Chapter Twenty
Tori was gaping at him like he was telling a kid Santa Claus didn’t exist. Instead of an honest truth he figured she’d known, at least a little, underneath all the ways he’d hurt her.
How could you know how to hurt someone if you didn’t care about them?
Wasn’t that the appeal of Courtney for so many years? They didn’t even care enough about each other to hurt each other, or at least for a time that had been the case.
“I need you to let me go,” Tori said carefully. He didn’t know whether to attribute the translucent quality of her skin right now to water or shock or even anger maybe.
But she didn’t seem angry. She was unnaturally still, so much so that if he did let her go, he was sure she’d sink.
“Tori.”
She moved then, wiggling out of his grasp, swimming back toward where her feet could touch without water covering her head. She didn’t stop there though, she kept going all the way up the rocky beach and to their pile of stuff.
Sarge trotted over to her and she plopped herself onto a towel. After a second there, her pale skin glistening with water droplets in the bright sun, she grabbed one of his shirts from the pile and pulled it over her head, holding her arms around herself as if to get warm.
He couldn’t help but wonder if warm was what she was really after.
Slowly, giving her a few seconds of space, Will made his way back to shore. Sarge pranced up to greet him, then back to Tori, clearly enjoying his morning at the beach.
The sun was warm, as were the rocks under his feet. Still, the wet shorts weren’t exactly comfortable. It was a secluded spot and he wasn’t about to play shy when that wasn’t, long range, what he was after.
So he walked over to his towel, stripped the wet shorts off, and grinned as Tori studied him. A guy still had an ego, after all.
“Don’t be ashamed if it keeps you up at night,” he offered, grabbing the extra clothes he’d brought.
She raised an eyebrow at him, unreadable except in sarcasm. “You think your penis is going to haunt me?”
“A guy can dream.”
She shook her head, but her lips curved a little. She could be so . . . impenetrable. The rock you couldn’t get a hand or foothold in to climb. A sheer wall of nothing but hard, stubborn matter.
It was somehow the most frustrating thing about her, and one of the things he admired most about her, all at the same time.
He pulled on the dry shorts, a dry shirt, spread out his towel on the least rocky space next to her he could find. He took a seat and let the warmth of the sun chase the cold of the water away.
It was a good feeling, something like baptism, rebirth and renewal. A new start, not one that erased the past, but accepted it. Forgave it.
He glanced at the woman it all centered around. She had her eyes closed and her face tipped to the sun. Water droplets clung to the slope of her neck and ends of her braid. She had goose bumps on her arms and legs, and it was impossible not to note her nipples poking at her shirt.
It was the perfect summer picture, and he couldn’t resist the desire to touch it. He traced the wave of a stray lock of wet hair, grazing his fingers across her cheek as he pushed it behind her ear.
On a sigh she opened her eyes and turned her head to face him. The blue in her eyes stood out today in the sunlight and the reflection of the smooth rocks. She pulled her knees to her chest, then leaned her cheek against them, still studying him.
“I don’t know what to do with all that,” she said quietly. “Honestly, there isn’t anything to do with it. It doesn’t change jack shit. What happened still happened.”
He wasn’t so sure he agreed with that, but arguing with her would only make her more certain. She’d dig in harder, and he needed her to realize, at some point, it didn’t change things, no, but it mattered.
It would always matter.
“But now it’s rehashed and we can move on.” Her gaze dropped from his and she moved her head so her chin rested on her knees and she looked out at the sparkling, reflective lake.
“Move on to where, exactly?”
She shrugged. “Friends. Coworkers. Maybe we do the sex thing just to answer any lingering questions, but mostly we’re just going forward.”
He wanted forward too, but inwardly he wondered if forward in Tori language wasn’t a little too close to running away.
“Brandon and I were talking about . . . well, I guess you’d call it opening up. Leaning on each other. I mean, I’m pretty sure Brandon would call it ‘family shit or whatever,’ but that’s why we were horsing around like kids.”
“Because family shit?” She spread out the towel behind her and moved a few of the more jagged rocks before stretching out on her back.
Will watched her, in nothing but one of his old T-shirts, a ratty, baggy thing on her, the hem of it landing somewhere mid-thigh. She closed her eyes against the sun beating down on them, and he’d give her a few minutes before he dumped sunscreen on her.
He rearranged his towel too, and the rocks underneath him, lying out on his side so he could still watch her. “There was the threat of a hug. I had to defend my manliness.”
She laughed, her chest moving with it, and he had to touch her again. If only lightly. He pressed his fingertips to the random droplets of water stubbornly holding on to her arm.
“I always figured you and Brandon shared all your secrets when the rest of us weren’t around. Or had some weird twin intuition.”
“If I had any intuition I would never have paid it any mind. As for telling each other everything . . . not so much. Evanses aren’t big on talking.”
She opened one eye to study him with. “But you always liked each other. Got along.”
“Mostly. He’s my brother. Even when I want to punch him in the face, I love him. Unreservedly. But it’s a strange thing to grow up in a world where everything is about how you look or are perceived, and nothing about what you actually are.”
“Because of the town?”
“Because of Gracely. Because of my father. Because of history and because life is weird and fucked up in the best of circumstances.”
She laughed a little at that, her eyes drifting closed again. He wanted to touch more of her, know more of her, and she kept it all locked away. It seemed no matter how much he offered over to her, she’d hold more back.
It wasn’t so much irritation that clawed through him as a panicky kind of futility. The kind he knew so well. If he listened to that voice it would tell him he’d never get through to her, so why try? If he accepted what he always accepted, he’d convince himself he just wasn’t good enough to be the one who did.
He didn’t think he could live with himself anymore if that part of himself kept winning. Kept turning him into someone he didn’t want to be.
“Why’d you come here, Tori?” It had to matter, the impetus for her reappearance. There had to be some reason she’d finally decided to come back after seven years.
“I was lied to about the availability of cock.”
But he wasn’t in the mood for humor or jokes. “I’m serious.”
“That’s always what scares me,” she muttered.
A joke, but not. “I’m starting to think nefarious reasons are at work. Are you an on-the-run ax murderer these days?”
“I wish,” she said under her breath, but he caught it, and the heavy sigh that followed, which meant she was weakening.
* * *
Tori didn’t want to tell him about Toby. The truth was, she could lie. Hadn’t she come up with a million lies before she’d set foot in Gracely?
But he’d made her soft, bringing her to this beautiful place, talking about feelings. Making it impossible not to believe him.
Which made it all worse. The past. The choices they’d both made. It swirled inside of her, a whirlwind of regret and bitterness, and she didn’t want to go back to the place where that ruled her life.
Life could only be made by moving forward, by stepping away from the bitterness and regret, and accepting it as your damn lot in life.
But how many times had he asked her now? He wasn’t letting her move on from that until she told him something.
“It was a guy, because isn’t it always?” she offered, as flippantly as she could manage, forcing herself to turn her head and look at him straight on. Regardless of what she told him, she couldn’t let on how much it all hurt.
His jaw tensed at the mention of a guy, and maybe it was a foolish thing to be soothed by that somehow.
“Yeah, what about a guy?” he demanded, his voice suddenly different than it had been all day. Not soft, not easygoing or charming. Not reminiscent or pained or any of the things it had been out in the lake. Just flat growl.
Yeah, this really shouldn’t make her feel better, but it did somehow.
“I was seeing him. Working at this posh ski resort. I taught classes or did one-on-one stuff. Skiing and rock climbing.” She looked up at the sky through squinted eyes. She missed it, sometimes, the job itself. She liked guiding, but she missed the teaching. Watching someone develop a skill and learn to do it on their own.
“You taught people how to ski?”
“And rock climb. I was a damn fine teacher, I’ll have you know. Kids especially. They loved me.”
“Did they now?” But any skepticism that had been in his voice at first had changed over to wonder.
She didn’t know why that made her more uncomfortable than the initial skepticism, or why this discomfort felt like a warm wave of satisfaction wrapped in sharp nerves. Pride and the desire to hide away all wrapped up into one confusing-as-hell emotion.
“It was a good job. I liked it a lot. The only drawback was I couldn’t take Sarge many places, but we had a nice little cabin and he did all right.”
“The guy, Tori, what about the guy?”
“I’m getting there,” she muttered. She didn’t want to lay out all her embarrassments in front of Will. She turned her face back up to the sky, the warmth and glow of the sun soaking into her skin. It could almost drug her into complacency.
Luckily, the rocks digging into her back kept her rooted in exactly what she was doing. Exactly what you are.
“I did these one-on-one classes, and there was this guy. He was smooth, and charming, and good-looking and we went out. For a while. He was one of those guys who took care of everything. Where we were going to eat, what movie we were going to see. He’d stock my fridge with the groceries he wanted, make the bed, change a lightbulb without my having to ask.”
“That’s your type?” Will asked incredulously.
“I wanted it to be. You live your life always doing all that shit, it’s kind of nice when someone swoops in and does it without a second thought.” She shrugged, focusing on one rock digging into her shoulder blade, letting that pain be more important than the one in her chest.
“Turns out, he was the son-in-law of a rival ski resort, doing some weird corporate espionage, and I was just . . .” She swallowed at the burning ball of resentment in her esophagus. “Something fun for him to do while he worked.”
“So, you left?” There was still a note of surprise and disbelief in his voice, and tears pricked at her eyes when she realized why.
He thought she was strong and kick-ass and wouldn’t stand for any of that. Because that was the Tori Appleby image, and boy, what a fiction it had turned out to be.
“Not so easily, no. But when your boss finds out you’ve been sleeping with the enemy, because the enemy’s wife made sure he knew, well . . . You get to be persona non grata pretty quick.”
“The fucker was married?”
Again it soothed something that it shouldn’t, his clear outrage on her behalf. Oh, she had no doubt he’d get over that and realize she’d been the idiot who hadn’t read the signs, who let herself get into the mess, but for now, he was outraged on her behalf and that was nice. No one else had been, they’d been too worried about what information Toby might have secreted away to his father-in-law’s ski resort.
“Long story slightly less long, my boss made sure every ski resort within . . . well, probably the state of Colorado, knew I wasn’t fit to be hired, so . . . I didn’t have a job, or a house—because that had been part of my salary—so . . .”
“So you came here.”
“I didn’t think Brandon would give me a job. I didn’t think . . .” Hell, she figured Will would have turned them all against her. She should have known better. Turning them against her would have required telling them what had happened. “I figured he might help me find something though. Him or Sam.”
“But not me.”
Tori snorted. “Yeah, no, I didn’t expect you to be particularly receptive after the last time I’d seen you.”
He was quiet for a while, and she noted he’d stopped touching her. No little brushes against her arm or leg. He was keeping his distance now.
She swallowed at the lump in her throat. She’d known it would change his opinion of her. She knew people didn’t like that story, because it never quite mattered she had been clueless, people thought it was pretty disgusting when you slept with a married guy trying to take down your place of business.
“Why’d the wife ruin your job?” Will asked at last, sounding far away and too contemplative for comfort.
“Huh?”
“The wife. You didn’t know he was married, and you didn’t even know what he was up to. Why did his wife make sure you got shit for it?”
“I assume because he probably told her it was all my fault, slinky seductress that I am, and she wanted to believe him. I can’t blame her for that, exactly. I wouldn’t want to realize I’d made that kind of mistake in marriage.”
“Men like that always know what they’re doing, don’t they?” Will said, his voice low and disgusted and . . . something else.
She snuck a glance at him, which she’d been avoiding so as not to see any sort of reflection of his lowered opinion of her on his face. His jaw was set, fine lines digging into his face. He had his hand clutched around a rock and he looked like he wanted to punch something.
Not good-natured wrestling stuff like he’d done with Brandon earlier, but a furious violence to him.
“What do you mean, know what they’re doing?”
“They know who to target.”
Tori frowned. “I wasn’t some victim. I was just an idiot.”
Will pushed into a sitting position, angling the top half of his body over hers. “It wasn’t you, Tori. Men like that, they know how to find your weaknesses, prey on them, then blame you for anything bad ever happening. It’s what they do, time and time again.”
She was surprised at his vehemence, at his theory. “What are you talking about?”
“Guys like that, who get their wives to look the other way, who get everyone to blame anyone but themselves for their crap. It isn’t by accident. It’s by design. They know who to target. They know just how to take advantage of people.”
“I don’t think we’re talking about me anymore,” she said carefully, resisting the urge to touch his face, to smooth the lines out, to somehow uncoil the anger that was poised tight within him.
Which wasn’t about her. Nothing he was saying was about her, and she needed to remember that to keep herself safe, whole. His care was only peripheral to whatever he was talking about.
It wasn’t about her, these things never were.
“My father had affairs,” he said flatly, but his eyes weren’t flat, they were full of so much emotion Tori wanted to look away, but she couldn’t.
“And your mother blamed the other party?”
“My mother refused to acknowledge them. Even when . . .”
Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it. But her arm had a life of its own, and she reached up to brush some wet hair off his forehead. “Even when what?”
He let out a sigh, and he took her stupid hand in his, studying her palm before pressing a kiss there. He pulled her up into a sitting position, so that their hips were touching, their chests facing each other.
She wanted to scoot away, but he was holding on to her, and she . . . It was like that cancer analogy she’d used when she’d first arrived here. Caring about him, wanting to soothe him, it was a cancer she couldn’t cut out.
“At least one affair resulted in a child.”
Some of the dots finally connected, because she’d been so wrapped up in her crap, she hadn’t given much thought to anything else. “Hayley.”
Will nodded.
“I’m sorry. That has to be hard.”
Will dropped her hand, looked away. “I wouldn’t be sorry for me. Hayley? Yes. Her mom. Hell yes. Me? I knew about it and didn’t tell anyone, well, except my mother. I’m not exactly poor little disillusioned son, in this scenario.”
So much anguish there, so much guilt. “Well, I think it’s time for some tit for tat. I told you why I’m here, now you explain that.”