Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (44 page)

But she was still talking, ferocious and relentless. “I kept thinking about Henry. How Henry told me I was too trusting. I thought that was why I couldn’t trust you. I felt like Henry had taken away the best part of me. The part that sees the best in people. And that was all I could focus on, how I couldn’t see the best in you, and it was Henry’s fault.”

“I don’t need you to say anything,” he said. “I don’t need you to promise anything or believe anything. I just—I’m just so glad you’re here. I’m so glad you came.”

But she didn’t respond, and his mouth got dry and his throat tight. She wouldn’t have come all this way, would she, only to dress him down? To turn and walk away?

“I kept banging my head against it. Why I couldn’t trust you. Why I couldn’t believe you. What was wrong with me. And then I got it. It had to do with this whole thing with my students.” She drew herself up to full height, and he realized he was seeing what she looked like when she talked to them from the front of a classroom. “ ‘If you listen to the wrong voices, it can be very hard to hear your own.’ I was trying to teach them about self-trust. But even after that, I didn’t totally get it. The problem had nothing to do with not seeing the best in you; it had to do with not trusting myself.
That’s
what Henry did. He stole my self-trust.”

Her hair was bright in the lobby lights, her eyes flashing, her hands moving wildly, her breasts rising and falling with her sped-up breathing. He still wanted to grab her, but he was pretty sure if he tried to, she’d bite him, and not in a good way.

“I should have stood up for myself that night at dinner with you. I should have told you,
Hey, cut me some slack, Miles, and don’t shut down on me
.”

“I shouldn’t have—”

“Because if I had, if I’d stood up for myself and made you look at me and listen to me, we would have both had time to think about it and figure out that it was normal for me to have some doubts in the situation you and I were in.”

“Nora—”

“For the record? I meant what I said. I don’t let anyone touch my phone. I don’t let my
mother
touch my phone.”

“I know,” he said. “I know you didn’t mean anything. I was just … so—”

“You were wound so tight.”

She said it gently, not an accusation, but she was right. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. Sorry I didn’t tell you that you were being an idiot, right then and there. And I’m sorry I didn’t hear what you were asking. You weren’t asking me to believe you; you were asking me to believe
in you
. I didn’t hear you. But of course I did, Miles. Of course I do. I believe in you. I trust you. I trust
us
. I trust
this
.” She gestured to encompass him. Them. And then she started to cry.

“Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”

He reached for her. She let herself be drawn into his arms, and he kissed her, her mouth, her wet cheeks, her eyelids. She rested her cheek against his shoulder, and she shuddered a little, like a kid who’d cried herself into hiccups.

The knot in his chest that had been clenched tight for weeks finally let him out of its grip, and he was pretty sure things were going to be okay. But he wanted more and better than
okay
. Deeper. More real. He owed her a lot of himself that he’d held back, and she deserved it after what she’d given him.
I trust us. I trust this
.

She’d stepped onto a high wire for him, thrown herself into the void—because that’s what trust was, ultimately, wasn’t it? A leap into darkness. One she’d been willing to make all along, if he’d let her.

“Can I talk now?”

She nodded. It was hard work not kissing her again, she was so wide-eyed and tearstained, her mouth soft and trembling. But now she was listening. Waiting. And here it went.

He took a deep breath. “I had this conversation with Owen. Where he reamed me out for acting like I was guilty, for refusing to talk to people about the whole embezzlement situation, for being antisocial. I was pissed at him when I got off the phone. But then I started thinking
about it. Thinking about me and the way I’d acted. Thinking about you and the way you made—the way you
make
me feel. Nora …”

His throat had gotten tight again, and she let him turn away and gather himself.

“I watched you at that party,” he told her. “Watched the way you were with people. The way you are: no holding back. You were scared, I know you were scared after what happened with Henry, but your response to it wasn’t to hide. It was to be out there in the world. To live.”

Tears had welled up in her eyes again, but she didn’t drop her gaze. She looked into him, and it seemed as if she was drawing the words right out of him, the confession he’d wanted to make all along.

“When I found out I was a suspect, I did the exact opposite. I hid from everyone. Wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t … I think I thought that if I told people I was innocent, if I asked them to believe I was innocent, it would seem more guilty.
The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks
.”

She made a sound, and he said, “Crazy. I know. Anyway, then I met you. I met you and—Jesus, kissing you was the least of what I wanted to do. I wanted to bare myself. Skin, soul, whatever. I wanted you to know everything that was inside me. Everything I was afraid of. I wanted to swear I was innocent, beg you to believe me. But when I had the chance to, I didn’t.”

Her blue eyes searched his face. Seeing through and around and under and in. His heart beat steadily, skipped, lost its rhythm for a long, terrifying moment, found it again as the words spilled out of his mouth—the beautiful, splintered truth.

“I didn’t do it. I swear. I swear I didn’t do it.” His voice broke, cracked along the fault lines that had always been there, disintegrated.

She pressed her lips to his cheek, to his ear, and he drew deep breaths that were not quite sobs. Or maybe they were. He wasn’t sure of anything except the comfort of her body.

“Shh,” she said. “I know.”

Her words unknotted something so deep in his psyche that it felt like release. Like absolution. Like grace.

He kissed her then, because he needed some kind of anchor, because everything had wrenched loose: everything he’d been holding together and trying desperately not to freak out about, all the unsaid things that had fought their way out, all his fears that there wouldn’t be another opportunity to be with her, that he wouldn’t be able to see her, touch her, kiss her.

God, she was sweet, her mouth so receptive and responsive, her body curving toward his, her heat, his arousal, like she was homing, her hands everywhere, in his hair, on his ass, her thumb curving around his hip to find the head of his cock.

The security clerk cleared his throat loudly, and Miles set Nora back from him. “More where that came from. Later.”

“God, I hope so.”

“Promise.”

“Miles? If they charge you, if you can’t make them believe the truth, if you have to go to jail—”

He tried to cut her off, but it was as pointless as it had been earlier. She was determined to say it.

“Whatever happens, I’ll be with you.”

He hugged her so tight that she gave a little squeak; then he released her. “I can’t begin to tell you how much that means to me, but I’ve got some good news.” Her eyes got huge.

“After my talk with Owen, I had lunch with some people who work for me and asked them to forgive me for not being more open with them. I told them I was innocent and asked for their help.

“A few of them got up and walked out, but most of them stayed. I asked them to think about anything they might know about the vendor fraud, anything at all, no matter how small. A bunch of them called my lawyer afterward. One mentioned that my executive assistant had been weird and squirrelly one day about a certain vendor account. They’ve changed the direction of the investigation. I’m not off the hook, but they’re looking closely at his actions. We’ll know more soon.”

“That’s great! I mean, not about your EA, but—”

“I know.”

She looked away, and he caught her regret. “I’m still sorry I didn’t have perfect faith. I wish … I wish I could have shown you a hundred percent certainty. I think you needed that.”

He shook his head. “No.” And then more vehemently, “No, I didn’t. I needed you to be who you were. Exactly who you were.
You
. You are so fully in the world, and I wanted to be in the world with you. It gave me the courage to dive back in.”

She made another sound, a half hum, almost a whimper, and lifted her face to him, an echo of that moment last year when the numbers had fallen off the clock too slowly.

This kiss was different. Tender, contemplative. It made him ache, not only in the sex-starved rock-hard parts, but all through. He wanted to get her out of here so he could make love to her, slow and sweet. Or hard and fast against a wall. That would work, too, and he was sure she’d be amenable to either. Or both. Both would be good.

When he released her, she smiled at him, her big, buoyant, nothing-held-back smile.

“I’ve never liked New Year’s,” he said. “I’ve always thought of it as a liar’s holiday.”

“Really?”

“Everyone makes resolutions they won’t keep, also known as lies. But New Year’s is growing on me as a holiday, I gotta say.”

She stood on tiptoe and whispered in his ear, “I’m wearing the red lace boy shorts.”

“Did I mention how much I
adore
New Year’s?” He slid a hand up her thigh until his fingers met the lace hem of her shorts. “Nora. Let’s get out of here.”

“I think that’s an excellent plan.”

He followed her into a single compartment of the revolving door and crowded against her, making her giggle. They tumbled out into the night. She slipped her hand into his, and he twirled her, drawing her close for another kiss, the heat of her mouth a contrast to the cold air that slid under their clothes. It was hard to think about anything other than the satiny feel of Nora’s thigh where the red lace lay. Or the heat he’d been able to feel even from that distance. Or what a long, leisurely time he would spend tonight reacquainting himself with her.

“Let’s get you someplace warm,” he said.

They hurried along the street toward the T station.

“You’re wrong about New Year’s, you know,” she said.

He tilted his head quizzically.

“Of course we’re going to screw up and fail to keep our resolutions. We know that. But we bother to make them, anyway. Because we have faith we can be better people. And we can. Not perfect people. But better people.”

She knocked the wind out of him sometimes. By being in a room. By saying what was on her mind. She left him breathless and winded and twice as alive.

He tugged her hand to stop her and kissed her again, because it was the best way to show
her.

And he left her breathless.

Good. That was only fair.

He stroked her hair. “If I hang around a few months, do you think you could try to explain to me why I shouldn’t hate Valentine’s Day so much?”

She shuddered. He wasn’t sure if it was the cold or the mention of the holiday. “No one can redeem Valentine’s Day.”

“Give it a shot, will you?”

She put her arms around him and rested her face in the crook of his shoulder. She felt right there, as if she belonged perfectly. “Hell, yes.”

Above them, noise exploded from a few open windows, a cacophony of shouts and horns.

“Happy New Year,” he said.

“Happy New Year.”

Across the Boston sky, fireworks scattered like the craziest constellation of stars he’d ever seen. And he kissed her to welcome midnight and the New Year, all the New Years.

Miles stood on the curb outside Nora’s U-Haul, shaking his head. “Nora?”

“Yes?” She struggled up the front walk of his house, clutching two twenty-gallon totes, one stacked on top of the other. Possibly it had been an ill-advised, overachieving idea, but she’d gotten tired of watching Miles carry all the heavy stuff.

“What’s this?”

She set down the totes. He had unloaded Rory from the truck, his yarn mane looking more scraggly than usual. “He’s an old-fashioned rocking horse. Rory was mine when I was little. He was in my mom’s house, but she said I had to take him or she would throw him out, so I picked him up on my way.”

He crossed his arms and gave her a mock frown. “You understand this is a deal breaker. There is no room in my house for an old-fashioned rocking horse.”

She almost enjoyed that grim, serious face of his, even in jest. She saw it so infrequently these days, and it reminded her delightfully of their first New Year’s Eve. “I stood by you in your time of need. I think you can cut me the slack for my rocking horse.”

“I think it might be easier to live with an embezzler than with this guy.” But he gave Rory’s real leather saddle a fond pat, and she knew he was sold. He hoisted Rory overhead and strode past her with an ain’t-no-thang ease, flexing an assortment of muscles in his back and shoulders and nearly causing her to drop her own excessive armful.

Recently he’d started to joke about his lost year. About his flirtation with imprisonment. About how easily he’d adopted the criminal mantle. He whispered to her sometimes that he thought he was secretly more Moriarty than Holmes, more Cigarette Man than Mulder and Scully.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” she’d whispered back. “But if you want, you can be Mulder and I’ll be Scully.”

In early March, Miles’s executive assistant had finally been charged with embezzlement, and a few weeks after that, Miles had started back to work. The first month had been hard for him. He’d worried that people at work still secretly believed he was guilty, that he’d lost
credibility with his employees, that he wouldn’t be able to lead the way he once had. His worry had made him tentative, and it had briefly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But he’d turned it around, showing up at work one morning with a day’s worth of team-building exercises that put him back on terra firma.

That weekend, when he’d flown to Boston to see Nora, he firmly asserted his leadership in bed with her, too. She remembered that weekend with great fondness.