Can’t Say No

she’d done something else, behaved in some different way on that cold winter’s day, that Gram would still be alive. Always, that was the nightmare. She’d take a thousand nightmares rather than the loss. Grief filled her up and was released in an explosion…an explosion of painful sobs. Yet the tower of guilt crumbled, and kept on crumbling.

So much pain…but this time it hadn’t been guilt for Gram, but the loss for herself. Dozens of people had loved and been loved by Bree, but only Gram had always understood the things no one else could grasp, the silly dreams and hopes she knew she couldn’t fulfill. Gram always believed she could. When Gram had died, Bree felt in some terrible way that she’d failed her, but Gram hadn’t died because Bree had failed to save her. Gram was a very old woman with a failing heart, and she had died almost instantly on a cold February day.

Tears kept coming, choking her silently now. Maybe that was the worst, knowing that change was happening inside her; that the process of learning to believe in dreams again was slow and not at all easy. It was happening, but Gram was no longer there to share it. Gram was gone…

“Damn you, Bree.”

Her head jerked up. Instinctively, she cringed under the single harsh beam of flashlight in her eyes, but the light was quickly diverted to the ground. She had one brief glimpse of his face, all dark shadows on granite planes, midnight-blue eyes haunted with anxiety, before Hart swooped down on her like a great offended bear.

He tossed some mosquito netting over her and tossed the flashlight aside before gathering her up, sleeping bag and all. His entire body was trying unsuccessfully to transform itself into a blanket, wrapping her up, covering her, securing her to his warmth.

She was still crying, and fighting very hard to stop. He sat down, still holding her; she made a frantic movement to rise, and had her face gently pushed into his chest for her trouble. “This time you’re getting it all out, Bree, and you’ll do it right now.”

He sounded so much like…Hart. A born bully, Hart, with a low, soothing baritone and huge, warm arms that wouldn’t let her go. How could she fight that? The way he murmured to her, you’d think it was perfectly all right to cry, to release the last of a lonely grief, to let it all go. The torrent of tears finally faded to a steady drip, drip, drip, and an embarrassing occasional hiccup.

“Better?”

She nodded.

He didn’t start scolding until she was ready to be mopped up, half with a handkerchief and half with kisses. “You realize how many hours I had to spend roaming around looking for you? Couldn’t you have just once, just once, accepted a little help from someone without trying to take the whole damn world on your shoulders?”

Exhausted, Bree said quietly, “I’m fine, Hart. Really, I’ve always been fine. I never needed a caretaker before, and I don’t need one now. You never had to-”

“No, I didn’t have to.” Hart pressed one swift, fierce kiss on her mouth before lifting his head to glare at her. “Since you didn’t take your car, I figured you had to be camping out somewhere, but I didn’t figure you’d pick a mosquito haven.” He slapped irritably at his neck before fumbling with the rough white netting between them. “Actually, I did figure it, having very few options at this time of year.”

In a silent whoosh, Bree was suddenly buried in a tangle of mosquito netting. That wouldn’t have been so bad if Hart weren’t trying to bury himself with her. “Now just be patient for a minute, Bree.”

Patient? It was like tussling with a wild animal in the middle of the night. He leaned forward, the weight of his thigh nearly crushing her. She got a mouthful of mosquito netting when she tried to protest; vaguely she heard the zipper of her sleeping bag being pulled down, and then he was trying to tug her out of it as if she were a sack of potatoes. “If you’d sit still for a minute…” he growled at her impatiently.

It was hard to stay miserable when she was in so much danger of smothering. “What are you trying to do besides kill me?”

“There.” His voice reeking with satisfaction, Hart finished his contortions. Sitting cross-legged, using his head for the mosquito-netting tent pole, he wrangled Bree to his lap and more or less covered her with her sleeping bag for warmth. What wasn’t covered by her sleeping bag had certainly been covered by him. His arms were wrapped so tightly around her she could barely breathe. His lips pressed, hard, on her forehead, then in her hair. “I knew it was going to happen tonight,” he whispered.

“What?” He felt…disastrously good. Her cheek lay against the beat of his heart, and the longer he held her, the more his warmth filled up the terrible yawning hollow that the tears had drained. She felt comforted when she shouldn’t have felt comforted at all. It was past time she handled her own problems, stopped leaning on a man who’d upset her entire life and was a little too good with women. She tried to sneak a hand up to rub away the last of the tears from her cheeks, and found Hart’s hand already there.

The pads of his thumbs, very gently, brushed away the final glistening of salty sparkle beneath her eyes. “You had to break down sometime,” he said quietly. “It just couldn’t keep going on. Don’t you think it’s time you told me about it?”

She shook her head no, and in response, felt a scolding trail of kisses whisper through her hair.

“Tell me.” More kisses tracked down the side of her cheek and then back into her hair again. “I’ve had enough of guessing, and hearing it secondhand. Your father said something about your grandmother dying, and I milked Marie for every other clue I could get, but what is all this business about your ‘not being yourself right now’? I don’t know who this ‘yourself’ is supposed to be, but the Bree I know is a most appealing, extremely sensitive, richly complex woman. She’s a little stubborn.” He tacked a kiss just behind her ear. “She’s inclined to take other people a little too seriously. She looks a little like a drowned rat when she pulls back her hair.” He centered another kiss on her chin. That one lingered. “Dammit, Bree. Let me help you.”

His arms tightened around her when she tried to get up. Hart could be unforgivably stubborn. After a time, she leaned her cheek against his chest and sighed irritably. The mosquito netting made a cocoon around the two of them; outside was darkness, the damp loneliness of almost dawn.

It seemed forever before she found her voice again, a voice that tried to sound light and casual. “My grandmother was just…so special. I’ve had people I loved and who loved me all my life, Hart-it’s not as though I was ever deprived, but with Gram…she was a kindred spirit. There could never be anyone like her again. She embraced life every morning, every minute of the day. She could make you believe in rainbows…” Bree’s voice trailed off, a lump in her throat again.

“And you loved her.” Hart’s fingers started to comb slowly through her hair, sifting through it, soothing it.

“I loved her, I respected her, I wanted to be like her. She always said I was, but it wasn’t true. And when she died…something happened. I’m still not sure whether I felt it was Gram I failed, or myself. It seemed part and parcel of the same thing. Everything I’d always valued didn’t seem important anymore. I wanted that joy of life Gram had-I wanted to go after it…” Bree hesitated and then smiled wryly, raising her eyes to Hart’s. “So I dropped a perfectly secure job, I did a Dear John on my fiance, I worried my parents half to death, I took off-hardly mature, responsible actions, now, were they?”

“I think,” Hart said gravely, “that in a sense those were very responsible actions.”

“Hart, your judgment is just not a help. You’re as off the wall as I am,” she whispered, and received a lopsided grin in reply.

“Now you listen. It isn’t crazy to go after what you want in life-it’s crazy not to. And as for your grandmother…” Hart shifted, trying to make a space for both or them to lie down. “You never disappointed her, Bree. I don’t need to have known her to be very sure of that. And whether you realize it or not, you’ve got the fighting instincts of a pro. I should know.” Once he’d settled her on his arm, he hesitated, leaning over her, and started restlessly sifting his fingers through her hair again.

“You should know,” Bree agreed.

“Sun’s coming up,” Hart remarked.

“I noticed.” Fingers of gray had stolen into the darkness. She could make out Hart’s face, the shadows and planes, the dark softness in his eyes.

“You look like hell when you’ve been crying, you know. Your face is all splotchy.”

“Thanks so much. I can always count on you to say the most complimentary-”

“Marry me, Bree.”

A robin twittered somewhere. Probably her imagination, Bree thought in a rush. When one started hearing voices, heaven knew how fast the rest of the mind could crack.