Alison Roberts - Winning His Heart

“Me, either.”

It was one of those absolutely spontaneous perfect moments. His bare shoulder was nearly touching hers. Peripherally, she was aware of the rise and fall of his naked chest, and that it was his scent, mingled with the pure scent of the dew on the grass and the night air and those flowers drooping under their own weight, that had made the night so deliciously fragrant.

“Is that Orion above us?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “the hunter.”

“I remembered how you impressed me once by naming all the stars in that constellation.”

She laughed softly. “Zeta, Epsilon, Delta. That’s his belt.”

“Go on.”

So she did, naming the stars of the constellation, one by one, and then they lay in silence, contemplating the night sky above them.

“I always thought you’d become a teacher,” he said slowly. “You had such an amazing mind, took such delight in learning things.”

She said nothing, another road not taken rising up before her.

“I at least thought you’d have kids. You always loved kids. You were always a counselor at that awful day camp. What was it called?”

“Sparkling Waters. And it wasn’t awful. It was for kids who couldn’t afford camp.”

“Naturally,” he said drily. “One of the most affluent communities in Canada, and you find the needy kids. I didn’t even know there were any until you started working there.”

“That whole neighborhood south of the tracks is full of orchard workers and people who clean rooms at the motels and hotels.” She didn’t tell him that now that she had been one of those people she had even more of an affinity for them. “It was Blossom Valley’s dirty little secret then, and it still is today.”

“And how are you going to fix that?” he asked.

Instead of feeling annoyed, she felt oddly safe with him. She replied, “I bet I could think of some kind of coupon system so the kids can come for ice cream.”

“Ah, Kayla,” he said, but not with recrimination.

“That’s me. Changing the world, one ice cream cone at a time.”

“No wonder those kids adored you,” he remembered wryly. “What I remember is if we saw the kids you worked with during the day at night, they wanted to hang out with you. I hated that. Us ultracool teenagers with all these little tagalongs.”

“Maybe you were ultracool. I wasn’t.”

“I probably wasn’t, either,” he said, that wryness still in his voice. “But I sure thought I was. Maybe all guys that age think they are.”

Certainly Kevin had thought he was, too, Kayla remembered. But he never really had been. Funny, yes. Charming, absolutely. Good-looking, but not spectacularly so. Athletic, but never a star. Energetic and mischievous and fun-loving.

Kevin had always been faintly and subtly competitive with his better-looking and stronger best friend.

When David signed up for lifeguard training, so did Kevin, but he didn’t just want to be equal to David, he wanted to be better. So if David swam across the lake, Kevin swam there and back. When David bought his first car—that rusting little foreign import—Kevin, make that Kevin’s father, bought a brand-new one.

The faint edge to Kevin’s relationship with David seemed like something everyone but David had been aware of.

Hadn’t Kayla spent much of her marriage trying to convince Kevin he was good enough? Trying to convince him that she was not in the least bowled over by David’s many successes that were making all the newspapers? Trying to forgive Kevin’s jealousy and bitterness toward his friend, excuse it as caused by David’s indifference to the man who had once been his friend?

But Kayla remembered David really had been ultracool. Even back then he’d had something—a presence, an intensity, a way of taking charge—that had set him apart.

And made him irresistible to almost every girl in town. And on one magic night, I’d been the girl. That he had shared his remarkable charisma with.

I tasted his lips, and then he hardly looked at me again.

“I adored them back,” she said, wanting to remember the affection of those moments and not the sense of loss his sudden indifference had caused in her.

“They were pesky little rascals,” David said. “You never told them to go away and leave you—us—alone. I can remember you passing out hot dogs—that I had provided—to them at a campfire.”

Maybe that was why he had stopped speaking to me.

“Did I?”

“Yeah. And marshmallows. Our soda pop. Nothing was safe.”

“I love kids,” she said softly. “I probably couldn’t bear to think of them hungry.”

“Our little do-gooder.” He paused and looked at her. “You did love kids, though. That’s why I thought you’d lose no time having a pile of them of your own. Especially since you seemed in such a hurry to get married.”

Kayla bit her lip. For the first time since they had lain down beneath the stars, she was certain she heard judgment there.

Marry in haste, repent at leisure.

“So why didn’t you have kids?” he persisted.

Kayla begged herself not to even think it. But the soft night air, and this unexpected moment, lying in the coolness of the grass beside David, made the thought explode inside of her.

She had wanted a child, desperately. Now she could see it was a blessing she had not had one.

“The time was just never right,” she said, her tone cool, not inviting any more questions.

“Aw, Kayla,” he said, and as unforthcoming as she thought her statement had been, she felt as if David heard every unhappy moment of her marriage in it.

She felt an abrupt, defensive need to take the focus off herself. “So why aren’t you married, David? Why don’t you have a wife and kids and a big, happy family?”

“At first it was because I never met anyone I wanted to do those things with,” he said quietly.

“Come on. You’ve become news with some of the women you dated! Kelly O’Ranahan? Beautiful, successful, talented.”

“Insecure, superficial, wouldn’t know Orion if he shot her with an arrow.”

The moment suddenly seemed shot through with more than an arrow. Heat sizzled between them as his gaze locked on hers.

“What do you mean, ‘at first’?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer—he just reached out and slid a hand through her hair, and looked at her with such longing it stole her breath from her lungs.

The air felt ripe with possibilities. Kayla again felt seen, somehow, in a way no one had seen her for years.

Somehow, feeling that way made her feel more intensely guilty than her disloyal thoughts about her husband.

And then, thankfully, the uncomfortable intensity of the moment was shattered when the darkness exploded around them, and they were both frozen in an orb of white light.

“End to a perfect day,” she said, happy for the distraction from the intensity. “Beesting, hospital emergency room, lost dog—” disloyal thoughts about my deceased husband “—now alien kidnapping.”

He didn’t smile at her attempt to use humor to deflect the intensity between them.

“Don’t forget the stargazing part,” he said softly.

She looked at him. Not many people would look better under the harsh glare of the light that illuminated them, but he did. It brought the strength of his features into sharp relief.

It occurred to her that the stargazing was the part she was least likely to forget.

David broke the gaze first, sat up and shielded his eyes against the bright light that held them.

“Police! Get up off that grass.”

CHAPTER NINE

THEIR PREDICAMENT STRUCK KAYLA as hilarious, but she suspected her sudden desire to laugh was like biting back laughter at a funeral. Her nerves were strung tight over the moments they had just shared. Her emotions felt electric, overwhelming and way too close to the surface.