Once and Again

Chapter Four

“I wondered if you’d find your way out here while you were home.”

Jessica glanced up to see Nick standing at the edge of the trees, the fringes of her dream. It was an oddly discomfiting sensation—this blurring of past and present. She blinked away the bittersweet reminiscence and accepted the harshness of reality.

“This is private property,” she reminded him.

“Uh-huh.” Despite his easy agreement, he came toward her.

“Which means you’re trespassing.”

He sat down beside her. “Actually you are.”

Her brow furrowed. “I thought this was part of your parents’ land.”

“It was. After my mom died, we subdivided the property. The dividing line runs somewhere through the trees behind us.”

“Who owns this part now?”

He smiled. “I do.”

“Oh.” She hugged her knees closer to her chest. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No.” He paused a moment before saying, “I haven’t been out here in years. And I didn’t know what made me come out here tonight—until I saw you.”

Uncertain how to respond to his revelation, she said nothing.

“What brought you out here, Jess?”

There were so many possible answers to that question. She decided the simplest was probably the best. “The stars.”

“You don’t have stars in New York City?”

“Not like this,” she admitted. “It’s like a completely different world here.”

“A world you were anxious to leave behind.”

She nodded. “I needed to be more than I could have been here.”

He sighed. “You were the only one who could never see beyond the limits to the possibilities.”

“In New York, there are no limits. Only endless possibilities.”

“You’re happy there?”

“I have a good life. A busy life.” Which, they both knew, wasn’t exactly an answer to his question. It was something she would think about later, when his presence wasn’t wreaking havoc on her senses.

“No regrets?”

“I don’t imagine anyone gets to this stage of life without a few.”

“Probably not,” he agreed.

She hesitated, then decided it was time to take that next step. “One of my biggest regrets is that I let what happened one night ruin a friendship we’d shared for so many years.”

“You had to know things would change.”

“I didn’t expect they’d change so completely.”

Nick didn’t say anything.

She sat beside him in the silence until the shrill ring of her cell phone violated the quiet of the night. Jess unclipped it from her waist and glanced at the illuminated display. Recognizing the number, she wished she’d left the phone in the house. But she’d got in the habit of carrying it everywhere with her, to ensure she was never out of touch if anyone from the office needed to reach her. As was apparently the case now.

“I have to get this,” she said to Nick.

He shrugged easily. “Go ahead.”

She rose to her feet and took several steps away before flipping open the phone to connect the call. “Hello?”

“Where the hell are you, Jessica?”

She pushed her hair away from her face, ignored the automatic spurt of irritation that was just as likely to have stemmed from the identity of the caller as the tone of his question. “I’m in Pinehurst—as explained in my memo.”

“Yes, your request for personal time—which wasn’t approved before you took off,” her ex-husband reminded her.

She lowered her voice, softly pleading for his understanding. She’d never asked him for any kind of favor, not even during their short-lived marriage, and she hoped he was cognizant of that fact now. “Please, Steve. I need to be here.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have responsibilities to this firm—including a meeting with Harrison Dekker scheduled for eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Dekker Industries was one of the firm’s largest clients and it had always irked Steve that the president of the company refused to work with anyone but her. “I already talked to Harrison—and Peter has agreed to cover the meeting for me.”

“If those are the arrangements you’ve made, that’s your choice. But you should know that with the partnership on the table, this isn’t a good time to be away from the office.”

It was a threat and not a particularly subtle one. Then again, subtlety had never been one of Steve’s strengths. When they’d been dating, he’d let her know he was in the mood for sex by leaving a condom on the bedside table. His idea of a proposal had been for his secretary to check with her secretary to arrange a mutually convenient time for them to visit City Hall. And Jessica had been so pathetically grateful that she would no longer have to go home to an empty apartment, she’d pretended it didn’t bother her.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said tersely, wondering why she’d ever expected that, even after years of dedication to the firm, he would show a little more understanding about a personal emergency.

She turned off the phone before tucking it away.

But not before Nick noted the faint furrow between her brows. “Problem?”

“Just my office,” she said by way of explanation.

“I didn’t realize that attorneys were so indispensable.”

“I’m a hotshot attorney,” she reminded him with a wry grin. “And I’m on the short list to make partner this year.”

“Partner?” He made a show of sounding impressed. “Well, that really is a coup.”

“I’ve worked my butt off for this opportunity.”

“I’m sure you have,” he agreed easily.

Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just an acknowledgment that your career has always been your number one priority.”

She didn’t deny it.

“What was so important that your ex-husband had to track you down on a Sunday night?”

“He just wanted to know how long I expected to be out of the office, so that he could cover my schedule.”

“How considerate of him.”

“Yeah, Steve’s a considerate guy.”

Nick’s lips twitched. “I might have believed that if I hadn’t seen you roll your eyes.”

“We frequently have differences of opinion,” she admitted.

“Is that why you divorced?”

“Actually we used to get along fine—until I disagreed with his decision to sleep with his secretary.”

“Ouch.”

She nodded. “It hurt, not just the fact that he’d been screwing around, but that he’d done so with her. It’s such a tired cliché.”

He didn’t know why she was telling him any of this, except that it was probably easier for her—as it was for him—to talk about a past that didn’t involve the two of them. And it was infinitely easier to talk about the past rather than her reasons for being here in the present: Caleb’s accident.

He stood up, took a step toward her. “I’m sorry, Jessica.”

She shrugged. “Apparently I’m better with the law than relationships.”

“What happened with the secretary?”

“He married her before the ink was even dry on our divorce. They have two kids now and two more on the way. Two sets of twins—she always was eerily efficient.”

He smiled at the wry humor. “Did you love him?”

She opened her mouth to respond, closed it again, the furrow in her brow reappearing. “I thought I did,” she said at last. “But now I think what we entered into was more of a merger than a marriage.”

He knew it would be a mistake to touch her, but he reached for her anyway, cupping a hand under her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze. He saw the awareness in the widening of her eyes, heard it in the thunderous beating of his own heart. He inhaled the soft feminine scent she wore, felt the ricochet of the sparks zinging between them.

“The woman I once knew had too much passion to ever settle for anything less than everything.”

She pushed his hand away. “The woman you knew was a girl—a teenager who didn’t know how to control her runaway hormones.”

“And your excuse for marrying a man you didn’t love is that you no longer felt passion?”

“I grew up. I realized that there were more important considerations than desire.”

“Other considerations—yes,” he agreed. “More important—no way.”

She shook her head, but he could tell she was fighting the smile that tugged at her lips. “Therein lies the basic difference between women and men.”

He wanted to draw her nearer, to fold her into his arms, feel the curves of her body yield against him. But he fisted his hands at his sides and held his ground. “Are you suggesting that you’re no longer swayed by temptation?”

“I’m just saying that…um…sex…isn’t the answer to every question.”

He smiled, inordinately pleased by the realization that the usually unflappable Jessica Harding was obviously flapped by the topic. “Maybe not the whole answer,” he agreed. “But it’s a factor that shouldn’t be ignored.”

“Yes, well, as…um…interesting as this conversation is, I should be getting back to the house.”

He considered asking her to stay. And maybe she would have. But he wasn’t sure if either one of them was ready for any progress in their relationship beyond the fragile truce they seemed to have established.

“I’ll walk with you,” he said.

“I know the way.”

He held his hand out to her. “I’ll walk with you, anyway.”

After a brief hesitation, she laid her palm against his. He closed his fingers around hers, disturbed by how natural it felt to be touching her, how comfortable he felt with her.

Even as she fell into step beside him, he cursed himself for being a fool. But he’d always been a fool where Jessica was concerned. He’d fallen in love with her when she was sixteen, proposed to her when she was seventeen. He’d been three years older, but still young enough and naive enough to believe they would be together forever.

He’d honestly thought they would build a life together—until she’d chosen her career over everything else.

Yeah, he might still want her, but he couldn’t ever forgive her.

Jess stepped into the house, bolted the door behind her and exhaled a long, deep breath.

It had been close there for a second. For just the briefest moment as they’d stood together under the moon and the stars, she’d thought he was going to kiss her. For that brief moment, as the heady masculine scent of him tantalized her senses and her hands ached to slide over the firm muscles of his chest and shoulders, she’d wondered what would happen if he did kiss her. Would she push him away? Or pull him closer?

It had been a second of insanity. There and gone so quickly she wasn’t sure if it had existed anywhere outside of her mind. Except that her heart was still beating a little too fast.

Which only proved to Jess how important it was to maintain a distance between herself and Nick, as she’d managed to do for the better part of eighteen years.

Unfortunately, circumstances were different now. If she and Nick both wanted to be available to Kristin and Brian, to support them, their paths would inevitably cross. Then there was the promise she’d made to Kristin to help out in Nick’s office.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.