No Perfect Hero(68)

I step into my jeans and hitch them up around my hips, then slip out onto the back porch and rest my elbows on the railing, looking out over the view.

Times like this remind me of when I used to have a free moment during deployment. I’d always slip off guard duty and find a quiet place to lean against a portable camp, or maybe just a rock, and have a smoke.

I haven’t smoked since Jenna, but the low clouds slipping across the sky serve the same purpose. Their winding, wind-driven patterns draw me in the same way the slow curls of smoke used to, letting me blank out and ease my mind.

Night back then was always silence over desert sand. An endless quiet, one that sucked me in deep and blanketed out everything else.

It could be frightening, if you’d let it – but I always found it soothing, having just a few moments where, for once, things weren’t trying to crawl inside my head and lay down roots.

The sounds of night sinking over Heart’s Edge are almost as soothing, too.

Charming Inn is far enough from the main town that I can’t hear cars in the streets or the rowdies already getting started at Brody’s. Won't take long before light and music will be spilling out of open windows and doors with the carefree mood of people who either want to forget their troubles or have very few of them to start with.

Here, though, it’s just the sound of crickets. The whisper of the wind fingering the tops of the trees, the occasional frog that wandered off a little too far from the creek down in the valley.

Small sounds of people, too. The other vacationers in the cabins making dinner or putting a movie on or calling home to tell their loved ones how much fun they’re having in such a rustic little place.

I’d never thought Grandma would be able to make a backwater like our town into a tourist attraction, but it makes sense.

There’s nothing special to attract people to Heart’s Edge. No monuments or history or legends besides our little romance tale about the cliff. But when you spend your life surrounded by city stress where everything moves at a million miles an hour and there’s always this gnawing anxiety over the smallest thing, it can be a relief to get away somewhere.

A place time moves at the speed of honey-gold afternoon sunlight and the only thing to do is take in the beauty and the silence.

For people facing deadly hypertension before they’re thirty, a place like this is a dream.

Yeah. Yeah, I get it now.

I felt that way when I finally came back, too. Never mind the fact that I originally came home to finally settle the score with Bress.

Didn't matter. I felt like I’d come home.

Maybe I should stop using the house hunt for a cover and think about finding somewhere real.

I’m so sunk in my thoughts I don’t hear the door opening behind me, or the soft footsteps creeping up.

I just feel the warmth as Hay presses her body into my back, something thin that feels like a t-shirt between us. It separates our body heat by the thinnest tissue-fine layer, doing nothing to stop my guts from igniting when her tits yield in soft curves against my shoulder blades.

“Hi,” she whispers almost tentatively, laying her cheek against my spine.

It aches to hear the uncertainty in her voice, to feel it in the subtle tension in her touch, waiting to pull away at a moment’s rejection. Like she thinks once the passion's over, our temporary truce might break and I’ll tell her not to touch me, to get out, get away from me.

Not anymore. I can't fucking do it, even if a part of me says I should.

That scares me a little, but not enough to thrust her away.

So instead, I turn in the circle of her arms, leaning my hips against the railing, and wrap her up tight to haul her more firmly against my body, smiling down at her.

She goes soft instantly, her smile warming as she rests her chin against the peak of my ribs.

She still looks half asleep, my t-shirt falling off her tanned, freckled shoulder and her eyes drowsy and glimmering liquid-dark like leaves. The best green shade of summer I’ve ever seen. “You didn’t wake me?”

“Looked like you needed the beauty rest, darlin'. Especially since you’re due on shift and on your feet for another eight hours soon.”

Haley laughs. “So you're tracking my work hours now?”

“Nah.” I grin. “Grandma texted me that I’d better not let you oversleep.”

Her eyes round. “Oh my God. How did she know I was with you?”

“I didn’t think of that.” Choking back a laugh, I clear my throat. “Maybe she was just asking me to be neighborly. She raised me to have manners like that, you know.”

“I’d never be able to tell.” With a half laugh, half groan, Hay thuds her forehead to my chest. “I don’t...I didn’t mean to...”

“I know,” I say. “I know. It’s okay, Hay. We did something we both wanted to, and I’m all right with it if you are.”

“Yeah,” she says softly, sighing and turning her head to rest her cheek to my chest, her half-lidded gaze drifting out across the sea of grass and sky and gently swaying trees. “I think I’m more than all right with it.”

“So?”

“So...?”

Fuck. Why do I feel like a nervous schoolboy all of a sudden instead of a grown-ass man?

This tiny firestorm of a woman has me all tangled up. “How do you feel about doing this some more until you leave?”