She stayed solid in his arms but her hands at his neck convulsed.
He kept going.
“Then you’re gonna text your family to tell them to come back and I’m gonna go home and leave you with them. You’re also gonna tell them that even though they’re here for a visit, you’re gonna have dinner with them tomorrow but then you’re gonna come to my place and spend the night with me. And we’re gonna spend Christmas Eve together until I gotta go to Kim’s to be with my kid in the evening. When I go to Janie, you can come home and be with your family. And I want time with you on Christmas so you need to figure that out, because I’m doing presents with Janie at Kim’s and then I got a couple of hours where she has her before she brings her to me in the afternoon. And those hours I’m gonna spend with you. And I want you to meet my daughter and do that soon. But we’ll plan that after Christmas. So your family can have you and Janie needs me but any time we have in between, it’s ours, and when they’re gone, it’s you and me and when I have her, we’ll have Janie.”
He stopped talking, and when she said nothing, just stared at him, her pretty face stunned, he felt his own face get soft.
“And soon as I can,” he said quietly, “I want you to make me spaghetti pie, whatever that is.”
He barely got the word “pie” out before he was on his back in her bed because she’d attacked him straight from his lap and she was kissing him.
She was all over him.
And Coert might have wanted to slow it down that time but he didn’t get that chance (and again had to sprint on her stairs, taking them two at a time, this time to grab his wallet) because it had been a long time, too long, way too long and they might have had a taste, but Cady was still very hungry.
And Coert . . .
Coert was still starving.
Again only in his jeans, done up this time, Coert moved up the stairs to Cady’s bedroom and this time found her where he left her in bed.
He got in it with her, stretching out beside her, but she was under the covers he’d pulled over her.
He laid on top, handing her phone to her.
“Thanks, Coert,” she said.
It came out shy, she didn’t meet his eyes and he sighed.
They’d had fantastic sex twice and they’d have more fantastic sex, a lot of it, but that didn’t erase the fact that they’d both jumped from their opposite sides of the shore into the raging waters of everything that came in between and neither of them had life vests.
They just had to have the determination, since they’d made it through the rapids to each other, to hold the fuck on.
“Kath,” she said softly, and Coert focused on her. She moved her eyes from her phone that had been beeping, he’d heard it go when he’d run to get his wallet, to him. “I think considering she’s sent eleven texts, she’s worried.”
“I bet,” he muttered, pulling her and the covers over her closer to his body.
“And I think Pat’s in some big trouble with Mike and Daly, and maybe Pam.”
“You need to text her.”
She nodded.
Turning her attention back to her phone, he watched her text with her thumbs.
“You can text with your thumbs?” he asked, and her eyes tilted back to his.
“I have seven nieces and nephews. They all have phones, except Melanie and Ellie, but they’re getting one when they turn ten, like their brother Riley did. And I’m cool Auntie Cady. I spoil them, to their parents’ chagrin. Thus they text me a lot. And even Melanie and Ellie do it, when they steal Riley’s, Pam’s or Mike’s phone to do it.”
“So you have lots of practice.”
She nodded, went back to her phone. He heard the whoosh, and then without her phone to take her attention, she looked like she didn’t know where to put her gaze.
“Cady,” he whispered.
It slid to his.
“If we do this, we have to learn something from what came before.”
“What’s that?” she asked quietly.
“We have to learn, even when it gets hard, we can’t give up and we can’t let go.”
She got it and he knew it when her eyes widened and her body relaxed against his.
“I spent so long not even thinking that this was a possibility, it’s hard to wrap my head around it being a reality,” she admitted.
He touched his mouth to hers before he said, “I understand that feeling.”
He watched her swallow and it looked painful.
“You get freaked, worried, anything starts twisting the wrong way in your head, use your thumbs and text me,” he urged.
“I think that might mean you’ll get a text every ten minutes.”
“After not having you for eighteen years, do you honestly think I’ll mind hearing from you every ten minutes? Christ, Cady, you lived in the lighthouse in my town, and I’d convinced myself I was pissed at you and I made every excuse I could find to come here just to see you.”
He didn’t mean to do it, but he got it when his words made her eyes fill with tears. It looked like she’d try to beat them back but she gave in and shoved her face in his throat, her body wracking in his arms.
He rolled to his back, pulled her over him and held her.
After he gave her some time to get it out, he pushed up so his shoulders were to her headboard and he took her with him, pulling her even deeper into him, holding tight.
“I never once considered the thought you’d forgive me,” he told her.
She pulled her head back and looked at him through watery, brilliant green eyes. “I thought the same. I thought you hated me.”
“Two sides of the same coin, they say, love and hate. Let’s move to the other side, yeah?”
She nodded.
He needed to get her where she felt safe and solid enough for him to leave her to her family but also so she could look past the part that was scary as shit and precarious as hell and keep on going.
“I’m committed to this, Cady,” he said gentle but firm. “I’m committed to working on this. Getting us through the whitewater and finding us somewhere safe. I would not have come here with your brother if I wasn’t all in. I’m looking you right in the eye and I’m saying that to you. It’s been a long time but I know what I feel. How I’ve felt since you came back. How I couldn’t get you out of my head, stop thinking about you. I know where I’m at even if I understand we have to get to know each other again, we have history to share and some of it might not be easy. Though,” he grinned at her and teased, “since you had an investigator, that might not be as tough on you.”
She ducked her head and tucked her face in the side of his neck.
“Teasing,” he whispered, lifting a hand to stroke the side of her neck.
“I know,” she whispered back.
“Too soon?” he asked.
“No, just that I missed you teasing me.”
He stopped stroking and wrapped his arm around her.
That was something he’d missed too.
He cleared his throat.
“To finish what I was saying, I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t have put you through all this, if I wasn’t all in, if I didn’t still love you. You said you still loved me too. So we have that. We hold on to it. And we ride these rapids until I can get us to safety. You with me?”
“I’m with you.”
“Good,” he muttered.
“I’m with you,” she repeated.
“Heard you, Cady.”
She lifted up and looked him in the eye, raising a hand to catch him hard on the head behind his ear.
And he thought he was alert.
But at her hold he became more alert.
“I mean that,” she said again.
Shit.
She was back there. Back where she’d promised she’d stick with him.
And then didn’t.
“I know,” he said gently.
“Seriously.”
“Stop it,” he urged softly. “You hear me? That’s twisting shit. That’s staying where we were. Apart. Separate. With too much in between. We’re coming together. We’re moving on. You with me?”
It took a second but she nodded.