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He’d always felt things intensely, passionately. He’d never been able to walk away from a fight. Or from her.
Except when she told him to go, to never come back.
Clenching his jaw, he reached for the comforter and draped it around her shoulders. “You should be fine now. I’ll be in the other room if you need me.”
She reached for him, curled cool fingers around his wrist. “Don’t go.”
He went very still. “You don’t know what—”
“I want to be warm again,” she said, lifting her eyes to his. They were huge, dark. “Is that so very wrong?”
A hard sound broke from his throat. In some hazy corner of his mind, he knew it was a mistake even as he reached for her. It was like throwing a lit match into a pile of dried leaves and expecting nothing to happen. But too much emotion burned inside him. Too much need. That had always been the problem. He’d never been able to care about nasty things like consequences.
She didn’t seem to care, either. She reached for him, pulled him to her.
“You’re real,” she murmured against his chest. “I never thought…”
Her words trickled off, but he didn’t need to hear them. He knew. God help him, he knew. And he could no more stop touching her, wanting her, than he could change the past. Make it better. Write a new ending.
“Neither did I,” he said hoarsely.
Outside, the temperature hovered just below freezing, but inside, the fire licking at the grate crackled and sizzled, filling the cabin with the scent of burning pine and times long past. But never forgotten. Memories hovered everywhere, slipping around him and slicing through him, seducing even as they destroyed. The joy and the desperation, the smiles and the laughter, the tears. The cold, hard truth.
Against his chest he felt the moisture, and knew that she was remembering, too. He pulled back to wipe the silent tears away, but instead of swiping a thumb beneath her eyes, he put his mouth there. Very gently, he kissed away her pain, though he could do nothing about the emotion stinging his own eyes. He could only skim his mouth along her cheekbone, the line of her jaw, finally finding her lips.
The onslaught of sensation stabbed deep. She tasted of regret and longing, tomorrows that never came. Of hope and possibility, dreams that never died. She tasted of the hot chocolate he’d made shortly before midnight. Of the tiny white marshmallows that had finally coaxed a smile from her.
The first she’d given him in almost nine years.
Now her mouth moved against his with the same hunger, the same urgency, that drove him. And when at last she pulled back and lifted her eyes, he saw the glaze of mindless passion that had haunted him for a seeming eternity.
“I…forgot,” she whispered.
He pushed up on one arm. “Forgot what?”
“What it’s like when you touch me, how everything else just…fades to the background.”
He told himself to quit touching her. Walk away, close the door. And again, he wished he was a different man, the kind who couldn’t be lured into stepping off the side of a cliff.
“It’s been so long…” Her voice was soft, distant. Almost pained. “Did you forget, too?”
Yes was the smart answer. Yes. “No.”
“Then help me remember,” she murmured, tugging him toward her. “Help me remember what I’ve forgotten.”
That was all it took. He returned his mouth to hers, and she came alive in his arms, touching him, running her hands along his body like a benediction of cool spring water. Everywhere she touched, he burned. Wanting to touch her, too, all of her, he lifted a hand to the buttons, but his fingers were too big, too impatient. He pulled the fabric, sent the buttons popping.
And then there she was. Through the flickering light of the fire, he drank in the sight of her sprawled against the flannel sheets. Her skin was flawless, almost shimmering. Her breasts could make a grown man weep.
And her smile. Dear God, her smile. He had forgotten. It had been the only way to stay sane.
“Are you sure?” he somehow managed to ask.
She answered not with words, but by skimming a hand down his chest, along his abdomen to his waistband. There she tugged.
On a low groan, he kicked off the ratty sweatpants. He told himself to go slow, to linger and savor, but the second the scrap of pink silk no longer separated them, she curled her legs around his and restlessly tilted her hips. And restraint shattered. He heard her name tear from his throat as he pushed inside, pushed home, nearly blinded by the rush of heat and pleasure. She was tight, almost virginal. But he knew this wasn’t her first time. He’d taken care of that nine years before. And then the marriage—
“Hurt her, and I’ll kill you.”
Six years hadn’t lessened the punch of the vow he’d made to his cousin that starkly cold January morning, nor the emotion behind it, but as she twisted in his arms, murder was the last thing on his mind. He destroyed the memory, refusing to grant power to the past. It was over. Done. Meaningless. She was here now, gazing up at him with untold longing in the blue of her eyes. That was all that mattered.
Need took over, the raw, soul shattering kind that could send a strong man to an early grave. It burned and seared, demanded. He wanted to take away the pain, the sorrow. To prove once and for all that fire didn’t always burn.
Past and present collided, melded, their bodies remembering what time couldn’t fully erase. They moved together as one. She cried out when he brought her to the edge, a distorted gasp from deep within her throat. He answered, twining his fingers with hers and tumbling over after her.
Stranded there in the mountains, surrounded by a forest of the tallest, most beautiful old-growth pines in all of Oregon, the real world seemed a distant entity, a faraway place that didn’t matter, couldn’t harm.
In the hazy light of early morning, he awoke alone.
She was gone. He didn’t need to leave the bed to know that. She’d been gone a long, long time. Years. Many of them. A snowstorm and a nightmare couldn’t change that.
On a low oath, he ripped the tangled covers from his body and surged to his feet, crossed the braided rug to stand at the window. The ending never changed, not in real life, not in his dreams. No matter how hot the fire raged, in the end, only ashes remained. And no matter how beautiful the snowfall that had temporarily transformed the mountainside into a winter wonderland, it always, always faded into a cold, relentless drizzle.
A snow globe sat on the small pine table beside the bed, the foolishly romantic one he’d bought her so long ago, the one that contained a cabin nestled in the mountains.
“It’s…beautiful.”
“I thought you might like it.”
She smiled. “What happened to fairy tales don’t come true?”
“Maybe I was wrong.”
Like hell he’d been wrong.
In one fluid motion he picked up the dome and hurled it across the room, taking obscene satisfaction in the way it smashed against the wall and fell to the floor, shattered just like all those pretenses he abhorred.
“Never again,” he vowed in a voice shaking with an emotion he refused to call hurt. “Never the hell again.”
Chapter 1
Six weeks later
The upper hand felt good.
With insulting detachment, Lance St. Croix studied the sunlight glinting through the cathedral window in a violent wash of light. Shadows stretched languidly across the white carpet