Because this was true.
And yet it wasn’t quite true.
She drifted over to the French doors and peered out to the deck, toward Devil’s Leap, jutting up from the swimming hole.
Something about the direction the room faced, the way the old trees sifted the sunlight through their leaves, the French windows...
If she turned around now she wouldn’t be surprised to see his parents’ big double bed, and a hologram of her and Mac entwined and madly kissing. That very last day she’d seen him before, of course, she’d wound up back here at Devil’s Leap.
“It’s really... it’s just beautiful. Thank you.”
She said it softly.
And it was true.
But there was an ache in her solar plexus.
The room without the paper didn’t feel quite the way she’d thought it would.
Because it wasn’t different enough.
Suddenly Mac looped his arms loosely around her from behind. Her body couldn’t help itself; she melted back against his warm torso the way water has no choice but to sink into earth. But her mind resisted the easy capitulation. She glanced down at the arms encircling her. The hair on his arms glinted copper, just like it had on that day.
He rested his cheek against the top of her head. A gesture so yearning, so intimate and whimsically tender her breath stopped.
He lifted it only a second later.
Perhaps he had unnerved himself.
Or didn’t want to give her the wrong idea.
It was also possible she’d tensed.
His arms fell gently away a second later.
They were quiet a moment.
“Guess I’ll get going,” he said.
She had a hunch they’d both thought a little wallpaper-vanquishing celebration sex on the drop cloth might have been in order. A little voice in the back of her head urged,His zipper is rightthere.You hardly even have to stretch out your arm to get it undone.
But suddenly the air was aswarm with unspoken things and, like wasps at a picnic, they were getting in the way of the impulse to get down, so to speak.
In other words, they weren’t going to be doing each other up against Nostalgia.
He flicked her with a glance that neatly undressed and savored her. His eyes met hers, searching for something. His were dark with some emotion. Not only desire. Sort of rueful. Sort of guarded.
She knew, and he knew, that he was still leaving for the day.
Lust was a complicated thing.
“See you tomorrow,” she said, just as lightly. “Thanks for all the hard work.”
“You bet, Harwood.”
He turned to go, then turned around and walked a few backward steps, as if he wanted to see her bathed in that amber light. Just to make sure she was real, and not the ghost of the girl she’d been back then.
She’d desperately wanted that wallpaper gone from the wall of the room. And now she thought she more fully understood why.
