Chapter 14
Avalon answered the doorbell a half hour later to find Mac standing there, still wearing what he’d been wearing when he’d maneuvered her out of the attic.
“Do you have a bathing suit?” he said without preamble. “Oh, hello, Chick Pea. Down, girl. Whoa, easy there.”
Chick Pea was sitting sedately next to Avalon, smiling politely up at him, eyes agleam with bonhomie, fluffy tail switching a little.
“Why do I need a bathing suit? Do you know something about the plumbing that I don’t?”
“I know approximately a million things about this house that you don’t. But no, that’s not why.”
“Youneed to borrow one? Because yours is in the wash?”
“I usually go without one when I go swimming around here, since there’s no one around to care,” he said affably.
Dear God. What was he trying to do to her? Her knees went buttery.
He cleared his throat. “Listen, didn’t you say you were a little stiff from scraping wallpaper?”
“I did say that.”
“There’s an old natural hot springs about a fifteen-minute hike or so from here. Gets dark fast out there and we’ll want to be back before then. We’ve got about an hour and a half, maybe two, before sunset. You in?”
Delight pierced so abruptly it stole her breath.
It immediately warred with wariness. Getting half-naked with the very hot man who had broken her heart wasn’t quite equivalent to sticking her big toe up the faucet, but no one would have called it awisedecision.
But then, no one was holding her to a particular standard of wisdom but herself.
And maybe she just needed to prove to herself that he no longer had the power to shape her life, even if he once had.
Finally, pure curiosity tipped the vote. She wanted to see the damn springs.
“Give me five minutes.”
The sunset was going to be a pretty good one. A few of the fluffy oblong clouds overhead were already limned in golden light, and with luck they’d go gold or tangerine or aubergine.
While in San Francisco, she’d desperately missed the surprise and variations of sunsets and sunrises. The light of the computer and phone screens and the neon lights over the takeout places never really varied.
She ducked to her knees, which was none too easy, given how stiff her muscles were, and touched a finger to the water. And watched the ripples waver out. River water warmed by the earth and cycled out again. Ceaselessly fresh. She could see her reflection in it; she could see Mac behind her smiling. Behind him was a tall cluster of old boulders.
“It’s about three and a half feet at its deepest. You going in?”
It was the first thing he’d said in about fifteen minutes. He’d clearly been so full of thoughts on the fifteen or so minute walk that he couldn’t say any of them. Or maybe he was even nervous. Maybe they both were.
The bathing suit her mom had stuffed into her gym bag was olive green and fashioned of fabric that was probably considered space-age at the time; it featured dramatic darts in the boob area and a flouncy little skirt. If her own willpower collapsed on her, this suit might very well keep Mac Coltrane at arm’s length, should he make the proverbial move. Her mom must have kept it out of nostalgic reasons; Avalon thought she recognized it from a few old family photos. It fit like a charm, though. Shedidhave her mom’s curves.
She shucked her sweatshirt and kicked off her thongs, then hesitated for a moment before setting about peeling off the jeans.
Which gripped onto the exotic fabric of her bathing suit the way her feet gripped the adhesive ducks in the bathtub in the bathroom she and Eden had shared growing up. It was a wonder there wasn’t a little suctiony pop when she finally got them loose.
Mac watched this whole little dance in rapt, entertained silence.
She was fit even if her own abs weren’t quite drum-tight. She was comfortably certain his silence was a tribute to the fact that she was well worth looking at, suit or no suit.
“Wow, that’s some bathing suit, Avalon. Speaking of tightropes and things you might wear to walk on them.”
His voice was a little bit lulled, though. A man a little bit drugged by his own hormones.