Jill Shalvis - Instant Temptation

He opened the door for her and lightly touched her back as he guided her down the porch steps. By silent, tacit agreement, they walked around the side of the house to stand at the top of the bluff at the end of the yard. They were surrounded by a 360-degree vista of sharp, rugged mountain peaks that Harley never got tired of looking at. The moon was high, casting the landscape in that iridescent pale blue glow she loved so much.

They stood there and just watched the night. Or she did. She was looking at the silhouette of the mountains and he was looking at her. “You’re staring,” she finally said.

“Yeah. You’re so goddamn beautiful you make it hard to breathe.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t…make my knees wobble.” She pressed her fingers to her eyes, then dropped her hands and turned to him. “I realize my change of heart must seem sudden and ridiculous given the mixed…sexual messages I’ve sent you over the past few weeks, first at Desolation, and then in my house. And then, um, on the river as well.” For two nights running, thank you very much.

He arched a brow at the list of places where they’d gotten quite intimately acquainted with each other’s body parts. “You forgot the closet.”

“Right, the closet.” As if she’d really forgotten. She’d never forget any of it. Chances were those memories were going to highlight her sexual fantasies for years to come. “My point is…”

“You’re done. You’re over it.”

“It’s not that.” As if she could be over it, over him. “It’s that I can’t play anymore.”

“What does that mean?”

She stared up at the inky black sky, littered with stars sparkling like diamonds as far as she could see. All her life this wide, huge, gorgeous sky had given her escape and peace, and she wondered where she’d find that escape and peace once she left there. Wondered if Colorado would fulfill her the same way. “I should have stuck with my instincts, that I’m not cut out for this. If I’m going to leave here, I have to go with my head and heart clear.” Although it was probably already too late for that.

“I know,” he said very quietly. “You can’t let an old crush get in the way of your dream.”

She felt her throat tighten. “You’re more than some old crush, TJ.”

His eyes looked dark, so very dark.

“You are,” she whispered. For so many years, she’d thought of him as big and bad and impenetrable. Invulnerable. But in fact, he wasn’t a superhero. He could be hurt. She’d managed that. She hadn’t expected to be able to, and the ache in her chest spread. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have started something I couldn’t finish.”

“There were two of us in this,” he said. “And I’m a big boy. I knew what I was getting into. And let’s be very clear. I wanted to get into it.”

She met his steady gaze, saw the truth in it, and so much more that her throat nearly closed up. She knew he deserved more of an explanation. But could she admit that she was falling and falling hard? What good would that do either of them? She’d get over him. She had once before. She’d find her happy.

She would. Somehow. “I hope you have a great trip, TJ.” She knew her eyes were suspiciously bright, that her voice was shaky. “I hope it’s a good one, and that you find-” She’d been about to say happiness. After all, the mountain fueled him, made him feel alive.

But he’d told her he thought maybe she did that for him.

Truth was, he did it for her, too. She swallowed hard, and knew by the flash of emotion in his gaze that she’d given away her own feelings in hers.

“Harley,” he said softly. “Don’t do this.”

“I have to. If I don’t, then…then I won’t be able to go.”

He just looked at her for a long moment, and she couldn’t maintain, just plain couldn’t hold it in, and a lone tear escaped.

At the sight of it, a small sound of frustration came from deep in his throat as he gently rubbed his thumb over her cheek. “Doing as you want shouldn’t make you cry, Harley.”

She sucked in a breath, which made it sound like a sob, but she shook her head and forced a smile. “It won’t…I’m fine. I just…” God. “I’ll miss it here, you know?”

He didn’t say anything to that, just looked at her as his thumb made another swipe.

“My parents are leaving. And Skye, too. She wants to transfer. So…”

“So nothing holds you here,” he said softly.

Actually, there was plenty holding her there. Memories. Friends.

Him. “You should be relieved,” she said, trying to tease. “You won’t have to babysit me out on the mountain anymore.”

She could feel the intensity of his gaze on her, but she didn’t look into his eyes, didn’t have the courage to face those green depths. Finally she felt him shift closer, felt the brush of his thighs to hers, and then he put a finger under her chin, waiting until she had no choice but to look at him.

“Harley,” he said. “You make me laugh, you terrify me, you make me worry. Sometimes you change it up and frustrate the hell out of me, and while we’re going there, I’ll even tell you that you always, always, make me ache and want, but I’ve never, not once, felt like I was babysitting you.”

She stared up at him, absorbing the seriousness of his voice and the look in his gaze. “Maybe,” she finally said, “maybe it was just a fluke. The chemistry, the heat, everything.”

“You don’t actually believe that.”

No. No, she didn’t.

Taking her hand, he pulled her along the bluff, to the other side of a clump of Jeffrey pines, where they couldn’t be seen from the house. There he molded his body against hers and kissed her. It was molten-lava hot from the get-go, and when his tongue touched hers, she heard herself moan. By the time he pulled back, she had a death grip on his shirt.

Still cupping her face, his mouth skimmed over her throat, to her ear. “Tell me again that’s a fluke.”

It took her a beat, but she knew him well. His voice had been low and quiet as usual, but also filled with an edge that matched the one in his eyes. “You know, you’re leaving, too. You’re always leaving. It’s not like you’re in a position to offer me-” She broke off, horrified at what she’d almost let slip, at what she’d almost asked for.

“What?” he asked. “What is it you’d have me offer you, Harley?”

When she just closed her eyes, caught between a rock and a hard spot, between her hopes and dreams, he shook his head. “You let me make love to you one night in my truck a million years ago, and it was apparently so bad that you spent the next decade avoiding me. Then I coerce you into spending time with me by following you to Desolation, where if I’m not mistaken, we had a much better than ‘fine’ time. Yet you back off again. So the message I’m getting is that you’re going to back off no matter what, and hide behind the ‘I’m leaving’ thing. Do I have that right, Harley?”

“You are leaving!”

His eyes narrowed, dark and turbulent. “You like to throw my lack of commitment out there, but you need to be honest, at least with yourself.”

She opened her mouth but he put a finger over her lips. “It’s not all me,” he told her. “You’re holding back, too. But the difference is that I know we could at least try to make this work.” He stepped away from her, and just like that, she felt cold and more alone than she had in a long time.

“You just don’t want to,” he said, and then was gone.

TJ took his bike for a long, mind-numbing ride. On the way back through town, he refueled, and though it was past midnight, as he drove by Nolan’s Garage, he saw that the lights were on.

Nolan looked up from his desk when TJ knocked on his office door. “TJ,” he said, his expression carefully blank.

“You’re working late,” TJ said.

“Yeah.”

They looked at each other a long beat.

“What can I do for you?” Nolan finally asked.

A legitimate question. They both knew that Nick handled all of Wilder Adventures’ mechanical issues. And it wasn’t as if TJ and Nolan were friends. Nolan was relatively new to town, and TJ was gone too much for their paths to have crossed more than a few times.

Still, there’d never been any animosity or tension between them.

Until now.

“Let me take a guess.” Nolan leaned back in his chair. “This is about Harley. You should know that she dumped me.”

TJ acknowledged that with a nod. “Sucks.”

“I suppose you scored a date tonight.”

“No. I didn’t.”

Nolan absorbed that, then blew out a breath. “You know, I really wanted you to be a dick so I could hate you. Or at least so she could hate you. Especially since then I might have had a shot.”

TJ took that in a moment. Decided it wasn’t entirely out of character for him to be a dick when it came to a woman. But not this woman. “Did you fire her?”

“You mean after she dumped me for you?” Nolan pushed away his laptop and rose to his feet. He came around the front of his desk, then leaned back on it, arms and ankles crossed. A casual pose. “No. She’s a friend. I wouldn’t do that to her.”

TJ let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “She didn’t dump you for me.”

Nolan raised a brow.

“She dumped me, too.”

Nolan’s arms dropped to his sides and his brow practically disappeared into his hairline. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

Nolan thought about that a moment, then frowned. “So why are you here?”

“I just wanted to make sure you didn’t fire her.”

“She dumped you and you’re still worried about her.”

TJ scrubbed a hand down his face. “Yeah.”

Nolan just stared at him for a long beat, then shook his head.

“Do we have a problem?” TJ asked.

Nolan shook his head, again. “No. Not that I haven’t given thought to smashing your face in several times over the past week, but there doesn’t seem to be much point in it now, other than to make me feel better.”

TJ nodded. He understood the sentiment perfectly. He moved to the door. “I’m leaving town for a while. I just wanted to know that she’ll have a job if she wants it.”

“But you’ve offered her a job at Wilder.”

“Yes, but I’m not sure she’ll take it. She’d rather choke on her pride than admit she needs anything, especially that job.”

“Yeah. She doesn’t do need well,” Nolan said with a small smile. “But she does know what she wants. And if that’s this job, here with me, then it’s hers.”

TJ nodded and turned to leave.

“That also applies to the man in her life.”

At that, TJ went still.

“If you’ve screwed something up and the man she now wants turns out to be me, you’re going to have to deal with that.”

Slowly TJ turned back to face Nolan, who was suddenly looking a whole lot more alpha than his usual quiet, mild-tempered self. “I suppose I will.”

And hopefully before that happened, he’d be 3,000 miles away on an ice climb, out of cell range, out of radio range, out of heart-hurts-like-hell range.

When TJ entered the lodge kitchen the next morning, his brothers were already there, mainlining caffeine. In the very center of the room, built to be huge and airy, stood a large butcher-block table, sturdy and capable of feeding the masses.

“We’re working ourselves to the bone.” Cam had his head down on the table. Katie was rubbing his shoulders.

Stone groaned and stretched out his long legs. “At least we’re raking in the dough.”

“Great.” From his corner of the table, Nick looked as exhausted as the others. “We can retire early-even though we’ll all be too fucking tired to enjoy it.”

Emma, dressed for a day at the clinic in trousers, blouse, and doctor’s coat, set a large pitcher of orange juice on the table and sank into Stone’s lap, leaning into him as his arms came around her. “What are you supposed to do, turn clients away?”

“Of course not,” TJ said, but they were all looking at each other, and suddenly he felt like he was watching a foreign film without the subtitles. “What?”

“We could cut back a little,” Stone said slowly. “I’d be happy with that.”

“Me, too,” Cam said, giving Katie a small smile.

Nick nodded. Him, too.

“That’s because you want to travel,” TJ said to Cam, unhappy with the direction the conversation was going. “And you”-he turned to Stone-“have your house to renovate. I don’t have either of those things.”

“Yeah.” Stone looked at him for a long moment. “I guess I assumed that you’d be happy to cut back, too.”

“Yeah, well, why don’t you assume my foot up your ass.”

“Just think about it, TJ,” Cam said quietly. “We’ve worked so fucking hard for so long. Hell, since we’ve been kids. All we’re suggesting is slowing down a little, letting everyone enjoy themselves for a change. Taking the time to breathe it all in. Sleep late. Be lazy.”