He thought he might be blushing. If he was wearing a shirt, he had a feeling he’d be tugging the collar away from his throat, giving himself some breathing room.

  She was looking at him way too closely. As if she saw everything. The emptiness. The months of pain. The regret. The questions. The doubts. The four thousand times he had nearly reached for the phone.

  Please. Save me.

  Trevor said, hastily rebutting the thought as if he’d said it out loud, “I don’t need rescuing.”

  She peered in behind him at his house. “It looks like you might.”

  “It’s socks on the floor, not a fire-breathing dragon.” But the heat rising as he looked at her, as he remembered her, made it feel as if there was a fire-breathing dragon inside him.

  “Quite a few socks.”

  “Look, it’s a long way to come to talk about socks.” On the television behind him, he heard the crowd roar. “You made me miss the putt.”

  “Boo-hoo,” she said.

  There was something so different about her. That was part of what was stoking the fire within him.

  It wasn’t just the new hairstyle. It was the way she was carrying herself. The light in her eyes. That little smile tickling across the lushness of her lips.

  He realized what it was. Confidence.

  Even the way she was dressed seemed different than what he remembered. Except for her wedding day, Jacey Tremblay had always seemed subdued, the woman who least wanted to draw attention to herself.

  But now spring sunshine spilled around her, and she’d worn a dress in celebration of the season, apparently. He squinted at it while trying not to appear too interested.

  It was the same color as the banks of daffodils the community association had planted. It hugged the parts of her that had filled out and showed quite a bit of the length of her legs. He knew how strong those legs were, and not just from watching her snowboard, either.

  Something clawed at the inside of him. It was more than hunger. Hunger didn’t feel as if it could consume you, did it?

  Maybe if you hadn’t had anything to eat for two months, it did.

  But no, it wasn’t hunger. It was fire.

  “What’s with the suitcase?” he asked her, trying for an unfriendly tone, one that would chase her away. For good.

  Even as part of him sighed its welcome.

  It wasn’t just a suitcase. It was that suitcase, the one that should have warned him there was a wild side to her that she kept carefully hidden from the unsuspecting.

  Now, he noticed, leaning against the suitcase was a snowboard. The design and colors on that were way crazier than the design and patterns on the suitcase.

  No, no and no.

  He frowned at her. He pointed at the snowboard. “What’s that for?”

  “Uh, isn’t it obvious? I bought my own. I found out that the rental ones aren’t all that good.”

  “You’ve been snowboarding?” He nearly added since but managed to bite his tongue. No need bringing either of their attention back to that. The logical question wasn’t whether or not she’d been snowboarding; it was why she had arrived here, on his doorstep, with her snowboard. And her suitcase.

  That was the logical question. Engineers relied on logical questions.

  Logical questions kept the world from going crazy, kept it running according to irrefutable and predictable rules.

  “I’ve been snowboarding lots,” she said. “There’s a hill outside Toronto. I mean, compared to Moonbeam, it’s pathetic, of course. But still, it was okay to practice stuff.”

  “Huh.” She’d gone snowboarding without him. He had no right to feel faintly miffed, as if somehow he had thought that would be their thing.

  They were not they.

  He hoped she hadn’t been practicing anything else since he wasn’t there to protect her from the Ozzies of the world.

  “Why are you here?” he asked gruffly, asking the logical question. He drew in a deep breath. “Please don’t tell me you got another letter from Caitlyn.”

  Jacey actually cocked her head at him. For God’s sake, it looked as if she felt sorry for him.

  “No, no letters from Caitlyn,” she said. “Unlike you, I got the message the first time.”

  Unlike him? He glared at her. “Oh, yeah, and what was that?”

  “It was that time can be short. Shorter than we think,” she said softly. “The message was to live every minute.”

  He supposed that explained her snowboarding without him.

  “The message,” she continued softly, “was to accept every single gift life offers.”

  He warned himself not to say it to her. But the words came out, anyway.

  “I got a message, too,” he said. “It’s different than yours. You know how we’ve talked about things that have the potential to be dangerous?”

  “Airplanes, bathrooms,” she said.

  “You know what’s the most dangerous thing of all?” he asked her.

  “Love?” she guessed, softly. She had no right to be looking at him like that. As if she saw him. Completely.

  “Hope,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “We hoped for a baby. And instead we got a diagnosis. And then we hoped for a cure.”

  Tears were slipping down Jacey’s cheeks. See? This is exactly what he hadn’t wanted. To drag her into his world of disillusionment.

  He wanted to stop speaking. But he didn’t.

  He said, “Right until her very last breath, I hoped. I hoped for a miracle.”

  The tears kept coming. Strangely, it did not feel as if her tears were hurting her. It felt as though they were healing him.

  Then she spoke. “Maybe this is our miracle. Love rising out of the ashes of all that despair. I know it’s not the one we asked for. Or hoped for. But maybe this is the miracle we needed. The miracle of believing love can win.”

  Trevor was thunderstruck. He could feel everything in him that wanted to be strong, that wanted to stubbornly hold on, that wanted to protect her, beginning to tremble, a structure warning of collapse.

  “Look what I have,” she said.

  He was not sure he would have been surprised if she pulled a toy poodle from that oversize bag. She held something in front of him, right under his nose.

  Lift tickets. Moonbeam.

  “Plus a couple days at the hotel.”

  He could actually feel a little bead of sweat breaking out over his upper lip as his heart, foolish thing it was, leaned toward what Jacey was holding out.

  Not lift tickets.

  No.

  The most dangerous thing of all.

  Hope.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  HOPE THAT JACEY was holding, not tickets, but a key. To the way out of his life, layered now, discontent on top of his grief.

  He’d felt flat, out of sorts since he’d dropped Jacey at the airport. His life had seemed like a yawning cavern of emptiness.

  He’d asked himself a thousand times, maybe more, if it had been the right thing to do, to let her go.

  He’d beaten himself up at least that many times for the affair.

  Though he wasn’t sure if it was an affair, and he sometimes got lost in debates over the semantics of it.

  Intimacy.

  Event.

  Fling.

  Hookup.

  What he’d discovered was beating himself up, and inner debates kept it all at an intellectual level. It kept it in his head, where he could cope with it. It kept the physical longing for her at bay. Slightly.

  The facts: he’d had a hookup, fling, intimate event, affair, with one of the best people he had ever met.

  He was in a prison of absolute loneliness and self-loathing.

  Jacey didn’t have the good sense to be holding it against him, apparently. In fact, she was waving a reprieve in front of him.

  Hope.

  Trevor leaned his shoulder against the door, just to make it clear he was not inviting Jacey in. He thought it was probably a pretty good impression of a man who could have a casual fling and walk away after.

  Without her ever knowing it was for her own protection. Without her knowing about the fire-breathing dragon that was taking in her lips and her curves and burning him up.

  “A plane ticket,” he said as she held up items for him to see, one by one, “a snowboard, extra luggage fees for the snowboard, a couple of days at Moonbeam. Did you win a lottery or something?”

  “In the weirdest way, I did. Remember when I played Caitlyn’s song?”

  A moment in his life he would never ever forget, but it felt as if an admission would tell her the awful truth. That he’d been unable to forget her, or one single thing about that time they had on the mountain. He lifted a shoulder instead of answering.

  “I guess people were videoing it on their phones.”

  “They were,” he confirmed. “I remember that. Everyone was taking out their phones.” Except him. He had been so lost in that moment, it had never occurred to him that he could have recorded it.

  Could have tortured himself with it all these months.

  “I’m not sure I could say it went viral, but it’s certainly all over social media.”

  He contemplated that. He could have been watching her, the way she had looked that night they had learned of the avalanche? That night he had seen her so fully and completely herself? That night that he had seen her soul? It would have been torture, but torture of the loveliest kind.

  “Anyway, long story short, a woman saw it who is kind of a big deal executive in the music world. I’ve got this contract to record it. And some of my other compositions. They gave me an advance. It’s a ridiculous sum of money.”

  He tried to say something sarcastic. Don’t spend it all in one place. But he couldn’t. That earthquake-about-to-happen sensation increased as he felt a brick in the wall that made up his defenses loosen.

  “Not that I’m rich or anything,” she said, “but I knew right away what I wanted to do with it.”

  No matter how much he wanted to protect her from the destructive caprice of love, even as his barriers were showing signs of weakening, he needed her to know. That he was happy for her.

  “Jacey, that’s incredible.” He meant it. He could see her flying far and high. He hoped she was ready for it. “I’m glad you didn’t give up music.”

  “I actually talked to that boy who didn’t pass the audition I trained him for. Remember my sense of failure? It turned out it wasn’t my fault. He failed the audition on purpose. It’s not what he wanted.”

  He looked at the light on her face.

  Oh, she was ready for whatever came next. The fact she had stopped taking responsibility for the whole world was written all over her. She didn’t need him.

  “It has been incredible. It seems the more I’ve opened myself up to life, the more good things have happened to me. Anyway, I have money. And I decided I had to use a bit of it to try snowboarding in the spring.”

  “I thought you were scared of bears,” he reminded her. He heard something morose in his tone.

  “Oh, I am. Terrified. But that’s why I’m here. Part of why I’m here.” She blushed, and her eyes skittered to his chest and then away. “I remembered you said that. About bears in the spring.”

  “So you’re hoping to bump into a bear while snowboarding?”

  “Not exactly. But I need to face the possibility.”

  He wondered if he lived to be a hundred, and if he saw her every single day, if she would ever stop surprising him.

  Delighting him, really.

  But no, he could not think of that. Of a life that had her in it, every single day.

  “Here’s the thing,” Jacey said, solemnly. “I try to do something I’m scared of. Every. Single. Day.”

  He was terrified himself at the moment. Of her.

  Of this new Jacey.

  Only it wasn’t really new. It was just as Caitlyn had said. Jacey was small and had no idea how mighty she was.

  Except that now, apparently, she did.

  “I went skydiving,” she said, beaming at him.

  He’d given up a chance at happiness to protect her from all the unpredictable vagaries of life and she’d thrown it away? Gone skydiving?

  “I want you to come with me,” she said softly.

  “Skydiving?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  As if he’d be afraid to skydive. Come to think of it, he would be, as would any sensible person.

  “I’d like you to come with me. To Moonbeam. Right now. I have reservations for tonight. For the next three days.”

  “No.” He thought he said it formidably, in a way that brooked no argument.

  “That’s what scares me today.”

  So he was an exercise in fully unwrapping the new her. Terrifying.

  “Asking you to come with me is what scares me,” Jacey said softly. “Leaving myself wide-open to rejection.”

  She was deliberately attacking him at his weakest point. He didn’t want to hurt her. But if he could just be strong for one more minute. One more second. The time it took to say—

  “No.”

  Jacey didn’t look rejected. In the least. She didn’t look scared, either. She looked like she knew how hard that single word had been for Trevor to utter.

  She stepped into him, not the least bit intimidated. He had plenty of time to back away from her, but he didn’t. There was no sense in her thinking he wouldn’t stand his ground.

  She laid her hand on his naked chest, right above his heart.

  Her scent tickled his nostrils and her touch made him remember things he shouldn’t remember right now, not when he needed so desperately to be strong.

  She looked up at him, those wide green eyes wise on his own, and he knew he wasn’t hiding one single thing from her. Jacey saw him. She knew he was terrified. And she probably knew he was on fire for her, too.

  “Thank you,” she said softly. “Thank you for trying to protect me.”

  “From? Not skydiving, apparently,” he snapped, still trying, but feeling the mortar crumble and a single brick fall with a thunk from the wall of his defenses.

  “That’s what you do, isn’t it, Trevor? Protect? When I think back on it, it’s in everything. Starting with really tiny things like the mittens.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “When I told you I loved you, it sent you into overdrive, didn’t it? To protect me from the most fearsome thing of all. And it’s not death by bathroom.”

  Her gaze was absolutely stripping. She saw to his soul.

  “You were trying to protect me from love.”

  “From hoping for too much,” he heard himself say. He felt another brick fall, and then another, until his whole wall lay at his feet and at hers.

  He felt naked, transparent before her. He felt as if her fingertips were drawing his freed heart to her.

  He yanked himself away from her hand on his chest, but it didn’t matter. It was too late.

  “You see, Trevor,” Jacey said firmly, “Caitlyn’s legacy to us wasn’t to instill in us the belief that love hurts. The lesson wasn’t to avoid it at all costs. She would hate that message. She loved with every fiber of her being until her very last breath.

  “This is her message to those of us who remain—to embrace every single opportunity life gives us. And especially this one. Love,” she continued softly. “I think we should give it a chance.”

  * * *

  Jacey felt as if she had stopped breathing, as if her heart had stopped beating. Waiting for Trevor’s answer.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  Her whole lifetime it felt as if she had been waiting to know whether Trevor would say yes or no to giving love a second chance.

  With her.

  This time she knew it wasn’t about her. Not at all. It was about him. So wounded on the battlefield of the heart. It would be the gravest act of bravery for him to say yes to this journey when it had nearly destroyed him once already.

  She would not do anything to coerce him. To change his mind if it did not go the way she hoped. This had to come from him.

  This single act of courage had to be his.

  To say yes instead of no.

  He looked away. He ran his hand through the tangle of his dark hair. He shifted from one foot to the other.

  And then, his voice low in his throat, like a warrior on one knee, surrendering his weapons after a hard fought battle, he answered.

  “I think we should,” Trevor said, his eyes meeting hers. “I think we should give love a chance.”

  Every single thing within Jacey sighed with relief and gratitude. She stepped back into him, twined her arms around his neck, pulled his lips to hers.

  Homecoming.

  She had missed him so much. She was starving for him. The Jacey she had become over the past few months did not hold back.

  Her lips sought his, her hands explored the familiar surfaces of his face, his neck, his chest. She demanded an answer, and answer he did, every bit as hungry as she was.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” he said, in between nips and kisses. He was a man who had been dying of thirst and she was a long, cool drink of water.

  “I want you,” she whispered. “I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want you.”

  Trevor broke the contact. He took a step back from her. When she tried to move back into the circle of his arms, he held up his hand.

  Stop? Seriously?

  “It’s not going to be like this.”

  “Like what? Glorious?”

  He smiled, with annoying patience, as if he was explaining a complex math formula to someone who wasn’t very smart.

  “We aren’t going to jump in as lovers and see if a friendship develops.”

 

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