Jennifer Snow – Winter Wedding Bells: The Kiss / The Wish / The Promise (страница 7)

“All set?” Julie swallowed the last bite of a cheeseburger—her second—and stood. She always ate more when stressed, he recalled.

“Looks fine. Just the wind triggering the motion detectors. How about you? Ready to go back?”

Her bag of empty fast-food containers swung at her side and the moon turned in her eyes. In the crackle-cold air, she resembled an ice carving of herself. Brittle. Frozen. Chipped away one shaving at a time.

A bright white silence floated down the mountain, too big for him to burst. He tamped down the questions rising inside and waited for her to speak.

“No. Not ready,” she whispered at last, her voice snuffly. Long, dark strands whipped across her oval face, obscuring her expression. The aroma of pine, balsam and holly berry floated on the arctic current swooping from the north.

Against his better judgment, he reached her in two steps and guided them back to the bench. “What’s going on, Julie?”

Her back curved and she dropped her head, her hair falling across her face, shielding it like a curtain. “I don’t know,” she groaned into her fingers.

“Are you having second thoughts? Is your groom?” The last word tasted bitter on his tongue. Despite the years that had passed, he couldn’t picture her with anyone else. Couldn’t imagine another man holding her. Loving her the way he once had.

“I don’t know what I want. Sound familiar?” She peered up at him through strands of hair, her arms clutching her gut.

“Yes,” he blurted out, regretting his harsh reply the moment it left his mouth.

She shot to her feet. “I shouldn’t be doing this. Complaining to you, of all people. I need to go back. Face the music, or quinoa...or...or...”

He stood and twined his hands in hers, the soft pressure of her palms warming him despite the dropping temperature. Around them, ice crystals falling from trees tinkled like Christmas bells. “We’ll go back when you’re ready. No rush to face quin-whatever. I’m here for you, Julie. We were friends, once.”

“More,” she whispered, her eyes anguished and wide as they searched his.

“But you didn’t want more,” he forced himself to say. His voice firm. Steady. “You wanted Connecticut. Your home. It took me a while, but I finally understood. I’m not holding any grudges. Talk to me and maybe I can help. Give you perspective as an old boyfriend.”

“Why would you do that?” She lobbed her bag in a nearby trash can.

“Because I care.” There. The truth. Something he hadn’t admitted, even to himself, until now.

“Oh.”

A shiver swayed them.

“Did you and your fiancé argue?” He tucked a silken lock behind her ear, resisting the urge to cup her cold face.

She collapsed on the bench again. A cut-string marionette. “He gave me a picture.”

He sat and stared. Puzzled. “As in a Paint-by-Number? A velvet painting of Elvis? Classic.”

She laughed. She had a good laugh—rich, open. It rang through the hollow spaces inside him.

“I might have liked that,” she said, a wry flip to the corner of her mouth. “But the picture was of a house. One he bought for us.”

“That’s a nice surprise—” He stumbled on the last word, finally understanding. “And you hate surprises.”

She fiddled with the top button of her navy coat, drawing the lapel tight around her neck. “But it was more than that,” she said to the distant mishmash of trees that had taken centuries to grow—birch, oak, spruce. “It looked exactly like my parents’ house.”

“You love living there.”

“I know. That’s what’s crazy. When I saw it, I pictured everything. Every day of the rest of my life. And I didn’t like what I saw.” Julie turned her head toward him, and the slice he could see revealed a tense jaw and the faraway sheen of one eye.

“What about your fiancé?”

The breeze moved through laden boughs, showering the earth with snow and ice. Over the tumult, his pulse thrummed, filling his ears. Did he want her to break things off? Reopen a door for him to step through again?

As he studied her delicate profile, the answer slammed his gut, as if it’d waited, all these years, to be asked.

Yes.

He still loved Julie. Despite it all. But because of her indecisive nature, he knew he could never trust her again.

“I don’t know.”

He handed her a tissue and she swiped at her running nose. “I’m such a mess. I ruined everything. Everyone. I hurt you.” She peered upward. An under-the-lashes look at him. “Now I’m breaking Mason’s heart. My parents’. I’m a—a—succubus.”

He chuckled. Couldn’t help it. She’d learned that term in a mythology class and they’d found every excuse to work it into conversations the entire semester.

But his mirth dried up when she dashed a tear away.

He cradled her face with both hands and met her eyes, gazing at her steadily until her breathing steadied. “You’re not a succubus. What you are is confused. Indecisive. Cautious. A bit of a glutton. And a pack rat with appalling taste in music, if I’m honest.”

A short laugh ended in a watery gulp. “Stop sweet-talking me.”

“Haven’t even gotten started.” He smiled, warming to the topic. “You’re also smart, funny—especially when you don’t mean to be—caring, loyal, and you have the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Oh, Austin.” She sighed. Her eyes glistened, tears suspended on her eyelashes. “What am I going to do?”

“What you want. Life is full of second chances. Give yourself one.”

“Even if it means hurting other people?”

His thumbs skimmed the soft underside of her chin. “Off like a bandage. One rip and it’s over. Trust me. It’s kinder that way.”

“Unlike us.” Her mouth twisted. “I held on until you peeled away.”

He leaned close. Breathed in the vanilla scent of her, sharp, sweet, wonderful. “I never really left.”

Before he could stop himself, he weaved his fingers through Julie’s hair, lifted it so that it fell strand by strand. She turned her head and only a breath separated her lips from his arm. Time seemed to hold still. Every minute spanned a million years.

Austin cupped Julie’s cheeks and her eyes closed. Moonlight ran down her neck like water. She moved closer, her face tilting, lips opening and, unable to resist, he captured her mouth and kissed her. The sweet taste of her exploded on his tongue, electricity jolting wildly through him, heat bursting in his belly.

The years apart dissolved and he lost himself in the moment. Everything gone but the feel of her pressed to him, her lips against his jaw as he nibbled on her ear.

“I’ve missed you,” he groaned, realizing he’d been fooling himself into thinking he hadn’t. “I’ve wanted to do that for so long.” He rested his forehead against her temple and breathed. “So long. You’re just—”

When he stroked her jaw, she jerked back, blinking.

It seemed as if she was going to say something, but no words came when she opened her mouth. She dropped her head in her hands, unable to conceal how her features had all squeezed shut, or the pain leaking out of every part of her face.

Austin heard a rustling in the bushes. A pair of red eyes blinked before vanishing again—a witness to his crime. Austin’s stomach churned with guilt.

“No. No no no no no.” Julie bolted to her feet and backed away before fleeing to the parking lot so fast it looked as if her feet were on fire.

Knife stab, center chest. Did he say knife? It was more like an ice pick. He felt pinned to this awful moment like a dead insect. Why had he kissed her? Taken advantage of her weak moment?

His shoulders bowed, laden with guilt.

* * *

JULIE KICKED OFF her shoes the next day, drew her knees to her chest and rested her heels on the edge of one of the hotel’s overstuffed library chairs. Her eyes drifted across the books packing the floor-to-ceiling shelves, the worn leather jackets as old as the lodge. How many lives did they chronicle? Love stories that triumphed and those that failed...like hers...again.

Air spun out of her. It disturbed the dust motes floating in the column of early afternoon light emitted by the gingerbread stained-glass windows. With a warm fire sparking to life in the brick hearth, a wicker basket of white-paper birch logs beside it, this should be a soothing spot. Exactly why she’d escaped here after ending her engagement with Mason, the two of them breaking the news to their shocked parents and announcing the canceled wedding to the bridal party and guests assembled for breakfast. Their event planner, Grace, had lived up to her name, calmly assuring them that she would handle everything and not to worry.

But how could Julie stop worrying when Mason looked so flattened? It broke her heart to hurt him, but he deserved better than a woman who’d kiss another man just days before her wedding.

Out in the hall, a group of adults and children passed by the open doorway singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Julie sank into the chair, grateful when they passed without missing a note. Christmas. How happy they sounded. The merry family she’d longed to form...only not with Mason, after all.

After tossing and turning all night, she’d showered and dressed. Exhausted but certain. Kissing Austin last night had been a mistake in every way but one. It had proved that she couldn’t marry one man when she so easily returned the affections of another. It wasn’t fair to Mason.