Guilty Needs(15)
“Going to keep hiding away, Colby? How did that ever solve anything?”
He stopped in the doorway. Slowly, he turned around, but there was nobody in there. He saw nothing. His voice hard and firm, he said, “I am not hiding.”
Then he left the room.
Something light, oddly soothing, touched his shoulder. He hissed and jerked, scanning the room. “If you’re not hiding, then go find her. She’s the reason you came back. Not this house. Admit it. Even if you can only admit it to yourself for now…stop hiding.”
He wasn’t going to hide. He didn’t come here to hide.
He came to tie up loose ends and decide what in the hell he was going to do with his life. That had nothing to do with hiding.
As he made the thirty-minute drive to the cemetery, he even managed to almost make himself believe that.
Then he saw Bree sitting by the grave as he made his way up the path.
She’s the reason you came back…
He hadn’t seen her since she’d left his place a week earlier and he really didn’t want to see her now.
Liar! Okay, well at least that thought actually felt like his own and it wasn’t ringing in his ears like the echo of Alyssa’s voice.
Stop hiding.
He wasn’t hiding. He just…well, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to see her yet. That was all. But the memory of that soft chastising kept him from backing away, even though he wanted to.
It would have been easy enough to leave. She hadn’t seen him yet and since he hadn’t seen her bike or her truck in the main parking lot, he figured she’d parked in one of the smaller ones. He could just avoid her until she left, make this first visit to his wife’s grave in privacy.
He didn’t though.
That voice kept whispering through his mind and he had to wonder if maybe his hallucinations weren’t on to something.
She’s the reason you came back…
The house didn’t matter to him.
Hell, his career didn’t matter to him. It had been a year since he’d written a damn thing and he couldn’t care less. Even though he knew he should.
But the house, his writing, his career, none of it seemed real. Nothing seemed real anymore, not since Alyssa had died in his arms. Well, nothing except dreams that made him hot with lust and sick with guilt. Until Bree had walked back into his life seven days earlier, or rather, until he had walked back into hers, nothing but those dreams had affected him.
Seeing her made him feel more alive than he had felt since losing his wife and if not for the guilt choking him, he might have even enjoyed it. But the guilt, man, it was killing him. How wrong of him was it to think about how damn pretty she was as he joined her at his wife’s grave? He laid a single pale-pink rose in front of the headstone and then sank down to the grass to sit by Bree.
“A year.”
Her voice was huskier than normal, soft and sad. He glanced at her and could tell she’d been crying. “Yeah. I can’t believe it.”
“Me either.”
She licked her lips and glanced up at the sky. “At least it isn’t pouring down rain today.”
He thought back, remembered the unseasonably cold rain that had poured from the sky the day they buried Alyssa. That rain had chilled him through and through, freezing him in a way that had gone deeper than just the surface. It had frozen him clear through to the heart and he’d been grateful. He hadn’t wanted to feel anything. Hadn’t wanted to grieve. Grieving meant letting go and he hadn’t been ready to do that.
The hot sun shone down on his back, warming him through the simple white polo shirt he’d unearthed from his closet. He could feel Bree’s body heat along his side, warming him in a way the sun never could. And he could smell her—that soft, sexy scent that had nothing to do with any store-bought lotion or perfume.
She was so damn different from Alyssa. Smooth, caramel-colored skin, dark gray, quiet eyes that seemed to notice everything, a long, lean body with those dangerously sexy curves.
Aside from that pinup body, everything about Bree was subtle.
Everything about Alyssa had been vivid, intense, fast—just like her life. She had worn a riot of colors, had talked fast, jumping from one subject to the next with a speed that often left the listener struggling to keep up. Five-feet-four, a lush ripe figure, her long blondish-red hair a mass of spirals and ringlets. She’d spend nearly forty-five minutes a day on her hair, another twenty or thirty picking out her clothes and putting on makeup. Completely female. He couldn’t go into the bathroom without finding something lacy and frilly and pink draped somewhere. He’d loved it. He’d loved watching her slick herself down with lotion, loved watching her mess with her hair, loved everything about her.
But he’d spent half of the last year since her death fantasizing about her best friend.
Maybe it was the polarity of the two. Bree was so damn different from Alyssa—always had been.
Or maybe you’re just realizing there’s an attraction there.
That thought was quickly followed by a rush of guilt. Realizing an attraction, admitting to one that had started within weeks—no, hours—of burying his wife, what kind of bastard did that make him?
It had only been hours after they’d buried Alyssa that he’d found himself lying on the floor in Bree’s house, her arms around him, his head pillowed on her thigh and his mind full of her. He’d looked at her…and wanted.