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CHAPTER TEN

JEFFERSON WAS AWARE of the surrender, not just in her but in himself. Had he actually been flirting with his housekeeper?

No, he told himself sternly, he had not. Being with her had coaxed his more playful side to the surface. Okay, he was more than surprised that he had a playful side, but he blamed the storm for cutting down his defenses, placing them in this predicament where they had to share a spoon.

And sharing that spoon had led to this. The complete collapse of defenses. They were going to share even deeper confidences.

“I’m not a housekeeper,” Angie confessed solemnly.

“Yeah, I kind of figured that part out.”

“I’m close, though, and qualified. I’m a high school home economics teacher in Calgary.”

Jefferson contemplated that. He could feel the truth of it—he thought of her making her lists and organizing his kitchen. He thought of her home breaking up, and her longing. He was not surprised that she had chosen a career where she would teach people how to make a home. And superimposed over this knowledge of her, he thought of the taste of ice cream, mingled with her taste, still sweet in his mouth.

“Or I was a teacher,” she said pensively. “I don’t know when I can go back there.” She shuddered.

Jefferson pulled the shared blanket more tightly over their shoulders, pulling her more tightly into him. “What happened?”

“First, I need you to understand why it happened.”

“Okay.”

“I met my fiancé in university.”

“Your fiancé?” Jefferson felt the shock of it. And the relief. All the electricity between them didn’t matter. She was taken! But his relief was short-lived.

“Not anymore,” she said sadly. “We broke off. That’s what made me so vulnerable when...well, I’ll get to that. Harry and I had been engaged since the second year of our studies. We graduated at the same time, and both got wonderful jobs. I secured my dream job teaching home economics in high school, he got on with one of the banks. I assumed it was time to take the next step, but every time I tried to set a date for the wedding, Harry would become evasive.”

He heard inside himself oh-oh but did not say it out loud.

“In fact,” she said, her lips pursed with remembered annoyance, “had I been paying more attention, I would have seen the whites of his eyes rolling in pure terror at the mere mention of spending a lifetime with me.”

“A lifetime with you doesn’t seem as if it should make eyes roll in terror.”

Her mouth popped open in surprise. She studied his face, as if she was looking for the lie. She smiled. He realized he was treading very dangerous ground, indeed.

“Finally, he worked up his nerve to tell me the truth. He had discovered his career in finance was a terrible mistake. He was bored.”

“God forbid we should ever be bored,” Jefferson said. He tried to keep his tone dry, but in fact, he felt angry.

“And unfulfilled. He had just discovered he didn’t want what other people wanted. He did not want a boring life in the suburbs with two-point-five children and a bus trip into work every day. And guess what? He’d already found someone who didn’t want the very same things he didn’t want and it wasn’t me.”

“Aw, Angie.”

She held up her palm. “Please don’t feel sorry for me. I should have picked up on the signs long before I did. And, besides, this is just the story before the story.”

“Go on.”

“So, in the space of a week, he quit his job and asked me for his ring back.”

“He asked for the ring back? That’s scummy.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Thank you. I thought so, too, especially after he told me he intended to sell it to finance his tickets. Make that two tickets.”

Jefferson was forming a very low opinion of a man who would not only ask for the ring back, but tell his ex-betrothed the reason he had to have it. “Loser,” he muttered.

“Thank you,” she said, as if she had desperately needed someone else to see it. Angie looked adorable all wrapped in the blanket, her hair curling wildly as it started to dry. But when she wrinkled her nose like that? How could anyone have ever pried themselves away from her?

“Thailand,” Angie went on, tilting her chin bravely. “That’s where he and Loxi—can that possibly be a real name?”

She glared at him as if she expected an answer.

“No, I don’t think it can be a real name.”

“Not that it stopped her from traveling! How can you even get a passport with a name like that?” Her question was full of indignation.

“I’d like to know,” he agreed.

She sighed at his agreement. “Anyway, that’s where he and Loxi had a plan to live on the beach and teach yoga or some such thing.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her eyes searched his, and her chin quivered. In denial of that emotion, she said quickly, “You don’t have to be sorry. I’m just setting up why I was vulnerable. I’m over it now.”

He doubted that. He could see she carried the pain of the betrayal as if it were somehow her fault, as if she had accepted her fiancé’s abandonment as a judgment of her. That she somehow was not worthy.

“But I wasn’t over it then. Right after it happened, I was in a shocked daze. Naturally, in the staff room, my missing engagement ring was noticed eventually. I had to tell people Harry and I were no longer an item. I didn’t tell anyone the Loxi or Thailand part. It was too humiliating.”

Jefferson thought of her carrying that on her own, trying to keep her head up high, and ached for her.

“Anyway, I went from discussing wedding plans and poring over bridal magazines with two other teachers who were engaged to being the subject of gossip and pity.”

She sat very still. She pulled the blanket a little tighter around her and gazed out at the dark waters of the pitching lake beyond the cove.

“There was another teacher there,” she said, her voice strained. “Winston.”

He saw a flinch crawl along her skin.

“I can’t say I’d ever paid the least attention to him besides a casual good-morning. He was quite an unassuming little fellow, given to wearing bow ties.”

“Never trust a man who wears a bow tie,” he told her.

“Now you tell me.”

She gave him a little smack on his chest and continued. “He confided in me that the very same thing had happened to him. I could actually see the tears in his eyes when he said it. He asked me if I wanted to go for a coffee with him.

“It seemed safe enough. My God, he was a fellow teacher. I felt sorry for him. I thought maybe he just needed to talk about it. I actually thought Oh, look, other people beyond you have problems. I thought it would be good for me to get out of myself for a bit. So, I agreed. One coffee.

“But I could tell, once we were out of the school environment, that there was something a touch off about him. I’m not sure I could put my finger on it, but it made me uncomfortable, and I gulped down my coffee and left with murmured sympathies about the pathetic state of his personal life.

“The next day in the coffee room, he was entirely inappropriate, sitting too close to me, putting his hand on my knee, touching my hair. It was creepy. I took to avoiding him, even taking breaks in my classroom. But he tracked me down, and I did not want to be in my classroom alone with him.”

She stopped, troubled. Her hands were wound together and she stared down at them.

Jefferson could see they were trembling. He covered her hands with his own and felt how shockingly cold they were.

“The more I rejected him,” Angie whispered, “the more strongly he pursued me. He bugged me at school. He called me at home. He gave me unwanted gifts. He sent flowers.

“I finally had to talk to my principal about it. Winston was warned to stay away from me. He didn’t. It actually got worse after the principal talked to him. Within a few weeks, he’d been fired.

“The phone calls really started to come in then. I changed my number three times. He always managed to get it. Sometimes he’d be raging that it was all my fault. Other times he’d tell me he had forgiven me for ruining his life. Other times he would be crying. Pleading with me to come back to him. Come back to him? We’d had a single cup of coffee.

“I had to involve the police. I had to get a restraining order. He started hanging out across the street from my place, just out of range of the order. I moved to a new apartment with what I thought was better security. Despite all that, he just kept coming at me. I was a wreck. I was as jittery as if I drank a hundred cups of coffee a day. I startled if one of the children came up behind me suddenly. I barely slept, and when I did I had terrible dreams.

“I started to question my sanity. I wondered if I was overreacting. I wondered if I was making things worse than they were. I wondered what I had done to lead him on. I pondered, constantly, what I should be doing differently.

“On the last day of school before summer break, I went home to my new apartment. The door was locked. Nothing seemed amiss or out of place. I went into my bedroom. The first thing I noticed was that my dresser drawers had been opened.

“And the second thing I noticed was that there was a stuffed bear on my bed. A huge stuffed bear, a panda, almost as big as I was. It had a red ribbon around its neck that made it look as though its neck had been slashed.”

She shuddered at the memory, and Jefferson tried to contain the pure fury that was coursing through his veins.

“I called the police, and they said they would arrest him...if they could find him. I have never felt such terror or felt so unprotected. I tossed a few things in a bag, and got in my car. I let a few friends know I was going away, and why I was going away, but that I couldn’t tell them where.

“Because I didn’t even know where I was going. It seemed it didn’t matter how far I drove, it wasn’t far enough. I was so paranoid I would not use my phone or my bank card. I checked in with the police on pay phones—do you know how hard it is to find a pay phone these days—but there was no sign of him. I began to feel as if he was hot on my heels. I was running out of money and hope. And then I saw your ad.”

She was silent for a long time. “And that’s why,” she finished softly, “in a boat in the middle of a lake, right now, I feel exhilarated. Because finally, I am in a place where he can’t get at me.”

Jefferson knew he should be relieved that it was not their togetherness filling her with exhilaration. He told himself he wasn’t relieved—or disappointed—because the emotion he was feeling drowned out every other one.

He had never felt such a killing fury as he felt now at the two men who had brought Angie to this point. But he controlled himself. He could see she had had enough of men who could not put her first, whose self-centeredness was so complete they could not control their own impulses in the interest of someone else.

“You can stay,” he said gruffly.

“What?”

“You can stay at the Stone House. As long as you need to.”

“Oh, Jefferson.” Her eyes clouded with tears. “I don’t know what to say.”

And just like before, when she had not known what to say, she leaned into him. He knew what was coming. He had plenty of chance to back away from it.

“You knew,” she whispered. “You knew I wasn’t really a housekeeper. You knew I was a damsel in distress.”

That was plenty of warning. What was a damsel in distress looking for, after all? She was looking for a knight in shining armor.

And he knew he was not that, even as he could feel the storm quieting all around them. The roar of the wind dropped, and the waters of the lake quieted. He knew it was time to break away from this, but he could not.

He was caught in a moment: the intensity of the storm, the sweetness of the ice cream, the warmth of her trust, his need to protect her, his sudden aching awareness of his own loneliness. All of those things were swirling around in him, making it impossible not to take what she offered.

Her lips.

She offered him her lips.

And he leaned in close and took them.

They tasted as he had known they would. Of chocolate and salted caramel, and of something sweetly feminine and trusting.

Her lips tasted of ambrosia, food of the gods. And he, a mere mortal, could not resist it. And so he tasted her, and he put his hands in her wet curls and drew her more deeply to him and tasted her more completely.

And remembered that another woman had trusted him to protect her and keep her safe and he had failed completely.

It took all the strength he had to draw away from Angie. He staggered to his feet. He knew it was not the motion of the boat making him feel so unstable. He’d offered her the sanctuary of his house for as long as she needed it.

It was up to him to make sure she was not more damaged when she left. And that meant he had to be better at controlling his needs than the other men in her life had been. He had to be better at putting what she needed ahead of what he wanted.

Because what he wanted was to explore every road that kiss could take them down, to climb every mountain it promised, to discover every valley, to let it open the possibility of new worlds.

His voice was too harsh.

“I am not your knight in shining armor. I am not anyone’s knight in shining armor. Do you get that?”

She nodded, but she looked as if she was going to cry again. He left her sitting there, wrapped in the blanket, and he pulled the anchor and turned on his nighttime running lights. He prepared to go.

The water had calmed, and the stars were like jewels shining in a black velvet sky. The light could not even hope to pierce the darkness of his own self-awareness.

When they got to the dock, he moored the boat. In stilted silence she went below and brought up all the groceries she had bought. She passed him up bag after bag of groceries and, finally, two ruined buckets of ice cream. When he offered her his hand to get out of the boat, she refused it and scrambled up on the dock by herself.

Loaded with groceries, he went up the steep steps to the house. She followed him. In the kitchen he set them down.

“I’ll look after them,” she said tightly.

“I think you should check in with the police again,” he said. “Maybe your stalker has been apprehended.”

“I’ll do that,” she said, that same tight note in her voice. But then her forehead wrinkled. “Do you suppose it’s safe to call them from your line?”

Jefferson could not even imagine being this afraid. For a moment, his every defense was undermined. He just wanted to take her into his arms and soothe her, kiss away that furrow from her brow.

Instead, he managed to strip all the emotion from his voice. “I have no doubt your stalker is insanely clever, but I somehow doubt he has managed to tap a police line.”

She nodded. “Yes, of course you are right. I will call them in the morning. If they’ve apprehended him I can go right away.”

He barely knew her! How could he possibly be aching at the emptiness she would leave behind?

“And, regardless, I won’t stay beyond our original agreement, despite your kind offer,” she said, reading between the lines. He would shelter her as long as he had to. “I will get the house ready for the magazine, and then I’ll go. I can’t let this thing go on indefinitely.”

He wanted, again, to sweep her up in his arms, to not let her feel she had to deal with this thing by herself. But what thing couldn’t she let go on indefinitely? Her thing with the stalker or her thing with him? He wanted to finish what they had started.

But wouldn’t that be all about what was good for him? Filling some gaping hole inside him? It wouldn’t be about what was good for her. He was thankful she was putting a time limit on her stay, even though he had foolishly told her she could stay forever.

Forever.

He could imagine forever with a woman like her. He could imagine starlit boat rides and facing storms. He could, all too easily, imagine campfires on the beach. And decorating a nursery.

But again, that was about some need in him that he had managed to outrun for a long time. He did not deserve that life. He had had his chance at forever. He had even vowed it. And he had not lived up to those vows. He had blown it completely.

But for two weeks? What was that in a lifetime? For two weeks, he could be the better man. Even if that meant staying the hell out of her way.