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glass with her fingertip. “That was a rather sudden decision.” “It was. I enlisted at the recruiting office at the naval yard the same day you and I…got together, and I went for basic training in Pensacola two weeks later.” “I remember,” she said. “I heard you’d gone.” “Yeah, I was in trouble. That decision to smuggle those Cuban immigrants onto the island wasn’t the smartest choice I ever made in my life. Which might explain why I wasn’t exactly myself the night I met you at the beach. I had some pretty serious consequences hanging over my head, and I was using a bottle to forget for a while.” She closed her eyes and released a quick breath of air— a seemingly subtle reaction, but he realized how his words might have hurt her. “I didn’t mean that the way it must have sounded. I don’t want you to believe that what I did, what we did, was just me being crazy.” “No, we were both being crazy.” “Maybe, but I never intended for you to be part of the madness.” “You weren’t solely responsible for what happened.” He felt that he was. She’d been a sweet, innocent kid, barely eighteen. He was a twenty-one-year-old man who’d gotten himself into more fixes than he cared to remember. But when she’d padded across the sand in her bare feet and sat beside him, she hadn’t seemed like the untouch- able Abigail Vernay. When she’d rested her cheek against his shoulder and curled her hand over his thigh, he’d lost his head. When she’d let him kiss her, when his hand had 98 CHRISTMAS IN KEY WEST snaked along that tempting slash of skin above the delicate dip of her naval…when she’d leaned in, pressed her breasts against him, he’d forgotten all sense of right and wrong. He shouldn’t have, but “shouldn’t have” had been the mantra of his life for a lot of years. She took a long sip of wine now and fixed him with a gaze so penetrating he felt it in the pit of his stomach. “I heard you were at the beach that night,” she said. “I looked for you. I wanted to find you.” He inhaled a long, slow breath to give his brain a chance to process what she’d just said. Did she mean what he thought she did? This was the last thing he’d expected to hear from her. Abby Vernay, the girl who always held herself to a higher standard, had intended to seduce him, the bad boy of Key West. She gave him a tentative smile. “You’re surprised.” “A little.” He should have gagged on the understatement. “I wanted you to kiss me, to find me attractive.” Oh, he’d found her attractive. And if the number of times she’d entered his head in the past few days indicated anything, he still did. He couldn’t tell her that. He wasn’t drunk. He’d changed and she had, too, in ways he still didn’t know, which was why anything he could say now would sound lame and insincere. So he said something that was at least true about what had happened after that night. “I thought about you. If I’d stayed in town, I would have called.” He smiled. “I figured you would have hung up on me.” Her eyes clouded with something he couldn’t identify. Regret? Suspicion? “But you didn’t call…in those two weeks, or ever.” “Once I left here, I got caught up in the whole military CYNTHIA THOMASON 99 thing.” He paused, realizing that what he’d just told her probably sounded like a flimsy excuse. “I couldn’t come back here. The details of my enlistment were all over town. It was a deal my parents and I made with the judge to keep me out of jail.” “I heard someone spotted you the night you picked up the immigrants, and turned your name in to the police.” Right. Huey Vernay, to be exact. But Reese wasn’t going to tell her that. He held up the carafe. She shook her head and he poured the last few drops into his glass. “We aren’t the people we were back then.” He drained his glass and called the waiter over. “That’s a good thing in my case.” “You’ve become Mr. Responsible,” she said. “My mother says you’re admired by everyone on the island.” [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |