Love in a Small Town (Pine Harbour Book 1) (8 page)

“I’m not going to do anything about it,” he said roughly. “I didn’t see anything and I’m off duty. Plus she’s Ryan’s wife, not that I’d let that stop me if—”

“She’s a mother of three.”

“Do you think she ever smokes up before she drives them around?”

That silenced her. Ugh. Maybe she should talk to Ryan. She looked around for her friend but couldn’t see him. All of a sudden she didn’t feel like drinking any more. She tucked the bottle against the wheel well behind her and lifted her legs up, wrapping her arms around them making a Livvie-ball, as her father used to call it.

“What are you thinking about?” His voice was quiet. She didn’t look over at him again, keeping her gaze trained on the moonlit tree line instead.

“How we’re too old for bush parties,” she admitted. “And my dad…I miss him. That he’s gone now makes me feel old too. Like…I should have done more, ya know? I don’t have much to show for someone my age. This job is fun, but it’s yet another temporary gig, ya know?”

— —

He craned his neck at her in surprise. She felt
old?
She was three years younger than him and he felt like their lives were just beginning. He reached out and tugged at her ponytail. She turned her face back in his direction and dropped her cheek to her knees. She looked exactly the same as she did the night he met her at a house party in Woodstock. Fresh, innocent, and beautiful. The urge to kiss her was overwhelming.

Instead, he pushed off the truck bed and moved to stand in front of her. “You want to dance?”

Someone had rigged up an mp3 player and a pair of portable speakers. A slow Guns N’ Roses power ballad floated around them. She slowly unwound her limbs and looked around.

“We’re among friends here, Liv. Dance with me.”
Let me take us back in time six years and start over again
. He wanted nothing more than to pretend he hadn’t fucked up the better part of her twenties. Flirt and touch and tease like they really could build a future together instead of having a history so tainted that his beautiful wife thought she’d missed out on something good.

She nodded and eased against him, her arms going around his neck and her head onto his shoulder. He slipped his hands under the borrowed shirt and found her waist. She giggled quietly against chest. “Your hands are cold.”

“You’re soft and warm. I’m not moving them.”

“I’m not asking you to.” They shared a long, warm gaze. 

“Good.” If this was the reward he got for going slow, he’d pace his win-Liv-back plan out over the entire six months reprieve he’d been granted. They swayed back and forth in the shadow of his truck, even after the song ended and something faster set the tempo for the rest of the party. Laughter and jeers filtered through the dark as people got a little silly around the fire, but all he cared about was the woman he held in the circle of his arms. “You having a good time?”

“Mmm-hmm.” She wiggled closer.
For warmth
, he told himself, but his dick paid no attention to the caution. He knew the moment she found him hot and ready for a laundry list of bad ideas because she froze, then eased away just enough to pretend she didn’t know how much he was enjoying having her up against him. 

“There’s a stag and doe next weekend,” he offered after he found his voice again. 

“Yeah?” She sounded skeptical, but tempted. In the country, the pre-wedding fundraisers were often the only real opportunity for dancing. If he was flooded with memories of slow dancing, maybe she was too. 

“We could meet there or something.”

“Are you asking me out on a date?” She tipped her face up to his and smiled. “That’s a terrible idea.”

“Don’t call it a date. We could accidentally run into each other.”

“And share a few beers? Maybe have a dance or two?”

“Would that be so bad?”

“Is your mom going to be there?” He heard the edge to her voice. 

Hell no. They weren’t fighting about his mom tonight. “Not her scene.”

“We’re not dating, Rafe. I’m leaving town in six months. And when I do, it’s going to suck. Let’s not make it worse.”

“If leaving would be so awful, don’t leave.” There, he’d said it.
Don’t leave
. Pathetic begging, something he’d promised himself he’d never do.

“Do you want to do this now?”

Listen to her list all the reasons why they don’t work as a couple? It was a short list of two razor-sharp points, but Liv had a way of exponentially expanding the list until it filled hours of endless, torturous fights. They always started as conversations but devolved quickly into sniping matches. “Let’s skip to the end where I’m an asshole.”

She stiffened against him, and then shrank away.
Fuck
. “You’re not an asshole, but you are a workaholic. And you come with a family that’s…overwhelming, to put it mildly. And you shut down when I ask you for even a little bit more. More time, more attention—”

“You have my attention. All of it. All the fucking time. I can’t get you off my mind.” Why wasn’t that enough? 

She pinched her eyebrows together. That made two of them that found this frustrating as fuck. “For now, sweetie. But not forever. You live a life best suited to a single man. There’s a reason why soldiers had to ask their officers for permission to marry way back when.”

He rolled his eyes. “This isn’t way back when. Guys in the army are married.”

“Soldiers and cops?” She snorted. “I think the divorce rate is pretty high in both professions. Mix them together and you’re better off in a relationship like Dean’s. Something easy. No strings.”

A spark of something stupid and awesome came to life in the back of his head. An idea that he was surprised neither of them had suggested yet. “Let’s do that.”

“What?”

“Something easy. No strings.”

She laughed, then stopped when she realized he was serious. “No.”

“Why not?”

She reached between and slowly tucked her fingertips just inside the waistband of his jeans. “Because when I do this…” She stepped closer and pressed up on her tiptoes, bringing her pelvic bone up against the bottom of his quickly hardening junk. “And this…you lose your mind and say stupid things like you love me. We’re a mess of strings already. We can’t fall into bed again. It’s a recipe for disaster.”

“I do love you.” The words spilled out with ease, and he was relieved to not have to hold them back. “But you’re right. An affair isn’t right for us. We need to take this slow.”

“
This
isn’t anything.”

He wrapped his arms around her, holding her against his body. “This is everything, Liv. And I’m going to find a way to make it right.”

— SEVEN —

P
ART of starting anew with Liv would also have to be repairing his relationship with his mother, because eventually he was going to have to ask her to be nice to his wife. So without a plan but with a clear mission, he headed over to his parents’ house a few days later, when he knew Dani had an evening shift. The last thing he needed was to have mother and daughter picking sides and hollering at each other over his head. Besides, he wasn’t going to dive right into the Liv conversation. That could come later.

Unfortunately, his mother did not get that memo. He found her in the kitchen baking bread. She barely let him sit down before serving the first volley. “According to Toni Ross, you were seen leaving your former residence at four in the morning on Sunday.”

“Is that right?” Rafe couldn’t care less what the uptight shrew across the road from Olivia thought of his comings and goings. For that matter, he didn’t really care what his mother thought either. He didn’t bother to set the record straight that he’d just walked Liv to her door, and it was closer to midnight than four a.m.—and Dean had been sitting in the truck the whole time. She wouldn’t believe him.

“It’s not the first talk of a reunion that I’ve heard about.”

“We’re not reuniting, Ma.” Not yet. They were just…rediscovering each other. Maybe. Liv still hadn’t given him a clear answer on if she’d be at the stag and doe. The next time he saw her, he was going to get her to say yes.

“So if someone said they saw you kissing in the woods behind the diner?”

It would, strictly speaking, be a lie.
“I haven’t kissed Olivia in two years.”
She kissed me a week ago, but I kept my hands mostly to myself
. 

“That city girl has you wrapped around her finger, Rafe. It’s not healthy.”

“Ma, you can’t talk about Liv that way.”

“I’m your mother. I can talk about whatever I want.”

“Not if you want me to listen.” He shook his head. “You’re the only person who never welcomed her to Pine Harbour.”

“I gave her a job!”

“So you could keep her close and monitor her every activity.”

She gasped. “Rafaelo, that’s not true.”

“No?” He stood up and grabbed his jacket.

“What are you doing?”

“Something I should have done two years ago. Setting some boundaries.”

“This isn’t very mature.” Her voice slithered under his skin, the reproach making him doubt himself for a second before she made his point for him. “Besides, she never embraced our family.”

“Why was it her job to build the bridge?” She didn’t have an answer for that. Obviously didn’t think she needed one, because she waited until he winced in apology. “I’m sorry, Ma. Look, I need you to dial it back. I’d prefer if you actually tried to make an effort to like her—”

She sniffed. “I don’t know where you got the idea that I hate her. I don’t, you know.”

“It never felt like that to Liv.” He took a deep breath. “It doesn’t feel like that to me, either, I gotta tell you. Maybe if I’d said something early on, Liv wouldn’t have left me.”

Silence was rare in the Minelli household, but it was never a good thing. This was no exception. His mother’s back stiffened and she resumed her kneading, this time without the commentary on his life. Which is what he wanted. Too bad thirty-one years of conditioning had trained him to feel badly for hurting her feelings.

“Ma…”

“Don’t
Ma
me, Rafe.” Her voice was cold and stiff. 

“Maybe this isn’t an all-in-one-day kind of conversation.” He waited for her to say something, anything, but she’d returned to the silent treatment. He thought about getting up and leaving but that didn’t help Liv at all. Or himself. “Ma, I’ve missed feeling welcome here.”

“You’re always welcome. You should have moved here instead of that stupid apartment. Then maybe you wouldn’t feel like a stranger in your parents’ home.”

“I couldn’t. A part of me hoped it would be temporary.”
And moving home would have underlined all of Liv’s fears about Rafe prioritizing his family over her.

“But it wasn’t. Doesn’t that tell you something about her character?”

“Sure does. It tells me she’s got backbone and self-respect.”

“You have no clue what it takes to make a marriage work for almost forty years. And if you think I don’t have a backbone—”

What the hell? “I wasn’t talking about you, Ma.” Not exactly. Without a doubt, Anne Minelli was tough as nails. “But you seem to have this idea that the perfect woman for me—for Zander and Tom, too, probably—is an empty vessel who can take on all our wants and make them her own. That’s not real life.”

“You’re a good man. And you deserve a good woman at your side, not one who’s going to walk away.”

“She wasn’t happy.”

“So? You think I’m always happy?”

No. His parents fought like cats and dogs at times. But they didn’t seem to
hate
fighting the same way he and Liv had. “That’s different. You guys always make up. Our fights…each one sucked a little more life out of our marriage.”

“Then she should have—”

“What, Ma? What could she have possibly done?” He was yelling now but he didn’t care.

Anne rolled her dough one last time and dropped the round, raw loaf in a baking pan. “She could have refused to let you go.”

Something in her voice gave him pause and he sat back down. “What’s going on, Ma?”

“When you were a baby, your father…” She wiped her hands and leaned back against the counter. “This goes no further than this room, you hear?” She pointed her finger sternly in his direction and he nodded, struck dumb and unable to respond with any words. “He left me. Life with a wife and two young boys wasn’t all the fun and games he thought it would be, and he wanted out.”

Disgust at his father roiled in Rafe’s gut. “No.” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t take him back if he did that.”

“Take him back? I
dragged
him back. He was done.” She frowned. “And that would have been the end of our love story if I’d let him go.”

Memories from his childhood slammed into Rafe. His parents necking in the kitchen…the look of joy on his father’s face when Anne told him, in front of their three boys, that she was pregnant again…whispered plans for birthdays and Mother’s Days, year after year. “He loves you so much.”

She nodded. “He does.”

“And he left you?”

“It was a moment of weakness, Rafe. And not one he’s proud of, which is why I’ve never told any of you about it.”

He closed his eyes. “And you think that Liv and I…”

“It’s not the same thing. You don’t have children. But neither of you fought for your marriage. So no, I can’t respect her. You…well, you’re just lucky you’re my son. Because I don’t respect you for letting her go, either.”

“Even though you don’t like her?” He opened his eyes and shook his head in confusion.

“I liked her just fine. She should’ve cooked more and not been so damn resistant to having babies, but she was your wife and she made you happy. But now she’s dead to me.”

“Well, she’s not dead to me, so cut that out.”

“I just want you to be happy. Staying hung up on your ex-wife impedes that.”

“She’s my
wife
, Ma. The ex part is a legal technicality. There is no one else for me, don’t you get that?”

A pin could have dropped and he would have heard it in the long pause before his mother started yelling at him. “No, you idiot! I don’t get that. Are you planning to be miserable for the rest of your life? If she’s it for you, then you’ve made a giant—no, colossal—error of judgement in signing damned divorce papers. You. Are. A. Fool.”