Cade

 

I had never been one to believe in fate, and I wasn't sure that I did right then. I certainly hadn't been thinking of fate when I saw the car in front of me spin off the road; the winking white tail of a deer disappearing on the other side of the road. Instead, my mind had been filled with images of death and blood, and when the woman in the car had finally stirred, I had felt a relief so profound it made me weak in the knees.

After that, all I could think about was getting her to safety and making sure she was well. I had actually liked it when she took the picture of my license plate. There was something about the sharp way she answered me, her take-no-prisoners attitude, that drew me to her like a magnet. That was when I’d recognized her. I’d recognized the sharpness of her voice, the defiant lift of her chin, and of course by those green, green eyes that could take a man apart.

It was Mara.

It was Mara fucking Becker that I had pulled out of the snow, and if that wasn't fate, it was at least proof that the universe had a sense of humor.

“God, Cade,” she said, and something in me thought I could hear some kind of warmth in her tone. If there was warmth there, I told myself not to trust it, but Mara had always been a straight shooter...about most things, anyway.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Oh the usual,” I said. “Dashing around in the snow, rescuing pretty girls. Being my regular irresponsible self.”

God, what the hell was wrong with me? I sounded like a snarky teenager, and she would have had every right to take my head off for it. Instead she laughed a little; a warm sound that made something inside me come undone.

“I'm not going to question it,” she said with a light laugh. “I know for a fact that you would have stopped for me ten years ago. The fact that you were still willing to stop now...I think that's to your credit.”

Praise from the queen herself. It took effort to stop myself from warming underneath her words. I had been down that path before, and I knew that it didn’t lead anywhere good.

“Didn't do it for your approval, princess,” I said with a shrug. “I would have stopped for anyone.”

“Good,” she said, a little tartness entering her tone as well. “Do you want a medal for not checking to see whether a girl is cute or not before you help her out of a wreck?”

I wanted to snap my teeth at her, and that was familiar too. Instead, I ignored her, choosing to focus on driving. The blizzard wasn't too bad, and the reports said that it would stop by two or three in the morning. My car could handle it, but I could end up in a ditch as easily as she had.

In the old days, Mara would have sailed into a fight with her banner held high, or she would have stalked off with way more dignity and verve than any teenage girl should have. Now, though, she simply looked at me through the darkness. I could feel her gaze on me like a touch, and I drew a deep breath into my lungs, letting it out slowly.

When I thought back to Mara and White Pines, I could never escape a shudder of pleasure; always hot, but as I grew older, strange as well. Christ, there had been plenty of women since Mara, the oldest of the Becker girls, but they were mostly gone and forgotten. None of them could draw a shudder from me the way the mere thought of Mara could. Now that she was in my passenger's seat, fully grown and with those same green eyes, those same full lips, I realized I hadn't been imagining it.

I still wanted her, and that thought pissed me off.

“What the hell are you looking at?” I asked, and she laughed again.

“You, of course,” she said, and there was no anger in her voice at all. “Are you still so angry at me?”

“I'd have to be pretty insane to still be mad about something that happened ten years ago,” I said gruffly. “Christ, we were kids.”

“That didn't answer my question,” Mara said, but she didn't press. She looked out her window at the sleeting blizzard, and when she spoke again, there was a slightly dreamy quality to her voice.

“I was mad at you for a long time, you know,” she said. “I might not have had a reason to be, but I was. I thought...I thought you had ruined a perfectly good thing, but now maybe I see why you did it. Why you left. Maybe it was even good that you did.”

That stung more than I thought it would. I could remember my last few nights in White Pines ten years ago. They weren't pleasant at all. The only person that had made them bearable was sitting beside me right now.

“Was I right?” I asked. I had meant for it to come out snidely, but it was a real question. “About what you did, I mean. Did you go to a nice college out east, marry some guy with a portfolio and a perfect credit score at twenty-two, and have an adorable kid by twenty-four?”

“I think you just described the first three or four guys I dated,” she said with a little laugh. “But no to the rest. That type of guy tends to want a housekeeper and a nanny more than a partner, and when I figured that out, I dropped out and moved to Atlanta.”

I couldn't stop myself from laughing at that, and she shot me a look that was slightly irritated.

“Miss Valedictorian dropped out?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” she retorted. “It was absolutely the right choice. I wasn't meant to work in business administration. I could see that I was surrounded by the kind of people I already wanted to kill at the age of nineteen, and if I’d kept on going with that crowd, I might have actually done it at twenty-five.”

“All right,” I said, conciliatory in spite of myself. “I'm sure that speech worked on your parents. What did you do instead? What was in Atlanta?”

“A guy,” she admitted, so shamefaced that I laughed again. “God, I wasn't even twenty, but I thought he knew everything—it was just dumb. We lasted about ten minutes after I’d moved down there.”

“But you didn't move back?”

“No. I had too much pride, but once I’d gotten over that, I’d fallen in love with the city, and by then I’d secured a magazine job. I'm an editor now. It's good work. I can do it on the road when I like. And it pays well enough.”

I risked sneaking a look at her again. She wasn't looking at me, and she wasn't expecting me to be looking at her at all. There was a faint line of tension between her eyes.

“But it's not what you want to be doing.”

She flashed me a sharp grin.

“What about you? Are you living your dream?” she asked. “Seeing the United States, odd jobs, the great American experience?”

 That was familiar. God, I had been ridiculous at eighteen, but a part of me still bridled at her tone.

“You're not the only one who’s changed, Mara,” I retorted. “I bummed around the country for about two years. Crossed it half a dozen times, worked on a shrimping boat off the Gulf. Then my uncle called me up and told me he had some work for me. I'm in real estate now.”

The way I said it, she would have been within her rights to guess that I worked for a landlord somewhere. When she laughed, I bristled, but when I felt her hand move over and touch mine on the wheel, something in me almost purred.

“I thought about you,” she whispered, as if it were a confession. “And yes, you were on that damned bike of yours, roaring along the freeway, stopping in towns for a few weeks to get enough gas money to keep going. I can see you on the Gulf, too. I've been there a few times, where the water's so blue it takes your breath away and the sun rises out of it all red, looking like it’s on fire...Were you happy then?”

“No,” I said bluntly. “It was fun. I had some wild times, but it wasn't right.”

“And what you're doing now?”

“Getting closer to right, maybe.”

“I'm glad.”

She sounded like she meant it, and I had to actually search for the anger I’d always kept right next to my need for her. God, the fact that she could disarm me in less than half an hour would be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic. I stayed quiet the rest of the way to White Pines, and then I automatically drove her to her grandmother's house.

“Having a family vacation at your grandma's?” I asked as we pulled up.

“No, she's been dead for a few years,” Mara said bluntly. Even as calm and steady as her voice was, there was a hurt there that made me want to take her in my arms. “The property got through probate, and now my sisters and I need to figure out what we're doing with it.”

She wasn't as calm about all of this as she wanted me to think she was, or that she wanted to be herself, but it wasn't my place to press her. Instead, I got out of the car and went around to open her door for her, and she smiled at me, ever the princess.

“This is where I get off,” she said needlessly, but she didn't walk up the stairs toward the door. “Maybe we'll see—”

I could lie and say that I couldn't help myself in that moment, that it was all the memories and need, and maybe just a small urge to rewrite the past. Tell the truth and shame the devil, though, it was only because I wanted her. In the dim porch light, with the snow whirling around us and getting caught in her dark hair, I wanted her—and so I pulled her to me and kissed her.

She tasted as good as I remembered, all warm and sweet, and after a moment of frozen shock, she pressed herself against me. We were both bundled up against the cold, but I could feel the warmth of her rising to meet me. I couldn't stop myself from burying my hands in her hair, holding her still so I could explore her mouth, learning her all over again, showing her how badly I wanted her...

Just as quickly as we had reached for each other, we pulled away again. We stared at each other, and I realized that I couldn't read her at all. We were adults now, not the crazy kids we had been before. There was an entire decade gaping between us, and despite what some part of me tried to insist, we didn't know each other anymore.

I started to say something, some apology, something to explain away what we had done, but then the door at the top of the stairs opened, spilling a harsh light over us.

“Oh my god, Mara? Are you all right? I've been calling you...”

 Shannon, my brain helpfully supplied. Standing in pajamas and a robe at the top of the stairs, she stared at us wide-eyed and confused. There were really no explanations for either of us to make, so I turned to Mara.

“See you later,” I murmured.

“Wait,” she blurted out, but I was already getting back in the car, heading back toward my hotel on the other side of town. I tried to tell myself that I was in White Pines to do work, not to mess around with my high-school sweetheart; but as I drove through the swirling snow listening to the wind whistle through my windows, I knew that it was only the barest thread of self-control that kept me driving ahead instead of turning around and finding that warmth that I had only ever shared with Mara Becker.