“I’ll be right in,” he told Boss, then turned back to Sabrina, ready to finish the sentence he’d started and stopped twice now.
However, the words slipped to the back of his tongue when he saw the look on her face. It was…worried? Distressed?
No, he decided. It’s pained.
“I know you want to talk about what I told you upstairs,” she said in a sudden rush. “But you really don’t have to say anything. I really do understand where you stand. Where you’ve been standing. And it’s okay, Hew. I’m a big girl. I’ve been rejected before and bounced back from it.” She offered him a small smile that twisted in his heart like a blade. “When one door closes, another opens. Isn’t that what they say?”
She did something then that damn near knocked the breath from his lungs. She patted his chest. A light touch. A simple touch. A friendly touch.
“I’m moving on.” She nodded determinedly. “I’ve got Martin now. So there’s nothing for you to feel bad about. Let’s chalk up what happened earlier to sheer lunacy brought on by the stress and horror of the previous twenty-four hours and forget it ever happened. Can we do that? Can we go back to the way things were before I licked your neck like—” She glanced around to make sure no one was listening in. “Like a Push Pop on the Fourth of July?”
He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t breathe. In his mixed-up, muddled-up state, all he could do was nod.
He’d gotten damn good at nodding at her.
“Great.” Her smile widened, taking up her whole face and crinkling the corners of her eyes. “Thank you, Hew.”
She immediately turned for the stairs leading to the ground floor and left him staring after her with his mouth half open and his stomach hitting the soles of his shoes.
Moving on.
Got Martin now.
Forget it ever happened.
His fingers flexed, but he wasn’t sure whose neck he wanted to throttle this time. He finally settled on his own because he’d been a damned fool. A blind fool.
She’d hinted. She’d tried. Hell, looking back, she’d stood right in front of him countless times with her heart in her eyes, and he hadn’t seen it.
Or he’d been too chickenshit to act on it.
Or more likely, he’d been too Maine-stubborn to believe it.
He recalled one night months ago when they sat beside the fire pit, and she turned to ask him, “Do you believe there’s one person for everyone?”
He’d laughed off the question, giving her some flippant reply about how he hoped not because that would mean some of his foster folks had been fated to find each other, and that just seemed too awful to contemplate.
God, what a jackass.
He’d missed the boat entirely. And now he’d be forced to watch her sail away in it with someone else.
When he remembered Martin actually had a boat—a real one, not a metaphorical one—he laughed. Or choked. He couldn’t tell the difference.
“Hew!” Boss’s voice echoed. “Time’s a-wastin’.”
“On my way.” He turned on stiff legs. But he’d only taken three steps before a thought occurred that stopped him in his tracks.
He hadn’t missed the boat. He’d shot a hole in the damn thing, sinking it himself.
23
Vivian wasn’t a stranger to fear.
She could chart the sensation like a map. Fear pinched behind the ribs. Sat cold and heavy in the gut. Crept into the dark hollow of the throat like a swallowed scream.
Fear was a part of her job.
But this?
