"How'd you find out?"
"Zach MacKenzie told me." Cole stopped under the spreading branches of a giant silver maple tree and pulled Brenna into his arms. "I'm here for you, fair lady. I'll help you in any way that I can."
"Will you?" she asked, almost absently, staring into his eyes.
"Sure." He smoothed her hair away from her face. "What are friends for if they can't be around when you need them?"
"Are you my friend, Cole?" she whispered.
"If you'll let me close enough to be."
"I'm trying," she said, as much to herself as to him.
He gathered her closer and nuzzled the hair away from her ear.
She leaned into his caress. Shivers spread through her. She felt his lips on her jaw, and she turned her face, needy for the kiss she knew was coming. He didn't immediately give it to her, though. He watched her through half-closed eyes, his lips near, but not near enough. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled him toward her, and stood on tiptoe until her mouth touched his. His lips parted, and she drank hungrily from him as though the sheer merging of their mouths could make her feel whole.
He groaned and shifted his hold on her, bringing her in more complete contact with his body. Another surge of heat rushed toward her center. She pressed herself closer. His hands slid under her shirt. She was sure she had never felt anything half so wonderful as his hard palms on her back.
Cole trembled as his body clamored for more. He had never wanted a woman so much as he wanted Brenna in this instant. He had to back off. He knew it. This was too public a place, and he was no longer a teenager willing to bear this hungry teasing. Yet, he barely had control enough to lift his mouth from hers.
"No more," he said, his voice hoarse with need. Ignoring his own command, he pressed kisses all over her face before claiming her mouth again. She came to him in kind. Knowing her need was great as his own made him shudder and again threatened his resolve.
His hands traced the contour of her buttocks, then followed a path from her waist to her soft breasts pressed against him. He tore his mouth from hers. "I could almost lay you down right here on the sidewalk, and to hell with the consequences."
"Take me home with you," she whispered against his neck, inhaling the aroma of his skin.
He dragged in a big breath and framed her face with his hands. "You're sure?"
"Yes."
He ran the pad of his thumb across her lower lip. "Now?"
She nodded.
He took her hand and they walked silently, swiftly toward the apartment. She tried to calm her emotions, to think. All she wanted to do was climb back into his arms. Her legs were shaking so badly, she trembled as she walked. Never had she wanted anyone like this.
She channeled her thoughts into mundane matters. Like an explanation to her brother.
"I have to go in and let Michael know where I'm going. I don't want him to worry when I'm not here in the morning."
Cole chuckled. "You make me feel like I'm stealing my high-school sweetheart off for the night."
"No chance of that," she said. "I was never in high school."
"Michael's not-" Cole stopped talking suddenly, then stopped walking, as well. He faced Brenna.
"What did you say?" "When?" But she knew when, and silently cursed herself. She had slipped again. How could she? How?
Chapter 12.
"You never finished high school?" A puzzled frown drew Cole's brows together.
"I neverwent to high school." She lifted her chin and faced him squarely, familiar defensiveness surfacing.
"I'm a dropout, Cole."
A look of complete bafflement passed over his features, followed by a frown. "You're so bright, so-"
Acting out of years of protecting herself, a habit so old she scarcely recognized it as such, she attacked before he could attack her.
"Going to school wasn't exactly a priority, Cole. Survival was." She thumped herself on the chest. "Take a good look. I've been on my own since I was fifteen years old. This is who I am. A barmaid. A housekeeper."
He stood in the middle of the sidewalk, his arms loosely at his sides.
"It's not exactly what you had in mind, is it?"
He shook his head, and she died a little inside.
"Who were we fooling, Cole? This was never going to work." She held her hands out as though weighing a ball in each, one much heavier than the other. "Your world is here. And mine ... is here. They don't match worth a damn, do they? Chemistry between us or not."
He extended a hand toward her. "I thought it was more-"
"Goodbye, Cole."
Without waiting for his reaction-his rejection-she stomped away from him, nearly ran up the walk, wrenched the door open and slammed it behind her.
Cole watched her go, feeling as though the knots in his gut might strangle him. He supposed he ought to have figured it out. He'd just never taken the things she'd told him to the logical next step. She'd left home at fourteen. Her mother and grandmother had died. She wouldn't have gone back to live with her father. And Michael would have been sixteen or seventeen at the time, too young to help her even if their father had permitted.
A dropout, though. Dropouts were stupid. Content to slide through life letting someone else shoulder the burdens. Working at subsistence jobs that took minimal skills and had no future. Like housekeepers. Like barmaids.
Like ... Brenna.
Cole hung his head, shocked at the turn of his thoughts. That wasn't how he thought of Brenna. It wasn't. When he was with her, her jobs didn't matter to him. Quite simply, he liked being with her. She was bright, funny, easy to be with. She had dreams that she had shared with him.But ... adropout .
Much as he wanted to believe she had finished school some other way-with a GED or something, he instinctively knew she hadn't. If there was one thing he could count on with her, it was her truthfulness. It was as she said-she had never finished, had never begun, high school.
He wished he didn't hate the idea quite so much.
Unexpectedly, one of Susan's last taunts came to him.Farm boy. She'd said it with the same derision his thoughts had about dropout. His roots were a piece of what made him who he was. And Brenna ... was who she was because of those same roots.
He took a couple of steps toward the apartment, then stopped again. She acted as though she had expected him to look down on her, demean her, hurt her. Hell, he already had.
With a mutter of disgust, he headed for his Jeep wondering how to approach this latest facet of the ever-more-complex woman he was half in love with.
Brenna jabbed the pillow and tucked it under her chest, no closer to sleep now than she was hours ago. She rested her chin on her arms and silently counted all the ways she was a fool.
One of the problems with sexual attraction, she decided, was that it rendered her brain a useless quivering mass completely at the mercy of her hormones. Twice now she had slipped, and twice now she had hurtled herself into a bottomless well full of her worst fears.
If only she had kept her mouth shut, she'd have her arms full of a warm, vibrant man instead of a lumpy pillow. A wave of complete wretchedness washed over her. If only...
If only... The phrase that measured all the lost possibilities of her life.
What if you didn't have anything to hide?
But I do.
But what if you had told him? Everything.
He'd be gone in a flash.
But he didn't leave you tonight. You ran.
I didn't run.
Didn't you?
She dropped her head onto her pillow and let the tears come. Starkly, she pictured Cole's face as she had walked away from him. Bewilderment-not censure. Concern-not judgment. Expecting the worst from him, she ran. Ran, just as she always had.
She fell into a restless sleep to the relentless beat of her own ever running footsteps.
She awoke five hours later with a pounding headache and all the events of the previous day clamoring for her attention. She didn't want to think about being unemployed. She didn't want to think about looking for another job. She didn't want to think about her almost-come-to-fruition plans. But she did.
Most of all, she thought about how she had driven Cole away, how she had judged him more severely than she had anticipated him to judge her.
She owed him an apology, and she knew it. I'm sorry, she mentally rehearsed. I shouldn't have ... what? Quit school when I was fifteen? Shouldn't have told you about leaving home? Shouldn't have run?
Shouldn't have lied to you.
A word she hated almost as much asif only .Should .
She got out of bed, slipped into a robe, and hoped a cup of coffee would help clear the fuzz out of her brain. In the kitchen she found her brother.
"Good morning, Brenna," he said to her over his newspaper.
"What's good about it?" she muttered under her breath, reaching for a bottle of aspirin.
"Pardon?"
"I said 'good morning.'" She filled a glass with water from the tap and swallowed two tablets. She poured herself a cup of coffee and checked Michael's cup, which was full.
He met her eyes when she sat down across from him. He folded his newspaper.
"Headache?"
"Mmm." She took a long swallow of coffee, ignoring that it was too hot.
"Want to talk?"
"No." She stood up. "I'm going for a run. Maybe that will help."
"Maybe," Michael agreed, watching her with narrowed eyes.
Five minutes later Brenna went through her warm-up and stretching exercises before she took off toward the park at a pace she kept deliberately slow. She intended to run until her body was as numb as her mind. That would take some time. She intended to run until all she felt was the throbbing muscles in her legs and until she could think about nothing at all.
By the time she had circled Washington Park once, she had worked into a comfortable, loose rhythm. Her mind was still keeping pace, tormenting her with all thewhat-ifs andshould-have-beens in her life. By the time she started her fourth lap, she doubted her conscience would ever leave her alone.
"Brenna, wait!" came a call from a feminine voice behind her.
Brenna turned around and jogged lightly in place, watching as Nancy Jenkins ran toward her. A few inches shorter and twenty or thirty pounds overweight, she ran toward Brenna as though each step was torture.
"I thought that looked like you," Nancy said, panting, beads of perspiration running down the sides of her face, and trying to smile. "I didn't know you jogged this early."
"I usually don't. And it's running, you know, not jogging," Brenna said.
Nancy grasped her side. "What it really is ... is agony."
"I used to think so, too," Brenna replied, slowing her pace to match Nancy's. "You're not working at the library today, huh?"
"Nope. We're on a new schedule. Just have to work every other night now," she said. "You haven't even worked up a good sweat. Did you just get here?"
"No. I'm about half way through my fourth lap."
"Four? God, there has to be an easier way to get into shape."
"You shouldn't be in this much pain," Brenna said.
"I thought 'no pain, no gain.'"
"That's for weight lifting," Brenna said, slowing her pace some more.
Nancy patted her side. "I decided if I couldn't stay away from the peanut-butter cups, I could run the calories off."
"When did you start?"
"Yesterday," was Nancy's breathy reply.
"Did you warm up first?"
"Warm up?"