It's Only Love(4)

“Please, Ella?”

Her brain didn’t stand a chance against her heart when he said please in that soft, urgent tone. She reached for the door handle.

They met at the front of her car, him still a little less than steady on his feet, and her certain she was making yet another in a string of huge mistakes where he was concerned. Then he put his hand on the small of her back to guide her up the stairs, and that was her undoing.

Why did he have to be so perfectly imperfect? Why did he have to be everything she’d ever wanted, wrapped up in one devilishly sexy, deeply wounded package? Her feelings for him ran the gamut from unbearable to undeniable to untenable and back again, an endless circle of frustration.

Her heart simply couldn’t take another self-inflicted wound—self-inflicted because she kept going back for more even though he’d repeatedly told her there was no hope for anything between them. She didn’t blame him. At least he’d always been straight with her. She blamed herself for being unwilling to take no for an answer.

So as she climbed the stairs to his front door, she attempted to manage her expectations. Nothing would happen. They would talk. She would stay until she was certain he was okay, and then she’d go home alone the way she always did, this time without a lacerating wound to nurse for the foreseeable future.

From behind her, he reached around to open the door, which wasn’t locked. The brush of his arm against her shoulder sent a tingle of awareness to parts of her that only seemed to stand up and take notice of this man. Only he had the power to activate all her systems with just the slightest contact of his body against hers. It made her wonder what it would be like—

No. Not going there. Under no circumstances are you going there. Well . . . No!

While she should be listening to her better judgment and distancing herself, instead she wanted to purr with the simple pleasure that came from being close to him for however long the moment lasted. She’d never claimed this situation was anything other than pathetic. At least she was remaining true to form in her “relationship,” such as it wasn’t, with Gavin.

She stepped into his home ahead of him. The door closed behind them with a resounding thud, and suddenly this felt like a bad idea. A very bad idea, indeed. The last time she’d been here, after hearing he’d been arrested for fighting in a bar, she’d left work to come check on him and had ended up crying all the way home after he sent her away.

“I, um . . . I should go.”

“I was going to make some coffee. Can I entice you to stay for that long?”

If she drank coffee at this hour, she’d be up all night, but she’d be up all night anyway, analyzing every second of this bizarre evening. “Sure. I guess.”

Gavin got busy making the coffee. The only sign of his slight intoxication was the mess he made pouring the water into the back of the coffeemaker. Aim, shoot, miss. Those three little words were like a metaphor for this entire situation, and the thought nearly made her laugh out loud. Except . . . There was nothing at all funny about unrequited love. It sucked every bit as badly as the songs, books and movies claimed it did.

“Have a seat.” He pointed to the stools at the counter. “I’ll be right back.” He disappeared into the hallway that presumably led to his bedroom and the bathroom.

The urge to follow him, to force a confrontation, to jump his bones—something, anything—was so strong that instead of giving in she got busy in the kitchen, poking through cabinets in search of mugs, taking a carton of half-and-half from the fridge and giving it a sniff to make sure it was still good, and locating spoons. Gavin took his coffee with just a touch of cream and a teaspoon of sugar. How she knew that she didn’t even know. She’d been paying close attention to her late brother-in-law’s sexy younger brother for as long as she’d known him, which was starting to measure in decades, rather than mere years.

Pathetic.

In all that time, she’d dated other guys. Even had the misfortune of sleeping with some of them. But she had never once felt anything even close to what happened every time Gavin Guthrie walked into a room. Take now, for instance. He’d changed into a T-shirt and old sweats, washed his face and, judging by the minty fresh scent that came with him, apparently brushed his teeth, too. Drops of water clung to the ends of his longish dark hair, and the scruff that covered his well-defined jaw made her want to rub against him in the most shameless way possible.

Then the coffeemaker beeped, and her brain took over once again, shoving her rapidly beating heart aside to remind her that she was having a cup of coffee that would keep her up all night and then getting the hell out of there.


*

Gavin had no idea what he’d been thinking when he all but begged Ella to come inside with him. Hell, he barely recalled putting her name in his phone in case of an emergency at a time when his entire life seemed to be one endless emergency after another.

He still had no business dragging Ella into his crap, but at the same time he couldn’t bear to let her drive away not knowing when or if he might see her again. She was like a breath of the freshest, coolest mountain air, infusing him with a warm ray of sunshine in the bleak landscape inside his mind.

Things were bad and getting worse. Pushing her away, repeatedly, hadn’t made anything better. In fact, during a wide-awake moment the night before, Gavin had undergone an epiphany, during which he realized that pushing Ella away was part of what had made everything worse. Thus his invitation for coffee, which had been reluctantly accepted. Not that he could blame her. Ella was a lot of things, but a fool had never been one of them. And she’d be a total, unmitigated fool to shackle herself to him.