If I Can't Let Go

“I was just at the grocery store. I have steaks in the car. If we don’t eat them, they’ll go bad.”

He forced himself not to grin too widely as he asked her for her keys and went to retrieve the meat.

While Liam showered, Natalie wandered through the yard and climbed out onto the rocky breakwater that partially surrounded the small beach. The breakwater seemed ancient. Natalie wondered if it had been created by the cottage’s first owners. She stood on a slick slab of dark gray granite, breathing deeply of the fresh air.

“Don’t fall. Those rocks are sharp enough to do some damage,” Liam yelled from the terrace.

Natalie spun around. He stood on the terrace, his hair still damp from the shower, the wind causing his blue cotton shirt to billow around his torso. She hopped from one rock to another and rose up the incline to the terrace.

“The wind has really picked up,” she said as she sprang up the steps. She paused when she saw his expression. She smoothed several loose wisps of hair that had escaped her bun, suddenly self-conscious under his stare.

“Hmm,” Liam mused as he regarded her. “Guess I don’t have to warn you about falling on the rocks. Might as well tell a gazelle not to be clumsy.”

Embarrassment and pleasure flooded her in equal measure. She glanced away. “Why don’t you let me make the salad? I can do a few grades better than mediocre.”

“Sure, if you don’t think you’ll mind the smell.”

Actually, the odor from the floor stain was barely noticeable and Natalie said so when Liam led her into the house. Thanks to all the open windows and the wind coming off Lake Michigan the house smelled as fresh as a wild meadow.

“Oh!” she exclaimed in surprise when she followed Liam into the kitchen. “You didn’t tell me you put in new cabinets. They look wonderful. And the floors…they’re gorgeous,” she said, peering into the empty dining room just off the kitchen.

“Thanks,” Liam said. “How’d you know the cabinets were new?”

“Oh…I looked at the cottage several years ago when I was shopping around for a place.”

He chuckled before he opened the new stainless steel refrigerator and started pulling out supplies for a salad. “You’re a lot smarter than me if you didn’t buy it.”

“Oh, no. Don’t say that. This house is amazing.”

“What made you decide not to buy it?” Liam asked as he straightened and shut the refrigerator with a thump. He deposited an armload of vegetables near the sink.

She shrugged and wandered over to where she’d spotted a knife block with a wooden cutting board turned on its side against the back of the countertop. “Oh, you know…it’s not a very practical place for a single woman and all. My brother didn’t think it was a great idea.”

“What did you think?” Natalie was highly aware of him watching her as he leaned against the counter. He now wore a different pair of cargo shorts and a loose blue T-shirt that brought out the color of his eyes and seemed to make his tan glow. He hadn’t put on any shoes. He was the picture of sexy summertime ease. She made a point of avoiding the appealing image of him as she withdrew the cutting board.

“I think this place is brilliant,” she said, smiling. “I used to sneak over here when I was little and wander around. No one lived here for over twenty years.”

“Maybe prospective buyers didn’t like the bats that were flying around in the attic,” Liam said dryly.

She made a face. “The real estate agent never showed me the bats.”

“That’s a shocker.”

She smiled and removed some juicy-looking tomatoes from a sack. “I never saw them as a kid, either. When I was nine years old, not even bats could have convinced me this place wasn’t enchanted. I’d sneak away when my mother took us to the beach and dozed off. There’s a path that runs from White Sands to here.”

“I know.”

She glanced up when she heard the huskiness of his voice.

“I took it the other night. That’s when I saw you dancing,” he said as their stares held.

She looked away. There it was again. He kept bringing up that moment he’d spied her dancing on the beach. It’d been a perfectly innocent occurrence. Natalie couldn’t imagine why it felt as if Liam was reminding her that he’d seen her naked every time he brought it up.

“Strainer?” Natalie asked briskly.

He turned and opened a cabinet, removing both a stainless steel strainer and a white salad bowl.

“Natalie.”

She glanced up as she reached for the items.

“I can close the shades if the room is too bright.”

She blushed. “Don’t bother. I’m fine. The tint of my glasses alters to the brightness of the light.” She turned on the water and began rinsing the vegetables, highly aware the whole time of Liam looking down at her. He’d said she fascinated him earlier. Was he, perhaps, one of those men she’d encountered infrequently over the years who confused pity for attraction? Given their circumstances, Liam might feel an even stronger tendency for misplaced pity.

Natalie wasn’t unrealistic. Men had been interested before. She wasn’t the worst catch on the planet. It wasn’t her facial scars that stood as a barrier to her having relationships with men. No, it was the way the scars had interfered with a normal social development that had done that. She’d been on the brink of adolescence during those excruciating months in the hospital. Girls at that age were highly concerned about their appearance. Compound that natural self-consciousness with a traumatic head injury, multiple broken bones and facial wounds that had made half her face look like ground beef before the surgeries—not to mention a mother, a lifeline, who had been ripped away from her during that critical period—and the makings of a socially awkward adult woman were all in the mix.

“I’ll go and throw the steaks on the grill,” Liam said a few seconds later. Was it her overactive imagination, or did he seem disappointed in her sudden fascination with clean vegetables?

She mechanically went about her task. Most of her brain was busy telling her foolish heart to slow. She shouldn’t have agreed to have dinner with him. This curiosity about his father and the Kavanaughs was tempting her to venture farther and farther into intimidating, unknown waters.

No, that wasn’t honest. It was her fascination with Liam that was risky.

Natalie had never slept with a man. She knew she was a bizarre anomaly in this day and age—a twenty-seven-year-old virgin. Liam, on the other hand, was the most confident, gorgeous man she’d ever imagined, let alone encountered. The idea of Liam and her engaging in any kind of sexual mating dance was just…ridiculous.

“We’re going to get rain,” Liam said as he entered the kitchen ten minutes later, carrying two grilled steaks.

Natalie nodded as she set the knife down on the cutting board. In fact the natural light in the kitchen had grown dimmer and the wind had started to howl across the dunes and the rocks, causing the window blinds to rattle. “We should go and shut your western windows.”

“Yeah, I guess we should,” Liam said as he set down the steaks on the counter. “You get the downstairs ones and I’ll get upstairs?”

They met back in the kitchen a few minutes later, the sound of the wind now a distant wail. Natalie was finishing setting the round oak table in a nook in the kitchen when he returned.

“Is this okay? I know you planned to eat outside, but—”

“No, this is great,” Liam enthused. He hadn’t seemed to notice the awkwardness that had settled on her when she realized how intimate the setting was—the approaching storm, the cozy kitchen, just the two of them sitting down to a meal. He was so comfortable in his skin he didn’t know how to recognize self-consciousness in others, Natalie thought.

He placed the steaks on the table next to the salad and walked over to the refrigerator. “Is iced tea okay?”

“I already poured us two glasses. They’re chilling off.”

“Excellent,” Liam murmured with a satisfied grin as he brought the glasses over to the table.

“It looks like it’s possible you weren’t bragging when you said you made a mean steak,” she said as they sat down together. Liam took her plate and began to serve her. Rain began to spatter on the windows.

“I never brag. Only the absolute truth ever leaves these lips.” He’d said it so soberly, but his sudden grin was pure devilry.

“We’ll see.”