Strong.
And she knew from long-ago experience that he would be warm to the touch. And oh how she wanted to touch. She wanted that more than she wanted her next breath of fresh air—and that scared her to death.
But Adam didn’t appear to share the yearning, which was good because she didn’t think she could resist him.
The wind kicked up and the temperature dropped. Adam pointed to Diamond Ridge ahead, and she nodded. Hopefully, they’d find her dad there and be on their way home by this afternoon.
Another hard, vicious gust hit them and she looked at Adam, wondering why they were stopped, wasting valuable daylight. “The road ends here?”
“Only if you don’t know where you’re going.” He gestured with his chin to what appeared to be a wall of woods. “You can pick it up about a hundred yards north.”
She was going to have to take his word on that. He got out of the vehicle and muscled a fallen tree that was in their way. He got back behind the wheel and turned to her. “So, tell me again why you’ve pretended to be married this whole time.”
She blinked. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing, actually. Answer the question.”
She sighed. “I didn’t pretend. Everyone just…assumed.”
“And by everyone,” he said, “you mean…”
“My dad. Grif.” She shrugged, not wanting to talk about this. “Neither of them are exactly big emotional talkers.”
“No guy is,” Adam pointed out. “But what does emotion have to do with it? You say, ‘Hey, Dad, Grif, my husband left me—’”
“I never said Derek left me.”
“So he didn’t?”
How had they gotten here?
Reaching out, Adam tugged off her reflective sunglasses. She really wanted to do the same to him, but she held back because this felt easier, not having to look into his see-all gaze. She blinked a few times in the harsh day’s glare, realizing it was no longer raining. It was too cold to rain.
Adam waited patiently.
So did Milo, head cocked as if he was intently following this conversation. Well, probably intently was too strong a word since he appeared to be smiling.
“No. Derek didn’t leave me,” she finally said, just as a few snowflakes began to drift down. Lazy. Slow. Fluttering through the air like forgotten hopes and dreams. “I left him.”
“The marriage was no good?”
“The marriage was no good.” She pushed her quickly frizzing hair back from her face. “But the divorce was great.” She reached up to try and contain her hair. No luck.
Adam pulled off his hat and slipped it onto her head, tucking a tendril of wayward hair behind her ear. His fingers lingered, stroking gently over her temple, along her jaw. “He hurt you, Holly?”
A rich question, especially coming from him.
And now she had a bigger problem—she was melting at his touch. Much too attracted to him, she leaned back, out of the danger zone.
Actually, she’d have to be on the other side of the planet to leave the danger zone that was Adam Connelly, but she was good at making do. “Not in the way you think.”
His eyes never left hers. “What happened?”
Oh no. Not going there. Not with him. “You know, if you’re feeling so Chatty Cathy,” she said, “let’s talk about you. You never answered my question last night—why did you come back to Sunshine?”
“I live here,” he said simply. “My brothers are here. My friends and business—”
“Are all here. Yeah, yeah,” she finished for him, doing her best to keep the hurt out of her voice. “But you said you weren’t going to come back ever.”
“No, actually. I said I wasn’t coming back to us.”
A direct hit, and she did her best not to fall out of the Ranger because that would have been embarrassing. As if she weren’t embarrassed enough. “I see,” she managed evenly. “Big difference there, I suppose.”
He grimaced. “Holly—”
“Can you just get us there, please?” She turned away from him, arms over her chest. She felt the weight of his stare, but then he finally put the ATV in gear and drove straight into the woods.
Adam drove through the woods with single-minded purpose so he wouldn’t think about the woman next to him. She was making a big production out of staring into the quickly thickening forest around them, looking completely engrossed in the gorgeous ambiance. But she was radiating confusion and hurt.
His fault, of course. “Holly.”
She pretended not to hear him. She was still wearing his hat, and she looked adorable. Adorably hot…
Not going there, Connelly.
Shaking his head, he drove on, clearing his thoughts. He’d been taught how to do this in counseling for the times when his brain got caught in a nightmare loop, replaying shit he didn’t want to replay but couldn’t stop. The technique was to start low, in the toes. He wriggled them. Then moved his thoughts to the arch of his foot. Then his heel. He went on to purposely and carefully categorize his entire body and, in doing so, prevented his brain from hijacking his thoughts.
He was at his own dick when he caught sight of Holly’s expression. Pale. Solemn.
Unhappy.
It was worry, he assured himself. Worry for Donald.
And it was also because he was an asshole.
He argued with himself for a minute, then stopped the Ranger. “Holly.”
She was still pretending he didn’t exist, and doing a fine job of it, too, so he cupped her jaw and turned her to face him.
Her eyes flashed at that. Yeah, she was pissed off, too, and suddenly, the interior of the Ranger felt a little tight. Especially since Milo was leaning forward, blowing doggy breath on them, waiting for Adam’s next move.
“Down,” Adam said.
Milo’s ears sagged, but he lay down.
“Holly, look at me.”
She lifted her gaze and he was immediately slammed by her beautiful blue eyes.
“It wasn’t you,” he said, voice soft. “It was me.”
“What?”
“Back when I left. When I said good-bye. It wasn’t you, it was me.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you seriously giving me Classic Breakup Line Number One right now?” She leaned away from him, arms crossed, body language blaring high warnings at him. “Should I feed you your next line, or do you know it?”
He scowled. “It wasn’t a line.”
“Oh yes, it was. And not a very good one. Line Number Two isn’t much better. It’s ‘I wasn’t ready for a long term relationship.’”
Adam couldn’t believe he’d been drawn into this conversation, or that he was even here. “I wasn’t ready for a long-term relationship.”
“Oh my God.” She turned away.
Milo, always extremely sensitive to tension, leaned forward and licked Adam’s ear.
And then Holly’s. She sighed and hugged the dog.
Swearing beneath his breath, Adam shoved the Ranger back into gear but didn’t hit the gas. He could feel his brain swelling. Probably an oncoming aneurism. “You were eighteen.”
“Old enough.”
“No,” he said, disagreeing. “And I was—”
“A good guy,” she said so firmly he knew that she believed it to the depths of her soul.
Something inside him reacted to that, something forgotten so long ago. “A complete fuckup,” he corrected. “Did you forget why I had to leave Sunshine?” He knew she hadn’t. His wild ways had been legendary. Hell, he’d dragged her into some of them. No one would have believed that Donald Reid’s daughter, in Sunshine for the summer, would give a thug like Adam a second look.
But she had.
She’d sucked him into her vortex in the best possible way. And then Adam’s wild ways caught up with him one night when he and his idiot friends had gone drag racing out on Highway 89. They’d raced a lot. But on this particular night, the weather had gone to shit. Not that they’d cared. Hell, they’d been invincible.
Thank God, Holly hadn’t been with him. He’d been careful to keep her away from his friends. The accident, when the inevitable had happened, hadn’t involved Adam or his car. Nope, that would have been far too easy.
The cop chasing them had slid out on the wet, slick highway, over a three-hundred-foot embankment, dying instantly.
By the skin of his teeth, Adam had been spared legal blame by the court system. The judge had ruled the tragedy an accidental death but had firmly suggested Adam get his act together, and fast.
On a one-track path to hell and already halfway there, Adam had been at a loss on how to do that. Then Donald—clueless as to what Adam and his precious daughter were doing with their free time in Adam’s beat-up old truck—had suggested the military.
Adam had agreed, and everyone within a two-hundred-mile radius had breathed a sigh of relief.
Adam could still remember facing Holly after he’d enlisted, looking into her achingly blue eyes, torn by what he felt for her and what he would become if he stayed.
Out of some sense of obligatory self-flagellation, he’d gone about cutting everything good out of his life before he left. He’d told Holly not to wait for him, that he wouldn’t be coming back. That she needed to move on.
And damned if, for the first time ever, she’d actually done exactly as he’d told her. When he’d found out about her marriage to Derek, he’d thought, Good, great, perfect. She’d really moved on. And while he was happy for her, he hadn’t kept in touch, not wanting to hear about it more than he already had.
As for him, he’d gone on to see five continents, learned how to survive in just about any kind of conditions, shoot anything with a bullet, and how to be a detached asshole. He’d also learned the value of discipline and boundaries, the hard way of course, since he didn’t know the easy way to do anything. His twenties were a blur of more wild-and-craziness, but this time it had all been sanctioned by good, ol’ Uncle Sam. “Did you?” he asked Holly. “Do you remember why I left?”
She looked away, arms crossed as if she had to hold her aching heart inside her chest. “I’m not going to discuss this.”
“So you’re still stubborn as hell. Stubborn and…”
When he broke off, not finishing the sentence, she spun back to him. “Oh, don’t stop there,” she said, “it was just getting good. Stubborn and…what?”
Adam tried really hard not to make stupid mistakes these days. But once in a while, he fell off the wagon. “Clueless,” he said, and once again hit the gas.
Seven
Stubborn and clueless. Adam thought her stubborn and clueless. Holly stewed over that for a good long time, but eventually she had to admit he might be onto something with the stubborn thing. After all, being stubborn as hell had pretty much directed her life. It was why she’d gone after Adam in the first place. Why she’d gone off to New York and married the first man to give her an ounce of attention. Why she’d let people think she was happy when she wasn’t.
It was why she was here on this mountain with Adam rather than letting him go without her.
So, yeah. She’d give him the stubborn thing.
But clueless? Her gut was churning up pretty good over that one. If she hadn’t needed him for navigating the now muddy, treacherous route, she’d like to show him clueless—with a boot up his very fine ass.
An hour later, the sky was as dark as gunmetal. The promised storm was nearly on them. She felt her chest tighten as she thought about her father, possibly hurt.
Or worse.
Another call to his cell got her nothing.
When Adam stopped and turned off the engine, silence reigned, except for the wind rattling the rain from the trees to the saturated ground. “Where are we?” she asked.
He pulled out his phone and checked for service. Some areas were complete dead zones, but in most they could get a few bars. He must have been able to do that now because he brought up a map, showing her their location. “We’re about a mile northeast of Diamond Ridge.”
She eyed the sky again. “It’s pretty bad out.”
“Not yet it’s not.”
She was glad he thought so. It was getting colder, but his easy confidence helped keep her panic at bay.
Because her father was out in this…somewhere.
“Donald would’ve been able to get farther in his ATV than this,” Adam said. “The weather was good on the day he left. But any ATV tracks will be washed away by now.” He turned to her. “Ready?”
For what? “Sure.”
He got out and she realized he meant they were going to hike in that last mile. Milo jumped out, too, sitting at attention, staring up at Adam, who gave him some hand signal. At the sight of it, Milo took off, bounding over the terrain like a rabbit.
“Where’s he going?” she asked.
“To search. He’ll let me know if he sees signs anyone’s been through this way, or if he finds someone.”
Or a body.
Adam didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. He tossed her a pair of warm, thick gloves while he affixed two pairs of snowshoes to his backpack before gingerly pulling it on.
“Your shoulder,” she said.
“I’ve hiked with far worse injuries,” he said, brushing off her concern, gesturing for her to grab her pack.
She did and then stared at the trail ahead, which appeared to go straight up, vanishing into thin air. “It’s a lot steeper from this side.”
“It’s an optical illusion.”