Grounded By You (8 page)

“This reminds me of the canopy of trees over the highway on the way into Bleckerville,” he said. “Every fall it’s an amazing display of color.”

Millie nodded. “When I was little, before my dad seemed to have every excuse under the sun not to spend time with the family, we would drive up the coast during the weekends in September to watch the leaves turn. It was so silly, but I remember being in the backseat playing games with Josh and my parents talking quietly up front. Dad was never impatient with us, even when we’d argue. We’d stop at the same small restaurant and have homemade apple pie, and sometimes we’d even rent a cabin and Dad would build a bonfire out back at night.”

“That sounds like a nice memory,” Sam said. He looked at her with that unreadable expression. “Not something that I would expect you to say at all.”

Millie crossed her arms. “My Dad didn’t grow up with a lot of money, and that was before his company really took off. Before my mom turned into a plastic Barbie doll
who only cared about what other people thought of her. It’s one of my favorite memories of when I was a kid because that was a rare occurrence by the time I was like eight or nine.”

Sam reached out, and his fingers slid down Millie’s arm. “I get it,” he said softly. Then he pointed over her shoulder. “What about that one?”

Millie followed the path of his finger. That painting was much darker, and she felt an old echo of pain in her chest. It was a solitary girl standing on the edge of a vast ocean in the moonlight. The girl was featureless, and although the water at her feet was calm, there was something slightly menacing about the shadows from the corners of the canvas that surrounded her.

“That’s not a memory,” she said.

She felt Sam’s presence behind her as he moved closer. “What is it then?”

If it were anyone other Sam asking, she would have made something up or laughed it off. She would have pretended that the image in the painting didn’t mean anything at all.

“It was a representation of how I felt at that moment in time when I painted it. Lost. Alone. Like the whole world moved and swirled around me, but I was standing still. It was as if somewhere along the way my path disappeared and someone had hidden it away from me. In order to move forward, I knew that I would have to take a step into the great unknown and risk that it would swallow me whole.”

She remembered those dark days. It encompassed the weeks after she came back from summer break. Her thoughts and emotions were a whirl of confusion and pain. She couldn’t believe that she was capable of leaving someone that she cared about the way that she had left Sam. She didn’t think she’d ever forgive herself for that.

Yet he was there beside her now, looking down at her with concern and compassion in his eyes. She didn’t feel as if she deserved it.

She choked back a sob and then she found herself in Sam’s arms. It was as if the well of emotions that she had been holding inside overflowed, and the tears fell unbidden. She cried for the little girl who learned that in order to survive in the new world, she had to grow a thick skin. She cried for the fact that she never let anyone get close to her, and then when someone finally did, she left him behind without a backward glance. She was twenty-three years old, and she cried because she knew she still had so much more to learn about life and love, and she was afraid she’d already lost that chance.

Sam said nothing. He stroked her hair and let her cry it out. After what seemed like hours, there was nothing more to give. She turned her face up toward him and met his eyes.

“I can’t explain why I acted the way I did at the end of last summer. It won’t make any sense, and it won’t make it better or change what happened,” she whispered. She was afraid then that he was going to tell her to go to hell. That his reappearance in her life had been just a way of him finding the right way to strike back at her for being such a bitch. “It was wrong, and I’m sorry. But what I’m really sorry for is that I didn’t say goodbye.”

Instead, he sighed, and one of his hands came up to wipe the tears on her cheek away. “I am sorry too, Millie. There were a lot of things that were left unsaid between us. I figured you knew that, and maybe wanted to save me from embarrassing myself. I kept thinking that I did something to push you away.”

She bit her lower lip, uncertain what to say next. She saw that his eyes drifted down to her mouth as she did it, and her heart sped up. Millie had been with her fair share of men, but this was different. There was something strangely intimate about that moment that she had never remembered feeling with a man before. When Sam looked at her, she knew that he saw her for who she was, not just some pretty face, or a person who carried the St. John name. She appreciated that more than she could ever tell him.

Millie reached a hesitant hand up and brushed a stray piece of hair off of his forehead. When he turned his cheek into her hand and closed his eyes, she knew that everything she thought was happening the previous summer was real. A year ago, she ran from those feelings because she was too scared to deal with them. Now, she was afraid that if she did run away, she’d regret it the rest of her life.

His lips pressed gently against the palm of her hand sending a tiny chill down her spine. Then his eyes opened, and his gaze blazed down on her. Goosebumps broke out across her arms as she read the emotions that she saw there. Desire. Passion.
Maybe something more.

His arm pulled her closer to him, and she could feel the heat from his body through her clothes. Her breath hitched as his fingers swept down her cheek and traced the outline of her lips.

“You had a lip gloss that you’d wear on the nights when you’d help me in the dining room. It smelled like peaches and mangos, and it made your lips shine in the candlelight. I noticed them every time you’d smile at me,” Sam said. His voice was low and husky. “I must have wondered a million times what it would be like to kiss them. I watched you hoping that one day, you’d look at me in a way that told me you wanted me to kiss you.”

Millie flushed at Sam’s words. She tried to look away, but Sam’s hand cupped her chin and brought her eyes back to his. “If I didn’t know any
better, I’d say that you want me to kiss you right now.”

Her breath became shallower at the intensity of his tone. She understood what he was asking and why he was asking. She was the one who ran away from him. She was the one who rejected him and everything that he had given her over the course of the summer. Sam wasn’t a taker, and she always knew that.

He was asking her permission to take this though.

She slid her arms up around his neck. “I’ll go find the lip gloss if you want,” she said with a shy grin. When Sam’s head lowered, his lips claimed her
s with a low growl, and the rest of Millie’s thoughts were swept away.

When Sam decided to take refuge at Millie’s apartment, he never imagined that he would find himself with Millie in his arms and she would willingly be offering her lips to him. It seemed like a dream, and if it was, he didn’t want to wake from it anytime soon.

There was something vulnerable about her as she told him about her work. It was as if she laid herself bare in front of him, and he never felt as close to her as he did in those moments. When she began to cry, he didn’t hesitate to comfort her. Then her apology was like a salve on a wound that had refused to heal. Something new grew up between them. That’s what gave him the courage to touch her in a way that he had only imagined.

When she responded to him, the thread that held him back all that time was finally cut, and he didn’t hesitate to act. Her lips were soft and they met his with a fervor that he thought matched his own. He traced the ridge of her mouth where his fingers had so recently been. His lips parted slightly, and his tongue darted inside to find hers waiting. He heard a small sigh in the back of her throat.

His hand swept up her back and into her long hair. He gripped the base of her neck and pulled her closer. He felt like a man drowning. He couldn’t get enough of the taste of her and every caress, every dance of their tongues made him want her more. He felt her body pressing up against him. His other hand melted down her side to rest on her hip.

Sam was sure that she felt his body’s immediate reaction to her, but she didn’t shy away from him. In fact, her fingers twirled through his hair and seemed intent on drawing him closer. He was so engrossed in exploring her mouth that at first the jangling noise didn’t register in his mind.

Millie groaned and pulled away from him turning her head toward the kitchen counter. Sam followed her gaze and saw that her phone rested there.

“That’s the ring tone I gave my dad’s number,” she said. She sounded out of breath, and Sam noted with slight satisfaction that her lips were swollen. He was eager to claim them again.

She laughed and slid out of his grasp. “Down, boy,” she quipped. “Give me a minute.”

Sam’s heart raced at the sultry look she gave him. His fingers twitched to touch her in all the places that he had only imagined in his mind. She brought her fingers up and gave him the “
Shhh” signal as she grabbed the phone.

“Hello,” she said. He chuckled at the mock
officialness of her tone. “Oh, yes.”

He watched the light in her eyes falter before it died out completely. “Right now? I’m a little… No. Of course, I don’t expect you to rearrange your schedule. Twenty minutes. Okay, I’ll see you then.” She put the phone down, and he saw that she was biting her lower lip again. The moment was clearly over.

“What’s wrong?”

“My dad’s on his way over. He wants to talk about when I’m going to be starting my new job.”

“You haven’t told him yet?” Sam’s eyebrows rose.

Millie sighed. “It’s complicated, Sam. It’s a delicate thing to tell a man like my father that I don’t want to take over the company that he spent his entire life building.”

There were so many questions that Sam had for her, but he knew that it wasn’t the time to ask. Instead, he moved in front of her and then gently kissed her lips again. It was amazing to him that not only didn’t she push him away, but she seemed almost as eager as he was for the contact. Then he pushed her hair away from her face and cupped her chin again. “You can explain it to me later. I’ll help you put these canvases up and then I’ll get out of your hair before he gets here.”

The look of gratitude on her face almost made up for the fact that he was going to have to leave her. He looked around the room again at all of the vibrant canvases.
They were Millie to a tee. Then he pointed at three of them, the two he had already mentioned and then a third that showed a sunset over an old wooden bridge. He had no idea how she had captured the scene so perfectly, but he knew the spot like he knew the back of his hand.

“Those three. And I’m sure if you can’t get the gallery owner to give you a show, the city of Bleckerville would buy that painting in a second. I’d be able to recognize
Knollwood Bridge anywhere. There is a lot of joy in that picture, and it reminds me of last summer.”

“Me too,” Millie said quietly.

Sam helped her move the canvases into a closet in the back of the apartment. As she closed the door and hid them from view, she leaned against the door with a frown. “I hate hiding this part of me.”

Placing a hand on her shoulder, he squeezed gently. “Hopefully you won’t have to do that much longer.” He wanted to ask her if she was going to try to hide what had just happened between them too, but he realized that it wasn’t the right time for that conversation.

Millie glanced at her watch. “I hate to do this, but he’s going to be here any minute.”

“You don’t want to be discovered cavorting with the movie star?” Although Sam was joking, there was a tiny undercurrent there that he realized he wasn’t entirely joking. He understood that Millie had things to talk about with her father, but he couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t another reason that Millie didn’t want them in the same room together.

Millie told him quite a bit about James St. John during their summer together. In fact, one reason that she decided to spend the summer at the Willoughby was to avoid her father’s latest choice in a string of men that he routinely put in front of her like some kind of twisted love parade. When she described them, Sam couldn’t help but hear the distinct differences between those guys and himself.

Ivy-leagued educated. Important jobs.
Lots and lots of money from well-to-do families. Exactly the kind of guys that Sam would envision Millie with as well. He never thought that he stood a chance with a girl like her.

They reached the door of her apartment, and Millie reached up and touched his face. “What’s that frown for? What are you thinking about?”

Sam shook his head, refusing to say what was really on his mind. “Nothing. Just wondering when I’m going to see you again.”

“I really have to get my studio organized. I’m itching to get back to work. Then I’ve got this thing that my dad is making me go to tomorrow night,” she said. “This weekend?”

He remembered that he had his own faux date the following night, and a string of media interviews and photo shoots between now and then. It was as if the studio was trying to cram six months worth of publicity into just a few weeks. He remembered what Victoria said about the studio wanting to release the movie for the holidays, and felt a bit queasy.