He stared at her, long enough to be unnerving, before he spoke. “Can you come in for a minute?”
“Oh, well . . .”
“I’m sorry. You were probably doing something and had to leave to come rescue me from myself.”
“I was actually on a date.” He didn’t need to know the date was with a sofa and two guys named Ben and Jerry.
“Oh God, El. I’m so sorry. I hope you’ve met someone really nice who treats you the way you deserve to be treated.”
“Do you? Do you really?”
“Of course I do! You know I care about you, and I want you to be happy.”
“If that’s the case, then . . .” No, I won’t say it. I will not give him the satisfaction of knowing that no other man could ever make me happier than he does, even when he’s pushing me away. Again.
“Then what?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“Come in. We need to talk.”
As her heart did a happy dance for the ages, Ella shook her head. “If you just want to tell me—again—all the reasons this will never happen, I’m good. I got the message the first half-dozen times you explained it to me.”
“That’s not why I want you to come in.”
Go, go, GO, her heart cried. For the love of God and all that’s holy, get out of the car and go into that cozy log cabin where the man of your dreams lives. Ella had always been one to follow her heart, but this time her heart was in deep conflict with the brain that was telling her to run, run, RUN before he could hurt her again.
“Please, Ella?”
Her brain didn’t stand a chance against her heart when he said please in that soft, urgent tone. She reached for the door handle.
They met at the front of her car, him still a little less than steady on his feet, and her certain she was making yet another in a string of huge mistakes where he was concerned. Then he put his hand on the small of her back to guide her up the stairs, and that was her undoing.
Why did he have to be so perfectly imperfect? Why did he have to be everything she’d ever wanted, wrapped up in one devilishly sexy, deeply wounded package? Her feelings for him ran the gamut from unbearable to undeniable to untenable and back again, an endless circle of frustration.
Her heart simply couldn’t take another self-inflicted wound—self-inflicted because she kept going back for more even though he’d repeatedly told her there was no hope for anything between them. She didn’t blame him. At least he’d always been straight with her. She blamed herself for being unwilling to take no for an answer.
So as she climbed the stairs to his front door, she attempted to manage her expectations. Nothing would happen. They would talk. She would stay until she was certain he was okay, and then she’d go home alone the way she always did, this time without a lacerating wound to nurse for the foreseeable future.
From behind her, he reached around to open the door, which wasn’t locked. The brush of his arm against her shoulder sent a tingle of awareness to parts of her that only seemed to stand up and take notice of this man. Only he had the power to activate all her systems with just the slightest contact of his body against hers. It made her wonder what it would be like—
No. Not going there. Under no circumstances are you going there. Well . . . No!
While she should be listening to her better judgment and distancing herself, instead she wanted to purr with the simple pleasure that came from being close to him for however long the moment lasted. She’d never claimed this situation was anything other than pathetic. At least she was remaining true to form in her “relationship,” such as it wasn’t, with Gavin.
She stepped into his home ahead of him. The door closed behind them with a resounding thud, and suddenly this felt like a bad idea. A very bad idea, indeed. The last time she’d been here, after hearing he’d been arrested for fighting in a bar, she’d left work to come check on him and had ended up crying all the way home after he sent her away.
“I, um . . . I should go.”
“I was going to make some coffee. Can I entice you to stay for that long?”
If she drank coffee at this hour, she’d be up all night, but she’d be up all night anyway, analyzing every second of this bizarre evening. “Sure. I guess.”
Gavin got busy making the coffee. The only sign of his slight intoxication was the mess he made pouring the water into the back of the coffeemaker. Aim, shoot, miss. Those three little words were like a metaphor for this entire situation, and the thought nearly made her laugh out loud. Except . . . There was nothing at all funny about unrequited love. It sucked every bit as badly as the songs, books and movies claimed it did.
“Have a seat.” He pointed to the stools at the counter. “I’ll be right back.” He disappeared into the hallway that presumably led to his bedroom and the bathroom.
The urge to follow him, to force a confrontation, to jump his bones—something, anything—was so strong that instead of giving in she got busy in the kitchen, poking through cabinets in search of mugs, taking a carton of half-and-half from the fridge and giving it a sniff to make sure it was still good, and locating spoons. Gavin took his coffee with just a touch of cream and a teaspoon of sugar. How she knew that she didn’t even know. She’d been paying close attention to her late brother-in-law’s sexy younger brother for as long as she’d known him, which was starting to measure in decades, rather than mere years.
Pathetic.
In all that time, she’d dated other guys. Even had the misfortune of sleeping with some of them. But she had never once felt anything even close to what happened every time Gavin Guthrie walked into a room. Take now, for instance. He’d changed into a T-shirt and old sweats, washed his face and, judging by the minty fresh scent that came with him, apparently brushed his teeth, too. Drops of water clung to the ends of his longish dark hair, and the scruff that covered his well-defined jaw made her want to rub against him in the most shameless way possible.
Then the coffeemaker beeped, and her brain took over once again, shoving her rapidly beating heart aside to remind her that she was having a cup of coffee that would keep her up all night and then getting the hell out of there.
Gavin had no idea what he’d been thinking when he all but begged Ella to come inside with him. Hell, he barely recalled putting her name in his phone in case of an emergency at a time when his entire life seemed to be one endless emergency after another.
He still had no business dragging Ella into his crap, but at the same time he couldn’t bear to let her drive away not knowing when or if he might see her again. She was like a breath of the freshest, coolest mountain air, infusing him with a warm ray of sunshine in the bleak landscape inside his mind.
Things were bad and getting worse. Pushing her away, repeatedly, hadn’t made anything better. In fact, during a wide-awake moment the night before, Gavin had undergone an epiphany, during which he realized that pushing Ella away was part of what had made everything worse. Thus his invitation for coffee, which had been reluctantly accepted. Not that he could blame her. Ella was a lot of things, but a fool had never been one of them. And she’d be a total, unmitigated fool to shackle herself to him.
He poured the coffee into the mugs she’d placed on the counter, stirring cream and half a packet of sweetener into hers. How did he know how she took her coffee? He didn’t recall not knowing that. He barely recalled a time before he knew Ella and the entire Abbott family. He and his brother Caleb had been friends with Ella’s brothers Hunter and Will since they’d moved to Butler when the Guthries were in fifth and sixth grades. Caleb had started dating Hannah when they were all in high school, and the two families had been close ever since, never more so than in the difficult years that followed Caleb’s death.
Gavin pushed his thoughts away from that sorrowful topic. He was getting sick and tired of the relentless grief that refused to give him an ounce of slack lately, especially since Caleb’s dog died and Hannah got remarried. Life went on, even when you thought it couldn’t possibly. Maybe it was time to allow his life to move forward, too.
He couldn’t seem to picture that life without Ella as part of it in some way, but he had amends to make where she was concerned, and there was no time quite like the present.
Gavin put the mug on the counter in front of her and brought his with him to sit on the stool next to hers. “Listen, El . . . I wanted to tell you—”
She held up her hand to stop him. “Please, don’t. I just can’t rehash it all again.”
“How do you know what I was going to say?”
“Because,” she said with resignation that tugged at his heart, “you’ve said it all before, and there’s only so much rejection a girl can take before she begins to get a complex.”
“Eleanor, look at me.” His use of her full name clearly startled her as she looked up at him with those wide, liquid brown eyes that could hide nothing, her lips parting with surprise. Yeah, he’d thought about that kiss on the beach in Burlington a few thousand times since, and hearing she’d been out with another guy made him feel panicky in addition to all the other unpleasant emotions he’d been contending with lately. “I never meant to reject you. It had nothing at all to do with you. I need you to know that.”
“So you say.”
“I mean it. Every time we’ve . . . talked . . . in the last few months, I’ve walked away from you because I had to, not because I wanted to.” She was very focused now on her mug of coffee rather than him, not that he could blame her.
“What happened tonight?”
“Tonight,” he said with a sigh, “I discovered my reputation is beginning to precede me. I had a couple of beers with some guys from work, and decided to hit Red’s on the way home for a nightcap. I was minding my own business at the bar when Red came in, saw me there and turned it into a federal case because of what happened down the road. I tried to tell him I don’t want any trouble, but he wasn’t hearing it. Somehow that big dude got ahold of my phone, and . . . And, well, you know the rest.”
“What was your plan for getting home?”
“I’m not an idiot, Ella, despite how it might seem lately. I was going to call a cab.”
She jumped up, those same soft eyes now flashing with anger. “If the bouncer hadn’t stopped you, you would’ve driven home. For God’s sake, Gavin, don’t make everything worse by lying to my face.”
“I never would’ve driven home. I would’ve walked before I drove—I’ve done it before.” When she eyed him skeptically, he ran his hands through his hair. “I know how it looked, but that guy was pissing me off getting up in my grill the way he was.”
“Someone needs to get up in your grill to make this crazy shit stop!”
In all the years he’d known her, he’d never once heard sweet, lovely Ella Abbott yell at anyone—or swear—and since she was one of ten siblings, that was saying something. Her raised voice did the same thing to him a slap to the face would have. It woke him up once and for all. He closed the small distance between them, hooked an arm around her waist and tugged her in close to him.
If she’d been surprised before, she was flat-out stunned now.
“The only person I want up in my grill, Ella, is you.” And then he kissed her the way he’d been dying to since that day at the beach, since the day he’d gotten his first taste of her and developed a hunger for her that had kept him awake on many a night after he pushed her out of his life.
Just as she could only take so much rejection, he could only take so much temptation. Eventually, someone was going to snap.
Her hands, which had been lying flat against his chest, were now pushing hard—hard enough for the signal to reach his kiss-addled brain. She tore her lips free, and that was when he realized only one of them had been enjoying that kiss. “Stop it.” She rubbed her forearm over her lips, seeming to wipe him off, which actually hurt him more than it should have. As if he had any right. “What’re you doing?”
“I thought that was rather obvious.” Since her mouth was apparently unavailable, he directed his attention to the long, elegant neck that had occupied far too many of his Ella-related fantasies.
But she was having none of that either. “Knock it off, Gavin. Whatever game you’re playing, I’m not interested.” The tears that gathered in her eyes said otherwise, but she turned away from him and headed for the door.
He chased after her, placing his hand flat against the door to keep her from opening it. “Stay, Ella. Please, don’t go.” Lowering his voice again, he said, “Please.”
Her shoulders slumped and her forehead landed against the door.
Gavin put his arms around her from behind. “Come here.”
She turned into his embrace, and he gathered her in close, the top of her head fitting perfectly beneath his chin. And just that simply, everything felt better than it had in years.
“If you’re screwing with me, Guthrie, I’ll kill you with my own hands, and I’m more than capable of that after growing up with seven brothers.”
The low rumble of laughter caught him off guard. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had cause to laugh. “Duly noted.” Tightening his hold on her, which seemed to be in direct relation to the fragile hold he had on his sanity, Gavin ran his lips over her smooth dark hair, which always had a shine to it. That was something he found endlessly fascinating. “I’m not screwing with you, Ella.”
“Then what is this?” she asked tentatively. He could hardly blame her for that. He’d given her more than enough reason to be tentative where he was concerned.
“This is me admitting that I need you, that I’m tired of fighting whatever this is that’s been happening between us for years now, that—”
She drew back to look up at him. “Gavin?”
“What?”
“Shut up and kiss me.”