CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Keeping his hands to himself tonight was going to be nearly impossible.
Huddled together under the two-person Mylar thermal blanket, Mitch wished Simone hadn’t taken off her coat so there was more padding between their bodies. Not that he didn’t like feeling her up close and personal, but her subtle curves molded against his body made it damn hard to keep his hands from wandering over and under her soft sweatshirt to her silky skin beneath. And while he wanted nothing more than to do just that, he didn’t want to do anything to spook her. They’d just gotten to the point where they could be civil to each other. If he moved too fast, he’d send her running.
And since she was obviously a pro at running, it was all he could do not to give her a reason to do just that.
She sighed and laid her head against his chest, her heat seeping into his pores, reflecting back at him under the safety blanket, making him even hotter with every passing second. “‘Annie’s Song.’”
“What?”
She rested her hand on his chest and spread her fingers. Tingles rushed over his flesh everywhere she touched, even through his thick flannel shirt. “You were humming it.”
He hadn’t realized he’d been humming. Nervous energy, obviously. He looked across the room but couldn’t see anything in the darkness. They’d extinguished both the lantern and heater for the time being to conserve energy. “You know John Denver?”
“Not personally.” She laughed. “My mom used to listen to his Christmas album every year. I got to know a lot of his songs that way.”
“My dad used to sing it to my sister when she was little. When she and Ryan got married, Dad played it for her during the father-bride dance.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I think there’s a lot about each other we didn’t know.”
Simone was silent, and in the darkness, Mitch cursed himself. He’d agreed not to mention the past, at least for the next few days, and he’d already crossed his own damn line.
“I didn’t have a wedding,” Simone said quietly. “Steve and I got married in a courthouse. We didn’t have to. I mean, WITSEC had already given me my new identity as his wife, but he wanted it to be official.”
She didn’t say more, and Mitch couldn’t quite tell if that was a good or bad thing. But man, he wanted to ask. Wanted to ask a thousand things about her dead husband. She’d rarely talked about the guy in all the months they’d been together, but he sensed if he pushed her for too much too soon, he wouldn’t get any of the answers he needed.
“It was a month or so after we went into the program,” she finally went on. “I didn’t really want to get married. Steve was the one who pushed it. Said he wanted everything to be official. For Shannon.”
“For Shannon,” she muttered. “’For Shannon’ was his excuse for everything. No one knows this, but I didn’t want to have a baby. That probably makes me a terrible mother, doesn’t it? I didn’t want to get married, didn’t want to have kids. And I resented him for it, because in one split second, I gave up my whole life. For a man I wasn’t even in love with. Lust, yes. Love? No. I didn’t even get to say good-bye to my grandmother.”
Mitch wasn’t sure what to say. But his mind drifted to her parents, who’d flown out a few times from Baltimore to spend time with Shannon. “What about your parents? I met them.”
Simone shifted against him. “No, you met our neighbors. Ray and Betty lived next door to us in Baltimore. They sort of adopted us, and when Shannon was little and started calling them Grandma and Grandpa, none of us corrected them. My dad died in a car accident when I was little, and my mom raised me in a small town in Pennsylvania until she died from heart disease I was sixteen. After that, I lived with my grandmother until I left for college. Her health wasn’t good, and I didn’t get to see her as often as I should have. I think that’s part of the reason the US marshals let me go with Steve. I didn’t have much of a family to miss me. A year after we went into the program, my grandmother had a stroke. I couldn’t go to the hospital to be with her. Shannon was only a couple of months old then.”
Mitch didn’t know what to say. So many lies. But he couldn’t judge her or be angry that she hadn’t told him the truth. Because if he’d been in the same position, he’d likely have done the same.
Simone pushed up. All he could see were the whites of her eyes, but they were sad, and a small part of him broke, knowing the lies had hurt her way more than they’d ever hurt him. “I never blamed Shannon. She gave me a reason not to dwell on the negatives, and in a lot of ways, she saved me. And even though I never wished for any of this to happen, it taught me patience and the importance of thinking things through. I don’t regret the choices I made. But I do regret that I couldn’t talk about them. I think…” Her eyes drifted down to her hand, still resting against his chest. “I think maybe if I’d been able to talk about it…things might have been easier.”
Things between them. She didn’t say the words, but he sensed them hovering in the air between them. And his pulse picked up speed, igniting a flutter—that hope—in his belly he’d felt when he’d held her in the safe room.
She laid her head back against his chest, and her fingers gently brushed his shirt. Tingles flared all over his skin again, and he worked like hell to keep his pulse from racing. She was sharing secrets—things most couples talked about way earlier in their relationship. And though he couldn’t tell her his biggest secret—at least not yet—he knew he could give her something.
“I almost got married once.”
Her hand stopped moving against his shirt. “You did?”
He hadn’t told anyone this—not even Ryan—and though he’d never planned to air his vulnerability, part of him figured maybe it was time. Maybe if she understood what he’d been through, she could understand why he’d reacted so badly when she’d lied to him. “It was about two years after we lost my sister. Ryan was just starting to come out of his fog. I’d been putting off working in the field because of him and Julia, but I was antsy to get out of the Bay Area. So when a site was identified in South America, I jumped on the chance to be the first geologist to start taking samples.”
He hadn’t really been in the market for a relationship, but looking back on it, losing his sister had definitely made him rethink what was important in life. “She was part of the team sent to Ecuador to evaluate the site. We met a few days after I got there, hit it off. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, we were a couple.”
More than a couple. They’d spent every waking moment together. Rachel had been everything he thought he’d been looking for in a woman. Outdoorsy, able to hold her own with the other guys on site, and totally hot. The first time he’d seen those long, shapely legs of hers in cargo shorts and dusty hiking boots, he thought he’d found nirvana. He’d never been so completely wrong in his life.
He cleared his throat and shifted his back against the wall where he was leaning. “A few months went by, and things were great. Neither of us wanted to leave, but when our analysis of the site was finished, we didn’t have much choice. I came home, and she went back to Dallas. We made plans for her to come to San Francisco to visit, but a week went by, and I didn’t hear from her. I tried to call her, but it kept going to voice mail. So after a few days, I got worried and flew out to Dallas to see her.”
“What happened?”
He shook his head, feeling like a complete idiot all over again. “Turns out the joke was on me. Her husband answered the door.”