But even as practicalities stopped him cold, he knew they weren’t the real reason why he wasn’t going to pull Lori down to the crude wood floor and take her. And it wasn’t because he didn’t want her, either. Lord, he couldn’t ever remember wanting to make love to a woman more, had never needed to know this badly what it would feel like to sink into her.
All these years in California he’d made sure to keep to himself, to feed a community without ever connecting with anyone beyond the food he grew for them. He couldn’t allow himself to fall in love again, refused to let anyone touch his heart, his soul, when he knew he needed to keep them both locked up and punished for the way his wife had died.
But even as Grayson reminded himself of all the reasons he couldn’t permit himself to feel anything for Lori, he couldn’t stop thinking about
the moment she had finally stilled in his arms after her climax.
He’d felt every inch of her softness in his arms...and every bit of her vulnerability.
She acted so tough, put on that sassy act at every turn. But he’d seen the flashes of pain in her when she didn’t think he was looking, simply because he couldn’t look away. It was why he’d let her stay when he thought she’d be next to useless as a farmhand.
Because he’d recognized in her the need to heal that had been in himself three years ago when he’d found the farm.
And yet, even though he’d lived with her for nearly a week, and even though she’d just come apart in his arms and it had been one of the most beautiful things he’d ever experienced in thirty-five years, he still didn’t know a damn thing about why she was on the farm.
Or what she was hiding from.
Grayson knew what he needed to do. He needed to push her away; needed to lash out hard enough that she couldn’t possibly stay; needed to find a way to live with himself for adding more pain to her eyes, more tears on her pillow. He needed a way to forget that he had begun to respect her for turning out to be much stronger than he’d initially given her credit for, filled with a determination that couldn’t help but impress him.
And, most of all, he needed to remember that the last time he’d let himself fall for a woman, he’d ended up losing her.
Grayson couldn’t repeat that. Ever.
Lori’s fingers were moving to his belt buckle when he removed his hands from her and forced himself to take a step back as he said, “This never should have happened.”
Chapter Twelve
Five words were all it took for Lori to feel as if she’d just stepped out into the cold, hard rain, a complete one-eighty from the bliss Grayson had just given her, immediately making everything that had warmed freeze up again.
She knew he was right, that they shouldn’t be doing this, but it didn’t stop his abrupt rejection from hurting. Hurting like crazy, actually, as though his words had run a sharp grater across her already raw insides.
Lori bent down to reach for her clothes, but they were so wet she could barely peel them apart, let alone shove them on so that she could get away from a man she didn’t understand. A man she shouldn’t want to understand when he pulled her into him one second, and shoved her away the next.
She’d been there. She’d done that.
Never again—wasn’t that what she’d vowed?
Oh, how she’d loved being naked in Grayson’s arms, but now that he’d pushed her away, she hated her nakedness. She felt powerless, as if he could see all the way through her when he’d put every single one of his guards back up.
A sob rose as she tried to get her stupid clothes to come unstuck from each other, and she wasn’t quick enough at swallowing it down. It didn’t help when Grayson handed her a blanket from the couch.
“Wrap this around yourself.”
Why did he have to choose that moment to be kind? If he’d been gruff like he usually was, she could have stopped any tears from falling...but now all she could do was take the blanket from him and turn away to move closer to the fire as she wrapped it around herself, hoping he hadn’t seen them. Her years of dance training were what made it possible for her to hold her proud, straight stance even as another tear fell.
“Lori—”
She could hear the regret in the way he said her name and she hated it. Hated that he felt sorry for her for wanting him the way she did.
“Don’t.” The word came out sharply. “We don’t need to talk about what happened. We can just chalk it up to an accident.”
She assumed he was silent because he agreed with her. But she could feel his gaze on her, feel the heat of it burning even hotter than the fire.
Lori Sullivan had always known exactly what she wanted, and she’d trusted herself to follow her heart every day of her life. But now that she’d had to face up to the mistakes she’d made in trusting her ex when she definitely shouldn’t have, she hated that she couldn’t trust what she felt with Grayson, either.
She stared into the fire and watched the flames leap in no pattern whatsoever. But she’d followed the same pattern her entire adult life: She’d fallen for men who promised everything, then after she’d given herself to them, no holds barred, each and every one of them had taken their promises back.
She told herself it shouldn’t matter that Grayson had just hurt her, too.
But it did.
He moved to her side, but instead of looking at the fire, he stared directly at her profile. “It wasn’t an accident.”
She was shocked enough that she turned her tear-streaked face to him without remembering to wipe it clean first.
A surprising tenderness—along with obvious regret—flashed in his eyes at the sight of her tears, and she might have been able to write it off as just another accident on his part if he hadn’t followed it up by brushing one thumb across her cheek to wipe the wetness away.
“No,” she finally agreed, “it wasn’t.” But that didn’t change anything. “So,” she said in an effort to change the subject as she turned her face away to swipe at her damp cheeks with the back of her hand, “do you have any board games in here that we could play while we wait out the storm?”
“Why are you here, Lori?”
What was he doing? Why wasn’t he letting them move into shallow waters again? Didn’t he realize how much easier it would be?
Luckily for him, she was a master at acting like everything was okay when it wasn’t.
Lori started to move away from him as she asked, “Or maybe a deck of cards?”
But he was quicker than she was, and his hand came around her wrist before she could get far enough away from him to take a full breath. “I want to know why you came here with the want ad in your fist when you’d clearly never set foot on a farm a day in your life.”
She couldn’t think straight when he was touching her. All she could do was crave the feeling of those rough, calloused fingers moving across her breasts again, over her hips, between her legs. Her breath was already coming faster when he dropped her wrist as though she’d turned into one of the flames in the fireplace.
“I told you already. It looked like fun.”
“Bullshit.”
When his gaze didn’t waver from her face, she felt herself begin to crumble. “The past few weeks...” God, was her voice really breaking? She took a deep breath that shook far more than she wanted it to. She hated feeling sorry for herself so much that she forced the corners of her lips up into what she hoped looked at least a little like a smile. “They weren’t good.”
He didn’t smile back. “Why?”
“Seriously?” The anger she felt wasn’t entirely directed at Grayson. Yes, he’d hurt her by pushing her away a few minutes ago, but it was Victor she was thinking of as she said, “You’ve made me come and now you suddenly think I owe you my life story?”
He ran one hand through his wet hair, looking as though he was at war with himself. Well, she knew exactly how that felt. Finally, he said, “I know this isn’t your world, Lori. What is?”
He was right—endless pastures and cows and pigs weren’t any part of her world. And yet, she was falling for it all the same.
Just as she was falling for him.
“I’m a dancer.”
Grayson’s dark gaze ran the length of her covered in her blanket, then back up to her face. “Of course you are. I had already guessed it from the way you move.”
She should have been surprised to hear him admit that he’d watched her move, that he’d paid any attention to her at all.
But she wasn’t.
“Why aren’t you dancing?”
She turned away from him, then, and this time he let her go. It hurt to think of dancing. Of not dancing. Her whole life, it had been her cornerstone. The one thing she could count on.
Lost.
She was utterly lost without dance at her center. If she could have done anything else, she wouldn’t have walked away from it. But her lifelong, soul-deep love for dancing had left her without a word of warning. Leaving a big, black hole inside of her that she couldn’t figure out how to fill back up.
“I don’t want to dance anymore.”
“You lie as badly as you drive.”
God, he was like a dog with a bone, and she spun around to face him. “Why do you care if I’m telling the truth about wanting to dance again, or not? You don’t want me on your farm. You don’t want to have sex with me. Nothing would make you happier than my packing up my things after the storm breaks and getting the hell out of your hair.”
He didn’t contradict her. She didn’t expect him to. Rejoicing was closer to what he’d do the day she threw her suitcase into the trunk of her rental car and drove down his long driveway back to the city.
“You can’t leave Mo.” She couldn’t read his expression as he said, “Not yet.”
“Sweetpea?” She was trying to figure out where that had come from. “Why are you talking about your cat?”
“You’ve made her depend on you. You feed her from your hand, for God’s sake.”
It was a ridiculous reason for her to stay, especially when he could easily feed his cat by hand if she left.
Was it his way of saying he wanted her to stay? She tucked the blanket more tightly around her and picked up her wet clothes, hanging them over the back of a chair near the fire. Whatever his reason, between the gentleness of his touch on her cheek as he’d wiped away her tears and his obvious concern for his cat, she suddenly felt safe enough to finally tell him a little bit of what had happened to her in Chicago.
“I was in a relationship for the past couple of years. A rotten one that everyone I knew kept telling me to get out of, but I didn’t listen until I found him in bed with a dancer I had personally hired.” She sighed at her own stupidity. “Well, it’s over now, and I needed a break from everything. From dancing. From my life.” She couldn’t stop herself from adding, “And especially from men.” Because how could she have known that when she grabbed the want ad at the General Store she was going to be applying to work for a modern-day cowboy who ran a fabulous CSA and could have made serious dough modeling for a high-end underwear ad?
Grayson didn’t reply for a long while, and when she finally looked at him, she expected to see disinterest. Or pity, maybe.
But not disdain. And disgust.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You broke up with your boyfriend? That’s what sent you running away from your real life? That’s why you stopped dancing?”
Whoa.
What was going on here?
And why did having him look at her like that hurt so badly? Even worse now that she’d—stupidly—let him touch her.
“He told me he loved me, he said he couldn’t live without me, but I found out he was only using me to dance his way up the ladder. I also found out, too late, that he stole jobs that should have been mine, and did whatever he could to undermine the ones he couldn’t get. He told lies to my face, then lied about me behind my back.” It exhausted her to say it all out loud. And made her furious all over again. “How can I keep dancing when I can’t even remember anymore why I love it?”
She hated what a fool she’d been, that she’d been so blind to what was happening when everyone else had seen it. How desperately she’d wanted to be loved, so desperate that she hadn’t put a stop to Victor’s emotional abuse until it had sucked the will to dance—and to love—from her.
But she could see that nothing she said made any difference to Grayson. “You think I’m a big crybaby, don’t you? That I’m just here to hide from everything and lick my wounds?” She took a step toward him and poked him in the chest. “So what if I am? What makes you the judge and jury for what counts as real pain?”
He grabbed her hand hard enough that she would have cried out if the fury on his face hadn’t stolen her breath away before she could make a sound.
“My wife died in a car crash. Three years ago. It was our tenth wedding anniversary.”
“Grayson.”
He let her hand go and cursed. “The storm is letting up. We need to get back to the farm to make sure the rest of the animals are okay.”
Her own pain instantly forgotten in the wake of Grayson’s confession, Lori desperately wanted to go to him. She wanted to put her arms around him and console him for the pain he’d suffered. And, most of all, she wanted him to trust her enough to bare his soul to her and let her help him finally heal.
“I’m sorry,” she told him over the sound of the crackling fire. “So sorry for what you’ve been through. And for what I just said.”
His face was granite when he turned back to her. “It was three years ago. I’m over it now.” His lie was a thousand times worse than her earlier one had been, about thinking that being a farmhand would be fun. “I’ll go get the horse ready to take us back.”
He was gone before she could reach for him, before she could say anything else. But so much was clear now. The way he’d pushed her away at every turn. The solitude he’d chosen despite the great community.
He was right, his pain was so much worse than hers—and yet, whether he wanted to see it or not, they were kindred spirits despite themselves. Because she’d made the very same vow not to love again and risk another painful loss.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t find a way to help him...