Still, she hadn’t wanted it to come attached tohim. “Does your wife know you’re here?”
“My wife?” A strange current swirled in his tone. “If you mean Tansy, she’s not my wife. We’re separated.”
Her pulse skipped. “Separated?” The word struck deep, like a bolt of lightning zipping along her bones.
“Yeah.” His dark eyes never changed. “I mean, we still live together. Still parent together. We’re just not...togethertogether.”
Thickness crowded her throat. Which was ridiculous, because Nick’s marital status, or lack thereof, had no bearing on anything. Tansy hadn’t even been what tore them apart, not really. It shouldn’t feel as if a nuclear bomb had just laid waste to her gut.
So Nick Thacker was single. So what?
He sighed. “Look, I won’t stay long. Just let me get you set up. You’re obviously freezing. Your lips are blue.” He peeked past her into the house. “Figures Gallant didn’t stick around to help.”
Aubrey swallowed the weapons-grade emotions marshaling behind her breastbone. She should say no. Send him home, then huddle under a blanket until sunrise, shivering and jamming her hands into her armpits for warmth.
But that sounded like a perfectly miserable end to a perfectly horrible day, so she pushed open the screen, stepped aside, and said, “Fine. Come in. I can’t seem to get a fire going myself.”
Nick’s stolid expression slipped, as if she’d surprised him as much as she had herself. But he recovered quickly and brushed past, arrowing down the hall.
Because of course he knew where the fireplace was. Of course he remembered.
At the thought, faint heat bloomed in her cheeks—the sum total of warmth her body could muster. She trailed Nick to the living room, where he knelt by the fireplace, wrestling with some kind of lever inside.
“What’re you doing?”
“Opening the flue,” he said. “Step number one. You didn’t even get that far?”
She smoothed a self-conscious hand over her hair. “I had no idea what the hell I was doing, to be honest. I tried to catch a stick on fire with a lighter.”
He paused. “Well, good thing that had no hope of working. You would’ve smoked up the whole house, if so.”
“Oh. Right.”
A smile ghosted over his mouth. “Right.” He bent to his task.
Aubrey settled onto the sofa to watch. As much as she hated admitting it, she found something about his competence... hypnotic. She mapped his every movement, so swift and economical, while he built a nest of shredded newspaper on the grate and split kindling with a pocketknife. Halfway through, he pushed up his sleeves, revealing tendoned forearms. Each smooth undulation pulled her mind toward another time.
This place, but a different year. She’d lain underneath him in this very spot, shivering not with cold, but with nerves. He’d soothed her then with a similar dance of his hands. Reassured her with a finger trailed down her side, with the heated nuzzle of his nose against her neck. Then he’d pulled back, his curls falling over his forehead, his night-sky eyes expansive and unshuttered, the way they always were when they were alone.
A question—what did she want?
Such surety had filled her then, a wave of heat with no end and no beginning. She’d wanted it all, of course. For him to be her first and her only. Because it would always be the two of them, just like this, forever and ever, ’til death do us—
“There you go.”
Cold reality washed over her. Aubrey blinked, finding herself once more in the frigid present. Nick crouched by thefireplace, facing her. Behind him, fledgling flames licked at an elaborate arrangement of wood. His expression was mild, maybe even borderline disinterested.
She pulled the blanket tighter. Clearly, his mind hadn’t traveled to the same place hers had, but why would it? She wasn’t even a blip on his radar now. She would never again watch his expression open up, never see his eyes turn soulful and welcoming, a private invitation just for her.
Aubrey swallowed against a prickly throat. God, what was wrong with her? “Thanks,” she forced out. “I’m warmer already.”
He nodded and stood, apparently not knowing what to say. She didn’t, either.
He turned an awkward circle, then toed a slatted vent in the floor. “Looks like you have central heat. Where’s the furnace?”
“I don’t know. In the basement, maybe? Why?”
“I’ll go get it lit. This fire’s only going to last for so long, and I don’t want you running out of wood in the middle of the night.”
