Half Moon Harbor (30 page)

“Because you plan on makin' a bunch of babies, do ye?” he teased, but gently.

She took it as intended, making a quick, but cute face at him. “Or maybe Ford will. Or maybe the Maddox clan will simply die out here. But it won't be without me at least trying to leave something meaningful behind. Meaningful to me. And that's not a job, not even the inn. It's just . . .”

“Home,” he said, knowing what she meant. Intimately. Something else twinged in his heart. “I know something of that.”

She looked into his face, and he realized from her expression that he'd let some of the plaintive emotion home evoked in him come out in his voice. “Do you miss Ireland?” she asked more quietly. “Do you miss home, your family? Are they proud of you even if they think you should be doing what they're doing?”

He nodded. “I think they believe this is foolhardy and I will give up eventually and come home, but, in their own way, I think they do support me finding my own way. Much as they'd rather it be their way. But miss them? Miss Ireland? Oh, aye. That I do.”

“Why not start a Monaghan's Shipbuilding there?”

“I thought about it, but this place was already here, with history that called to me, and . . . I knew I'd have a much better chance of making a go of it if they weren't all looking over my shoulder, trying to talk me away from it with every breath. I didn't know the place was in the shape it was, but even so . . . I wanted to make my own mark. Not in the way you do, not necessarily by making a home, but the bigger goal is the same, I think. Finding a place to belong, a place that has a bigger meaning than merely occupation or location. Something that extends beyond that, connects all of that.”

She nodded. “Exactly.”

“So, you know why I'm here and why boats. I know why you're here, but why the inn?”

Her cheeks went instantly warm and that surprised him. His quiet smile edged out wide again. “Well, well . . . do I detect something perhaps not rooted in rational planning and educated risk-taking?”

“Oh, I educated myself about it. As much as anyone can. It was actually a fantasy, a sort of pie in the sky, if I ever won the lottery kind of dream, and that's all it was ever supposed to be. Somewhere along the line, as my life wasn't going as planned, or the plan wasn't as satisfying as I'd thought it would be, the dream suddenly, somehow became a goal. And then I couldn't stop thinking about it, like what would happen if I just . . . did it. Went for it. You know? What it was suddenly wasn't as important as what it represented—which was doing something that I wanted to do, versus what I thought I should do. It was the first thing I've ever really, really just . . .
wanted
to do.”

He nodded in understanding. “That tells me not at all why it is that innkeeping ended up being that thing.”

She gave him a rueful smile and nudged at him, which just made him tug her more deeply into his arms.

“You're going tell me?”

“Or?” she said, the playful lightness coming back into her voice. With it came a bit of the energy, the verve she always seemed to have so naturally, so effortlessly that had winked out when she realized her dream wasn't going to go off quite as she planned.

“Or I carry you up to my lair and find a way to make you confess all.”

She gave him a considering look. “I'm almost tempted to call your bluff, just to see what mad skills you think you are going to employ to make me talk.”

He grinned. “That's the spirit.” He back-walked her until she was pressed against the large picture window that looked out over the slope of the hill and the water just beyond his boathouse and leaned down to nip at her chin, running his hands up her sides, brushing ever so lightly over her nipples. Reveling in the way his touch made her gasp and her body go all soft and pliant, he cupped her face with both hands and tipped her head back, which arched her hips more fully into his. “Have I mentioned how much I love that you wear your hair down so often now?” he said against her lips, sinking his fingers into it and gently tugging.

She moaned against his mouth and opened under his questing tongue. He'd thought to tease her more, but ended up as lost in the moment as she was. He finally left her mouth damp, her lips puffy for a breath of much-needed air and continued the rain of kisses along her jaw, pausing at the pulse spot just beneath her ear. She groaned, letting her head roll to the side, and he turned her, so her back was pressed to his oh so aching front. He groaned as she pressed the soft curve of her bum against the very hardest part of him. He drew her hair aside and kissed her neck, his body twitching hard as he felt the shiver of pleasure race through her in a delicate shudder. He grinned against her skin, happy to have found yet another of her pleasure triggers. He drew his hands up her hips, fingers splayed over her stomach, then inched them up higher, taking her shirt with him, exposing her soft, pale skin until he could cup the gentle swell of her breasts.

She pressed her head back against his shoulder, arching as he played with her nipples through the soft white fabric, then pressing back against him as he leaned around and kissed the edge of her jaw. She moved against him, and they found their rhythm so easily. He realized it was like that for them in all ways. A match of ebb and flow, need and want, thought and process.

He nudged her head forward, caught up in the moment with this woman—his woman—and feeling as if everything was converging for him in that one moment. “Open your eyes and look out there,” he said in a heated whisper against her damp neck. “See the slope of that land, how it runs naturally straight to the water?”

She murmured, “Yes,” her breath coming in short gasps as she reached down and grabbed his arm, keeping it tight around her waist as she pressed back against him.

She made him want to howl at the moon, everything was so primal with her. “See the deep curve”—he moved against her—“dipping in, then playing out way across the other side?”

“Yes,” she gasped as he dipped her back against him and pressed his hips in.

“That's where they built the great schooners, the massive clippers, right there on that ground . . . and then rolled them down into the sea. We Monaghans were brilliant at finding just the right lay of the land. Did ye know that's where the term came from?”

She moaned softly, letting her head roll left to right in a slow shake, her eyes still open, still looking, seeing, taking it all in, even as her body was lost to his touch.

“Now I get to build one, Grace, right on that very same spot. I have no idea what I'm doing, I know it as concept only, but och, the dream of it, the chance of it. I want to try, need to try. Do ye ken?”

She nodded, and he felt her body catch, her throat work under his questing fingers, which curved around her collarbone as he turned her cheek to his mouth. He turned her fully in his arms and saw her eyes were shimmering and felt his belly clutch again. “No, no, I didn't say it to make ye sad, but to show you that it's the right thing.” He brought her mouth up to his. “As is your inn. Yer out of your depth, but it's what ye want and ye know it. Ye see it in your mind's eye, your heart's eye, and ye want it to be all that ye imagined.” He pulled her close. “I know I'll have to make compromises with my ancestors' design for all sorts of reasons. As will you, concerning the idyllic setting you envisioned. But we'll do it, Grace, that we will, to get to the grander goal, and it will be none the less satisfying for it. I want my dream and I want you to want yours, to fight for it. Dinnae give up on it because it's no' perfect.” He knew what else he was saying.
Don't give up on me, for I'm far from perfect, too.

She nodded, and the shimmer turned to glass. “I never cry.” The words were hardly a whisper. “I do want it, Brodie. For you. For me.”

He tipped up her chin. “For us?”

She held his gaze, even as hers swam. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Then have it we shall, aye?”

She searched his eyes, his face, her fingers sliding around his waist, then holding on by fistfuls of his T-shirt. “Aye.”

He grinned, and felt, in that instant, that the world was his to claim and conquer. He took her mouth fiercely, confidently, and urged her to take the same. And that she did. But just as he thought to take her up to the loft where he'd imagined her so many times, where he'd wondered how it would be to wake up to her scent on his pillows every morning, she ducked out of his arms and stepped away.

Drawing in breaths in deep gulps, she dipped her chin, one hand propped on her hip, the other scooping her long hair away from the heated skin of her face.

He knew better than to go to her, crowd her any further. There should be something he could say . . . but he'd said it all. It was up to her now—which was terrifying, really. He knew she was of like mind with him, but still wasn't quite certain she would see it through.

“It's . . . a lot,” she said when she'd gotten her breath back under control, her back still to him. “And it's good. So good. I just . . .” She finally turned to him. “I need to be better at trusting it will always be good.” She lifted a quick hand. “I don't mean smooth, no bumps. I mean—”

“That I won't up and abandon you,” he said, understanding as much as he could just how deep those scars ran. He honestly couldn't fathom the rootlessness she felt, knowing it had been caused by people making active decisions to put her in that place. She'd overcome so much of her past. On the surface, she could be considered a success. Smart, educated, good career, better head on her shoulders. Bright, funny, forward thinking. Strong. So damn strong. And yet . . . this was her soft white underbelly. And the power that her fear of abandonment had over her wasn't to be underestimated.

“It's stupid,” she said.

“On the contrary. It's the very opposite of that. Self-protection has it all over self-destruction.”

“Until one becomes the other,” she said quietly.

“Och, Grace. Ye see that's where I have faith in you. You're too stubborn, too independent, too strong, and too damn smart to let yourself be doomed by your own fear. You might hate it, you might want to run from it . . . but in the end, you won't.”

“What makes you so certain of that? You're so certain, but you don't know me. You don't know—”

“Don't I?” he countered. “Has anything I've just said to you shown that I don't understand you? You're here, aren't you? That took courage.” He took one step closer, but that was all.

“Since you know so much,” she countered, “you'll know that I need time.” She laughed, more a short hiccup. “Isn't this kind of hilarious? The ladies' man and perennial bachelor is the guy preaching about grabbing what you want and holding on tight . . . and I'm the one needing to step back, take a breath. You know, I wondered once, when I realized that you had so much more depth than your swagger and charm—”

“When was that?”

“When you first mentioned Alex to me, that very first day. I saw that look in your eye, that emotion, that she'd meant something special to you. And I thought ‘huh, who would have thunk it?' Then I learned that she'd chosen someone else, and I wondered how that was possible. To have someone like you actually fall . . . only to turn you down. I thought that would take a strength I wasn't sure I'd have. I'd be too locked into the fairy-tale ideal of it to say no, even if maybe I should. Only now, here I am, and here you are, and it's all of that and so much more . . . and I'm the one, in the end, who isn't strong enough to say yes. To take what's being offered.”

“Grace—”

He was interrupted by the sound of the panel door being slid open. Or opened wider. Apparently his visitor had been standing there for a while, unnoticed in the heat of the moment.

Cami strolled into the room and walked right up to Brodie. “Well, that's your loss,” she told Grace. Then she smiled at Brodie. Every hair on his neck lifted at the barracuda gleam in her dark eyes before she turned back to Grace. “Just as well you bow out now, and bow out
grace
fully.” Cami laughed at the little pun, and there wasn't the slightest bit of warmth in it.

Brodie hadn't completely recovered from the shock of Cami's sudden appearance, so he didn't react in time, didn't calculate her next move.

“What this man needs is a woman who knows exactly what he has to offer.” Cami turned her hot chocolate brown eyes on him and her smile twisted wider still. “And exactly what to do with him.” With that, she wrapped herself around him and kissed him.

His body was still hard from being wrapped up with Grace and leaped, quite declaratively, at the physical contact, separate and apart from his brain, which had instantly recoiled.

But it was enough for Cami. Eyes wide with a dark thrill at his apparent response, she turned while still draped all over him and leered at Grace. “Happily, I know just the woman for that.” She looked back to Brodie and raked her long nails through his hair. “Besides, what with you and Daddy working together, my powerful connection to the town council, and”—she rubbed up against him, her pupils all but drowning her eyes when his damn body jumped right back—“the firestorm we're about to start, we'll be one unstoppable force.”

It was as if he was in a horrible bad dream, his feet in quicksand, his body immobile as all of his brain synapses fired at once and he couldn't seem to force them to regroup against the more primal responses of his body.

She leaned in and whispered loud enough for Grace to hear, “You did tell her about our little deal, didn't you, darling? She knows all about us, right? Maybe she's simply not cut out to be the kind of. . . understanding partner you really need. But then, so few women are.”

Over Cami's shoulder, Brodie's gaze was locked directly on Grace's. Her expression had gone completely blank.