupying. Hell, he’d had his sights on president of the United States at one point, an office he knew now he wouldn’t hold if he were the last qualified candidate on earth.
A door closing brought him back to the present before the faint sound of a shower running filled his mind’s eye with Mimi’s slim frame, lithe legs and pert, round breasts. The first time she’d untied the string on her bikini top and flashed him, he’d stared slack-jawed at her pale skin, lightly freckled from the sun, and known he’d do anything to have her.
