Her heart trembled, her knees shook, as she said, “So what am I thinking?”
He ran a hand over his mouth. Then looked at her. Right at her. She felt it, like an arrow through the heart, even from so far away. “You’re thinking that maybe you were a little hasty yesterday, pulling the rug out from under us.”
“Really? What else?”
“You’re thinking you didn’t give my plan, my request, proper consideration.”
Sable sighed. “Then tell me. Tell me what you think I should do.”
“Stay,” he said as he took off, his long legs eating up the ground between them. “Don’t move.”
“But you’re busy.”
“Story of my life. Though clearly that word takes on less meaning when you’re in the picture.”
“You’re welcome?”
Another laugh. Another skitter of sensation down her spine. This one scattered all the way to the ends of her fingers and toes. She shuffled her feet a little wider in case her knees gave way, only to feel the roof of the car strain.
She wobbled. Then the car wobbled back. Her foot slipping an inch.
“Rafe?”
He must have heard the panic in her voice as he began to run. Towards her. In slow motion.
Well, not in slow motion, but that was how it felt. As if he were now the one pulling out the Hollywood stops. Only she couldn’t run towards him too, as she was stuck on top of a car, in slippery city-girl boots.
One wrong move and the car would go full Herbie and send her flying.
And then there he was in all his dark-curled, broad-shouldered, unshaven glory. His perma-frown in place, the phone still at his ear.
She made to crouch, to go to him, only to be met with a creak. And a groan. The ground seemed to swell and keel. And it suddenly felt a longer way down than it had been up.
She froze, knees bent, one hand out to balance, the other holding Janie’s phone to her ear.
“Sable,” Rafe’s voice murmured in her ear a split second before she heard it in person.
“Hi,” she said into the phone, to him.
“Everything okay up there?”
“Yep. I’m fine.”
“Meaning you’re in straight-out panic mode, right?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
He put his phone in his back pocket and held out a hand.
She tossed him Janie’s phone. He looked at it, passed it on to his sister and gave her a look that sent her off in the direction from whence he’d come. Chatting to the car owners, directing, taking over. Bossy Little Sister in action.
Rafe climbed onto the car as if it were nothing. A mountain goat. Or a man who knew his way around the load-bearing walls of a car chassis.
When he reached the roof he took her around the waist and drew her to her knees, then her backside. Weight distributed over the windscreen frame, she sat, legs sliding down the window. While he uncurled his long self beside her.
“I thought you’d gone,” he said, looking down at his hands, playing with a blade of grass he must have nabbed along the way.
The constant movement of his hands was so familiar, she near choked on the feelings spilling through her. “I thought about it.”
“Couldn’t get a bus ticket?” he asked, glancing her way.
She nodded. Slowly. Mesmerised by the emotion in his eyes. The heat. The hope.
That hope was everything. Her touchstone. Her true north. The hope that she’d finally, truly found her way back to him.
It was enough for Sable to stop prevaricating and leap. Figuratively. For she was clutching every muscle in case the entire car deflated underneath them.
“Rafe.” She swallowed. Watched his dark gaze follow the small movements in her face. “When you asked me to stay the night of the dinner party, I know you said you wanted it to be a ‘no-strings’ thing, but the thing is...”
She dragged her eyes from his before she found herself lost in his eyes. “The thing is, I’ve spent so much of my life on the run. First with Mercy, dragging me from town to town. Then from my own shadow as I struggled to figure out where I fit every time we stopped. Then you came along and for the first time in my life I knew what it meant to stand still. To simply be. It was a heady thing. Magical really. Overwhelming. So much so I ran from you too.”
She glanced up at Rafe to find his eyes on her. Gaze full, dark with emotion. Then his hand slid slowly around her back, hooked her around the middle and drew her in. His chin landing on top of her downcast head.
It was so sweet, so tender, her throat threatened to close up. But she had more to say.
“I came here with a plan,” she said. “But a little voice kept telling me that it was an excuse. That I was still running away. From LA, sure, all those opinions of people I’d never met. But mostly from the anger I felt at myself for all those lost years. And when I found out, yesterday, that I wasn’t pregnant, it felt like a slap from the universe.”
Sable scratched at a loose thread in Rafe’s jeans. Before her hand landed on his knee. He took her fingers in his, turned them over, entwined them together.
“I promise you weren’t the only one.”
She slid her head out from under his, shook her hair from her face and looked back at him.
“I was caught up in the romance of it all. Your return, the feelings still between us, the notion of a ready-made family. When you told me it didn’t take... I’m so sorry, Sable.”
He lifted his hand, ran his thumb along her cheek, gathering a tear she hadn’t even felt drop.
“Do you know how rare it is to fall the first time you try?” she asked.
“I’m thinking, pretty rare.”
“Even the healthiest people in the healthiest relationships can struggle. So much comes down to luck and timing.”
“I can imagine.”
“And...” She stopped. Swallowed. “And the thing is, I don’t want to stop trying. With you. For as long
