Moonlight on Butternut Lake (24 page)

A
couple days after his first appointment with Dr. Immerman, Reid was sitting at the desk in the study when Walker appeared in the doorway.

“Hey,” Reid said, looking up from the file in front of him. “I was just taking a look at the business plan you gave me.”

“What do you think?” Walker asked, coming over to him. He was pleased, Reid knew, to see him working again.

“I think I'm going to need a little more time,” Reid said. Which was true. Because when he'd told Walker he was “just taking a look at it,” he'd meant it literally, as in just staring blankly at it while he thought about Mila instead. She was over at Allie and Walker's cabin, where her swimming lessons had been moved for the rest of the summer. With August right around the corner, Butternut's peak tourist season was upon them, and Allie was too busy at the gallery to take Tuesday and Thursday afternoons off anymore. Instead, Mila would be going over to her cabin on those evenings, after Brooke and Wyatt had had their dinners but before it was too dark to comfortably see outside. Reid understood the rationale behind this, and he understood, too, that
Allie couldn't have known how much he liked watching the lessons, but still, he felt a little sulky, knowing they were continuing without him and knowing, too, how close Mila was to swimming.

“Hey, don't worry about the business plan,” Walker said, sitting on the edge of his desk. “Take as much time with it as you need.” Then he added, “It's not even the reason I came over. I want to take you back to the cabin with me. I think Allie and Mila have something they want to show you.”

Reid looked at him questioningly, but Walker, feigning ignorance, only shrugged. His brother had always been a lousy liar, Reid thought, but right this minute he was going to let it slide. “Let's go,” he said, reaching for his crutches.

By the time Reid and Walker drove over to the other cabin and walked down to the dock, there was a feeling of excitement in the air. Wyatt, for instance, was jumping up and down, and even Brooke, resting securely on Allie's hip, seemed more wriggly than usual.

“Uncle Reid,” Wyatt said, still jumping, “my mom and Mila have a surprise for you.”

“Do they?” Reid said, smiling and reaching over to pat Wyatt's mop of unruly brown curls. “Well, I can't wait to see what it is.”

He glanced over at Mila, who was standing at the end of the dock, and she waved to him shyly. She looked excited, too, but she also looked nervous. She'd obviously been in the water already. She had a beach towel wrapped around her waist, and her still wet hair was pulled back in a ponytail. But towel aside, there was still plenty of her bathing-suit-clad body visible to him, and Reid tried, mightily, not to gawk at her. God, he loved that bathing suit. Loved it even better from close up than he had from far away.

“All right, let's get started,” Allie said briskly, handing Brooke
over to Walker. “Are you ready, Mila?” she asked, walking out onto the dock. Mila nodded, and it was then that Reid realized that Allie wasn't wearing a bathing suit, and that she hadn't been in the water yet, either. He frowned. He thought she got into the water with Mila during their lessons.

“Have a seat,” Walker said to Reid, sitting down on a nearby deck chair and settling Brooke onto his lap. Reid sat down distractedly. He was watching Allie and Mila, who were conferring quietly with each other. Then Mila stole a quick look at Reid, dropped her towel on the dock, and climbed down the ladder into the water.

“Isn't Allie going in with her?” he asked Walker.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Just watch,” Walker said, jiggling Brooke on one knee and pulling Wyatt over to sit on the other.

Allie sat down on the edge of the dock and spoke to Mila, who was standing in the shoulder-deep water. “You know what you're doing,” she said encouragingly. “Just take it slowly. And whatever you do, remember to breathe, okay?”

Mila nodded, and then, with an expression of quiet determination on her face, she turned around, pushed off from the bottom of the lake, and began to swim a slightly awkward front crawl.

“Oh my God,” Reid said after a moment. “She's doing it. She's swimming.”

Walker smiled. “She started swimming last week, but she wanted to be able to swim out to the float and back before she showed all of us.”

Reid nodded, watching her. Now that she'd settled into her stroke, it was less awkward. More graceful. She was swimming in a straight line, too, more or less, from the end of the dock to the
swimming float a short distance away. But the water out there was deep, he realized, deep enough to be over her head.

“She's not . . . she's not going to get tired, is she?” he asked Walker. “Because she can't touch the bottom out there.”

“She's fine. She's not going very far, and Allie wouldn't let her go even
that
far if she didn't think she was ready.”

“You're right,” Reid said, relaxing a little. “She's doing fine.”
Better than fine,
he thought, his pride in her building steadily as she swam. She reached the swimming float and stopped there for a moment, catching her breath, and then she turned around, pushed off the float, and swam back to the dock.

“That was fantastic,” Reid said, more to himself than to anyone else, and, ignoring Walker and Allie and Wyatt, who were all cheering for Mila, he pulled himself up on his crutches and started down the dock. Mila climbed up the ladder, wrapped her towel around her, and, after hugging Allie, she started toward Reid, meeting him halfway.

“You did it!” he said, wanting to reach for her, but knowing if he let go of his crutches, he'd fall.

“I did it,” she agreed, coming up to him, her face alight with happiness. “And, Reid, I love it! I love it so much! One day, when your leg is stronger—”

But he didn't let her finish. He leaned in to kiss her cheek, her smooth, cool cheek, and then, at the last second, he shifted direction, fractionally, and kissed her mouth instead. If he'd stopped to think about it, it might have occurred to him that kissing her this way, in front of everyone, wasn't a great idea. But he didn't stop to think about it. He didn't want to. And neither, apparently, did Mila, because after hesitating for a moment, she kissed him back.

After that, everything but the two of them seemed to disappear.
The dock, the lake, the whole world, and everybody else in it. And when Mila pulled away from him, breathless, he was amazed to see that everything, and everyone, was still there. He looked over at Allie. She was mildly surprised, but also, Reid thought, very pleased. She had seen this coming. Then he looked at his brother. He hadn't seen this coming, or hadn't wanted to see it coming, Reid thought. There was a long silence then, during which the only sounds were Brooke gurgling and Wyatt still jumping up and down.

“Well, I don't know about anyone else,” Walker said finally, “but I could use a drink.”

I
f I live to be a hundred, I will never,
ever,
forget the expression on my brother's face after I kissed you,” Reid said with satisfaction as Mila let them into the cabin's kitchen. But Mila said nothing. Reid paused, resting on his crutches, his brow creased with sudden concern. “You're not upset about what happened, are you?” he asked as she closed the door.

“I'm not upset with you, Reid,” she said, though she was careful now to put a safe distance between them. “I'm upset with myself. Letting that happen was poor judgment on my part.” She leaned against the kitchen counter, her arms folded protectively over the bathing suit and cover-up she was still wearing. “I don't know what I was thinking.”

“I don't think you were thinking,” Reid said. “I think you were just doing what felt right to you in the moment.”

“Well, that's not a very good formula for living your life, is it?”

“I don't know about that,” Reid said. “Some people would say it's a
very
good formula.”

She frowned, though, preoccupied by something. “What did your brother say to you when he was helping you into the van?”

He hesitated. “He said . . . he said ‘I hope you know what you're doing.'”

“Do you, Reid?”

“I know exactly what I'm doing,” he said, looking at her in that way he had of looking at her. That way no one else had ever looked at her before. It was as if he were seeing her as the person she actually was, instead of seeing her as the person he wanted her to be, or hoped she would be. And she almost asked him then,
What is it, exactly, that you're doing, Reid?,
but the truth was, she was afraid of how he might answer the question.

So instead she said, “We need to turn some lights on in here. It's almost dark.” But when she headed for the light switch next to the door, Reid objected.

“I like the light in here now,” he said, and she stopped, because she realized she liked it too. Outside, the sky was lavender, and inside, everything seemed to be bathed in its gentle light. It seemed a shame, she thought, to drown out this twilight softness.

“This is my favorite time of day,” Reid said.

“It is?” she asked. “Why?”

“Because it's the one time of day you feel like anything could happen,” he said, not taking his eyes off her.

Exactly,
Mila thought.
That's the problem
. But he smiled at her now, and she felt that irresistible tug toward him that she knew was as emotional as it was physical.

“I think Lonnie left something for dinner,” she said, resisting it. “Should I heat it up?”

“If you'd like some of it,” he said.

“No, not really,” she said. Because what was the point of heating up food she had no intention of actually eating? And what was the point, finally, of postponing the inevitable between them? Because standing there with him, she realized she couldn't do it
anymore, couldn't resist the sheer force of their attraction to each other. She had tried, since their first kiss on the deck, and it was wearing her down. It was
exhausting
her. And she wondered why they were still talking, instead of doing what they both knew they were going to do, and then she realized, for the first time in her life, that talking—just talking—could be as sensuous as touching. Or at least it could be with Reid. She felt that warm, almost liquid sensation sliding through her body now, as if his hands and lips were already on her.

Why didn't he come to her? she wondered. There was only six feet separating them, maybe less, from where they both stood, leaning against the kitchen counter. But he made no move to close the distance between them, and, suddenly, she understood why. He was waiting for her to come to him, waiting because it needed to be her choice. As persuasive as Reid could be, he would never pressure her to do something she didn't want to do. Never ask her to be someone she didn't want to be. And, in that sense, he was Brandon's polar opposite. He was a man who could take no for an answer. A man who wouldn't take yes, in fact, unless she could give him that yes wholeheartedly. With all her being.

Somehow, knowing this gave her the courage to walk over to him now, angle herself between his crutches, put her hands on his shoulders, and kiss him, full on the lips, without any inhibition. And he kissed her back, but this kiss, she quickly discovered, wasn't part of his repertoire of kisses from that night on the deck a week ago. This kiss was something else entirely. It was . . . it was so many things. It was hungry, and deep and sweet, and tender, and needful. It held nothing back, and it gave everything away. And within thirty seconds, Mila knew this kiss couldn't end as innocently as the last one had, with the two of
them saying a chaste good night at Reid's bedroom door. But that was all right. She didn't want it to end that way. She wanted everything from this man, she realized, with a little shock. She wanted everything at once.

He must have known that, too, because no sooner had he started kissing her than he started to unbutton her cover-up, which was really just an oversized white cotton shirt that buttoned up the front. She let him unbutton it, and let him slide it down her shoulders and her arms, and drop it onto the floor, where it settled at her feet. Then, still kissing her, he caressed her bare arms, and shoulders, and collarbone, until finally, when she thought she couldn't stand it anymore, he began to caress her breasts, very softly, but very deliberately, through the stretchy fabric of her bathing suit.

She shivered and felt her nipples harden immediately. He concentrated on one of them, stroking it softly at first and then harder, until the friction he'd created between her bathing suit and her nipple made Mila break away from their kiss with a little moan of pleasure. He kissed her again then and dipped a hand inside of her bathing suit top and, after cradling her breast tenderly in his palm, he stroked her nipple harder, in a way that sent a rush of warmth through her body.

“Let's go to my room,” he said into her neck. “Or your room.”

“I, I don't know. It's not . . . it's not a . . .”
It's not a good idea,
she meant to say, but she lost her train of thought. What Reid was doing to her felt so good, so unbelievably good, that she couldn't form a single coherent sentence. So she stopped trying to and instead dug her fingers into his hair and arched her back so that she could feel more of his body against her body.

“Oh God, Mila,” he groaned. “Let's go.”

Mila started to shake her head, but he kissed her lips again,
and it was quiet in the kitchen for a while, quiet as he slowly peeled the top of her bathing suit down, leaving her breasts bare in the dusky light, and his hand free to explore them with his expert touch. “Mila,” he said, finally, his voice throaty with the same excitement she felt, “it's given me so much pleasure, watching you learn how to swim this summer. Now let me give you a little pleasure. Just . . . just a little.” He skimmed his lips along her collarbone.