Moonlight Road (Virgin River #11)(45)

Maureen tilted her head and smiled at her son. “Well, then, Luke, if you don’t want to worry, don’t. George and I are very cautious and plan ahead.”

“Mom,” Sean attempted.

Franci stood. “Stop. You flew jets that go over five hundred miles an hour and are just back from Iraq—you aren’t allowed to take the temperature of anyone’s life choices. The way I see it, if you and I decide to spend our retirement in an RV, I just hope to God it’s as fancy as theirs. Now, this meeting is over. Who wants a drop of Courvoisier with their coffee?”

“I do,” Shelby said hopefully.

“Who besides Shelby?” Franci asked.

Aiden carried through exactly as planned—he brought Chilean sea bass, mushrooms, rice pilaf, baby green beans and cheesecake to Erin’s cabin for dinner and cooked with her. No bear. He found out that her undergrad degree was in accounting, so it was natural for her to pursue tax law. Law school? “I’d always been a good student and I saw potential. Once I started, I wondered if I hadn’t taken on more than I should have, but it worked out. What did you want to do?” she asked him.

“Save the world,” he said with a shrug. He thought maybe now would be the time to explain that he wasn’t exactly who or what she assumed. “I was a crew member on an ambulance team in college, my part-time job, and the senior EMT delivered a baby. It was the most awesome thing I’d ever seen and I—” The timer on the stove went off and he jumped up to pull out the fish, distracting her.

Through dinner they talked about the most important people in their lives—to Erin it was her brother, sister and her brother-in-law. She told the story of how Marcie found Ian Buchanan in this very cabin, before it was, in her opinion, habitable. How Marcie fell in love with him and married him. When she mentioned that Drew graduated from medical school, he thought it was the right time to tell her…. But the phone rang and she dashed to it. She was only on a second before disconnecting and, with a big smile, said, “Remember I told you Marcie and Ian are coming up for the long weekend—Fourth of July. Would you like to meet them?”

“I would. Definitely,” he said. “How is it you never married?” he asked her. “And don’t tell me you didn’t date, because any man with a pulse would ask you out.”

She flipped the subject on him. “I dated—though infrequently. But what about you? I can tell you’ve been a bar hound, out with a hundred women.”

He was shocked. “What makes you think that?”

“You’re confident, good-looking, and admit it—you’re good with women. I’m a terrible pickup and you have me doing exactly what you want!”

He laughed at her; he almost said something about how he had to be good with women in his business. And the things he’d seen in his work as a gynecologist absolutely ensured he wasn’t careless or frivolous about sex. “Nothing could be further from the truth! Honestly? The military keeps a guy busy and the only women I was meeting happened to be hospital staff. We had some fun, but it seemed like a bad idea to have too much fun, so it was just friends. You must have run into similar situations with colleagues? Lawyers you met on the job? Bottom line—no long-term relationships since my very miserable, very short marriage.”

“Tell me about that,” she said, leaning her chin in her hand.

And so he had, trying to keep the high drama of it all out of the story. Really, some of the things he went through with Annalee were not to be believed. He’d been a complete fool and he wasn’t proud of it.

Before he left her that night, very reluctantly, he made good use of her lips. He pulled her tight against him so she knew he was completely turned on. He was more than a little grateful—he hadn’t been that turned on in a while, and it was fantastic. All that night in his little cabin by the river he thought about Erin, dreamed about her.

The next day they went for a walk through a redwood grove, although poor Erin was still stiff and sore from her marathon bike ride down the beach. They held hands and talked about their families. Aiden learned about Erin’s remodel by e-mail. “I’d done some remodeling around my dad’s house the past several years, so I had an idea what I wanted. And the builder, a local guy, was easy to work with.”

Aiden found himself telling her about how his brothers Luke and Sean met and married their wives, about his widowed mother who hadn’t had a date in a dozen years, and George, about how Art came to live on Luke’s property and his recent declaration that he had a girlfriend. And in between these stories, their arms were around each other and they kissed: deep, hot, passionate kisses that lasted a long time. “I love kissing you,” he told her.

“I don’t think this is kissing,” she said. “I think this is making out. I haven’t done this in a really long time.”

He pressed her up against one of those majestic redwoods. With a finger, he stroked back some of that silky reddish-blond hair over her ear. “I should talk to you about something. About me, about what I do for a living.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said, shaking her head.

“It must matter, Erin. Aren’t you a little concerned about getting involved with some sailor you’ve only known a few weeks? Kissed a few times?”

“Because of something as unimportant as income?” She shook her head again.