“That’s why I never let myself get close to you.”
“Rourke, that makes no sense—”
“He knew about us.”
“Did he tell you so?”
“No. He knew, though.”
“And that’s what you’ve lived with all these years.”
“It’s not the sort of thing you forget. He loved us and we betrayed him and he knew, and the second he died, we were frozen there, with no chance to… We can never fix it.” Something in his face reminded her of the boy she’d once known—anger and vulnerability and a stark yearning that had touched her heart. Even then, he’d been both damaged and overprotective. It came through now in his refusal to forgive himself for something he couldn’t change.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I talk to Joey all the time. I’m not going to torture myself over whether or not he knew about us. I refuse to do that, and I wish you would, too.”
“It’s not a choice for me,” he said. “I could have prevented his accident the night he died. I could have dropped everything, driven down and given him a lift.”
“God, Rourke, will you listen to yourself? You can’t save the world. It’s not your job.”
“Oh, sorry, I thought it went with being a cop.”
The ideal role for him. Save people and then walk away. Not this time, she decided. This time, she wouldn’t let him. “You do the best you can,” she said. “We all do, and yes, sometimes it’s not good enough but that’s the way things go. You say we shouldn’t be together, we’ve never been good together, and I say you’re wrong.”
“Bullshit. It should have been you and Joey. You and he were perfect together. It was the way things should have been.”
She glared at him. “That’s something you decided. You didn’t even give me a vote. For your information, Joey and I weren’t ‘perfect.’ Nobody is. I loved him, but never in the way I loved you.” The admission rushed from her before she could stop it. She took a deep breath, mortified yet curiously relieved. Finally, she’d told him the truth, and so far, the world hadn’t come to an end.
His reaction was less than encouraging. He swore and glared at her, got up and went to the window, standing with his back to her. Darkness gathered over the lake, and outside there was not a single glimmer of light. “Bad idea,” he commented at last. “You didn’t want to be with me. I got word my best friend died and all I could think about was the fact that now I could fuck you.”
She knew he was being deliberately crude. His temper had never fazed her. “That’s not what you were thinking and you know it. That’s a story you’ve been telling yourself to make sure you spend your life feeling guilty about what happened. What you really felt, what we both felt, was the loss of someone we loved with all our hearts. Someone we loved so much that we didn’t let ourselves love each other because of him. The problem is that you and I are good together, and we tied ourselves in knots trying to ignore that. And every time we pretended, every time we denied our feelings, we made things worse. Are you seeing a pattern here?”
Rourke turned from the window to face Jenny. Her words took hold of his heart, squeezing until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Crossing the room in two strides, he put his arms around her and pulled her close, and she fit perfectly in his arms. Her soft, flowery smell enveloped him and in the midst of what was probably one of the worst moments of her life, he felt a terrible surge of affection for her.
When she tilted her face up to his, he kissed her delicately, the taste of her impossibly warm and sweet. She kissed him back with an ardor he’d dreamed about for years, and they didn’t speak anymore but strained together, pressing close until Rourke nearly shuddered with need, but at the same time, he had to wonder if this was a replay of the other time, when they thought they’d lost Joey. With an effort he pulled back and asked her with his eyes. She said nothing but took his hand and led him into the bedroom, where a light burned low beside the bed. And there, finally, he showed her his heart in the only way he knew how.
* * *
The snow came down in slanting sheets, piling against the side of the lodge until it nearly reached the windowsill. In the middle of the night, Jenny lay on her side next to Rourke, watching him.
This night had been so long in coming. When they finally let themselves go, it had been an explosion of emotion and it was better than dreams and left her feeling a contentment so deep it made her eyes tear up. The intimacy they’d shared was like nothing she’d ever experienced before, and the piercing sweetness of it caught her unawares. Her feelings for him eclipsed the pain and grief that had surrounded and insulated her.
A weak glimmer of light struggled through the gray dawn. She’d lost count of the number of times they’d made love, learning the landscape of each other’s bodies in a slow series of discoveries. At some point he
