Guilty Needs(22)

“Are we back to that?” Bree demanded.

But the question was posed to empty air, because Alyssa was already gone.

She didn’t know what made her turn.

She hadn’t heard his car, hadn’t heard him approach and she knew he hadn’t said anything. But he was there. She knew it even before she turned around. Slowly, her legs stiff, her heart slamming away, she turned to watch as Colby walked her way.

There was something different about him.

It had only been a week since she’d seen him, but something had changed. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

His hair was still too long, in desperate need of a cut. He looked a little tanner, like he’d spent some time working outside. But that wasn’t it. He moved… She nibbled on her lip, watched how he strode toward her and thought back.

His walk, she realized.

The past few weeks and before, really back when Alyssa and he had first gotten the news that the cancer was too advanced, he had walked as though he had the weight of the world crushing down on him.

Slow. Not feeble or anything. Just deliberately slow, as though, if he moved too fast, the weight on his shoulders would fall and crash. Or he would.

As if he were doing some sort of unseen balancing act.

But that had changed.

He moved with the confident, easy grace he’d been born with.

He came, halted beside her and smiled, reached up to brush her bangs back from her eyes. He glanced at the flowers on Alyssa’s grave, then down at the ones he held. It was a store-bought bouquet, a bunch of daisies that were dyed brilliant colors. They looked exactly like something Alyssa would have loved.

“Yours look better than mine,” he said.

Bree made herself smile and shrug. “Yeah, but yours look like something Alyssa would have picked out.” She took them from him and knelt, under the pretense of adding his daises in with her lilies. Really, she mostly needed to have a minute to get her breathing level before he wondered why she was practically panting.

The daisies’ bright colors should have looked silly next to the quiet beauty of the lilies, but she decided it looked just right. “How are you doing?”

“Good. I think.” He crouched down beside her. From the corner of her eye, she glanced at him and saw that he was smiling. The faint, easy sort of smile a person had when things were going right. An unconscious smile. “Was going through my office yesterday and found an old story I’d set aside. Ended up flipping through it and next thing I know, it’s nine o’clock, I’ve added fifty pages to the story and half the plot is worked out.”

“Really? That’s great.” She turned to look at him, smiling. He hadn’t written anything since he’d finished the last book in his contract a month before Alyssa died. “Your agent is going to be thrilled.”

He grimaced. “If she still wants to be my agent. I’ve left her hanging for quite a while.”

Without realizing what she was doing, she leaned forward and hugged him. “You’ve had a hell of a lot to deal with, Colby. She’ll understand that.” She squeezed, but before she could pull away, his arms came up and wrapped around her.

It was an awkward position, her kneeling, Colby balanced on his heels. But he didn’t seem interested in letting her go. Bree didn’t have the will to pull back from him, not even when he shifted around and settled on the ground so he could pull her into his lap. All without letting go. “I missed you,” he said quietly, his breath whispering along her skin.

It was an innocent statement.

Even his embrace was innocent. Bree knew that.

Just as she knew, if she didn’t get away from him soon, she was going to embarrass herself. She squeezed him and said, “I know. I missed you too.” Then she tried to ease back.

He let her, but he didn’t let go completely. She ended up sitting on the ground between his thighs, one of his hands on her waist. She sat as straight as she could, trying to keep from leaning against him. “Where did you spend the past year?” she asked, trying to make herself think about something other than the fact that he was so damn close.

“Here…there…everywhere. Spent some time in South Carolina, drove down the coast. Spent the past couple of months working in Mobile.” He shrugged.

“Doing what?”

“Nothing at first. Just driving. Had to keep moving around. Made it easier for a while. I took some money from my savings account and just used it for hotels, to eat on. When it was gone, I sold the Lexus and bought the cheapest car I could find and just did more driving around. Worked odd jobs—bartending, construction, whatever.”

“Did it help?”

He was silent for a while. When he answered, his voice was thoughtful, slow, as though he still wasn’t entirely sure of the answer. “I don’t know. Some, I think. I hid from it for a while. Hid from her dying. Did my damnedest not to think about her if I could, and when I started to think about her, I made myself stop. It made it easier.”

“You weren’t ready.” Shifting around, she knelt in front of him.

He lifted a hand and cupped her face.

The feel of him touching her almost had her shuddering and she just barely managed to throttle it down. But she couldn’t control everything, and when she spoke, her voice was low and raspy. That could be blamed on other things though. He didn’t have to know it was because she was dying for him, right? “Sometimes we’re just not ready to deal with things. The mind shields us until we are, gives us time. You just needed some time. It gets easier.”