Winter Read online

  She wasn’t usually the queen of overshare, but maybe she’d crossed the line this time.

  It wasn’t that she felt comfortable with Aaron. No, there was a strange frisson of feeling when it came to Aaron Winter. She craved his presence, but she also feared it.

  It was one thing to curl up at night in her bed, alone, and dream of him. Call out his name while her fingers stirred her body to a shuddering orgasm. It was another thing entirely to be anywhere near him.

  That caused all sorts of other problems.

  And even with this relatively short visit, having him near was already fraying the ends of her calm.

  “You think this is a bad idea, right? Like my very own mid-life crisis. Well, don’t worry. I’m not planning to buy a sports car and become a cougar and pick up a cub to have a wild affair with.

  His hands touched her.

  No, his hands grasped her. Holding her forearms tightly. She could feel his shudders as they worked through her body.

  “Aaron, I was only-”

  “Stop.” His voice was rough. “Please don’t.”

  “Aaron?” He could hear her confusion. “I was just joking.”

  He nodded. He knew she was joking.

  But the idea of her taking another man to her bed. A younger man. There were things that his bear could not endure. And Aaron was in full agreement.

  He had to hold off his bear, because the wild passion and need that his bear felt needed to be spent, and the idea of laying spent with Celeste in his arms was something he had dreamed of for years.

  His bear, who was in tenuous agreement with his plan in the first place, was ready to throw Aaron’s plan to the wind and claim her right there under the oak tree in her yard.

  “Come with me.”

  He almost grimaced at the words he’d sputtered out.

  A heartbeat away from taking them back, his bear took a swipe at the link between them and dug psychic claws into Aaron’s gut. The pain sliced through him with a gasp.

  “Come with me, Celeste.”

  He was up on his feet before he made a conscious decision and frowned at his bear within. The bear didn’t seem to care that he had overstepped.

  Celeste put her hand in his and stood, moving closer to him. “Where are we going?”

  “Can it be a surprise?”

  He almost expected Celeste to take a step back, to weigh her options, to think of some way to let him down gently. Surprises were not something Celeste suffered well. She would rather know what was around every corner.

  Knowing her for all of these years, and how fiercely she protected her children, he wouldn’t blame her if she demanded to know.

  And because he loved her as much as he did, he would tell her.

  Celeste gave him a little smile. “The kids know what this is about?”

  His answer was a little nod.

  “And the outfits missing from my closet are in a bag somewhere?”

  Well and caught, Aaron wasn’t going to try any subterfuge. “Julia packed your things and Jason put your bag in my car almost as soon as I got here.”

  Aaron saw a tentative little smile play across her beautiful lips and both he and his bear felt a curious twist of hope in his gut.

  Celeste bit into her bottom lip as she cast her gaze toward his car in the driveway. He wished that he could read her thoughts. As much as he needed her and wanted her to be happy, he wanted to know how to make her happy. And unlike a large number of shifter couples who developed the ability to communicate without words. Aaron had never heard of any shifter/human couples who discovered the same bond with each other.

  “These last few months,” her voice held a tentative edge to it that had him holding his breath, “when you’ve been away... is that where you’re taking me? Do I get to see where you’ve been spending all of your time?”

  Away from her.

  His bear growled and flexed his claws into their link.

  She missed us.

  “Yes,” there was no need to play a game with her. She meant too much to him for that. “And I want to show you why I’ve been spending time there.”

  “Why,” she sucked in a little breath, “and not who?”

  He didn’t understand her question at first.

  “I know that your hometown is in the mountains, Aaron. Is that where you’ve been going?”

  He nodded while his eyes watched her carefully. “The town is called Mystic and my family’s home is near the base of Mystic Mountain.”

  “Aaron,” she touched the fingertips of her free hand to her breastbone and he tried to ignore the fact that her hand was shaking, “if you’re taking me to meet a girlfriend... or a fiancé... I can save you the time and wish you both the best life possible.”

  Her smile was pretty enough, but it felt brittle and tense.

  “I’m not taking you there to meet anyone like that,” he tried to explain, “but there are people in town who want to meet you. When I go back there to work on my family’s home, I go into town. I visit the café, get gas at the station, and supplies at the stores. They ask me about my life away from Mystic. They want to make sure I’m happy. That I’m living a good life when I’m away.”

  “And are you, Aaron?” Her voice was soft, but he could hear her earnest question. “Living a good life?”

  “Not without you, Cel.” He held out his hand. “Every time I leave here and go back to Mystic, the first thing that I miss is having you near me. Whatever I do up there, whenever I’m up there, I’m thinking about you.”

  “And you want me to go to Mystic with you?”

  He nodded, slowly considering his words before he spoke.

  “I want you to come and visit, Celeste. But I also want you to stay. Stay with me.”

  “Stay? You mean to live with you?”

  The thought that she might turn him down outright made his heart seize and then pound in a frantic rhythm.

  “Give me a chance to show you what it could be like between us.”

  He watched her carefully, holding his breath as she thought through her answer.

  In the end, her answer surprised him. She took his hand in hers and gave him a gentle squeeze.

  “I’ve wanted to get closer to you for years, Aaron. I just never thought you wanted the same thing.”

  “Then I’ve been hiding it better than I thought. I had to hold it in, because I was afraid if you thought I wanted more that you would shut me down… ask me to stay away from you. From the twins.”

  Celeste looked back at her stately Victorian house and Aaron wished he could hear her thoughts. Her smile was warm and gentle when she turned back to look at him.

  “When you first knew us… when I worked for that small motel at the edge of town, you were a godsend back then. Patient and gentle with my questions and the children. I didn’t understand how a man like you could be so kind to me.”

  “A man like me?” There was a momentary stab of dread in his chest.

  “You’re like Paul Bunyan. Bigger than life. Muscles… all over. I’m not tiny or petite, but you make me feel dainty and feminine.

  “And around you, dainty doesn’t feel like weak or unimportant.”

  He could hear the pulse of his heart in his ears.

  “Around you, I felt cherished and I wasn’t sure if… if the way you treated me was because you were just a great guy,” she drew in a breath, the rise of her shoulders hitching before they lowered again, “or if you cared for me the way I cared for you.”

  Within him, his bear roared in satisfaction, shaking the walls that barely held between them.

  Within his own very human heart, Aaron felt joy, a tremulous feeling that had him reaching for her until both of his hands held hers between them.

  “I have cared for you, Celeste. I still do. More and more over the years. Come with me. Give me the chance to show you how much.”

  He swore he saw the answer in her eyes before she formed the words on her lips.

  “I’ve let my
self hold back for too long,” the look in her eyes pleaded with him to understand, “I’ve cared for you too, Aaron, and I’ve wanted more, but I’ve been afraid to reach out and ask for it. I didn’t want to lose you in our lives because you didn’t feel the same… the same need that I did.”

  Need.

  She needed him.

  At that moment he knew, they needed each other.

  “Come with me, Celeste. Let me show you what could be between us.”

  Her hands squeezed his and she nodded. “I want to see the rest of your life, Aaron.”

  Lifting their joined hands, Aaron brushed a kiss across her knuckles before he touched them to the side of his face. “You, Celeste. You are the rest of my life.”

  Three

  Celeste awoke to a soft repetitive sweep of sound and Aaron’s warm hand on her thigh. “I’m sorry, Aaron. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

  “No worries, Cel. I just thought you’d like to see the snow that’s falling.”

  “Snow?” She wiggled up in her seat and rubbed at her eyes. “I haven’t seen snow in…” Her voice drifted away and a troubling darkness clouded her thoughts, “… I can’t remember how long it’s been.” Blinking out into the dark night, she saw the bright headlights on the road ahead of them and in the halo of those lights she saw snowflakes falling, swirling past them. “It’s so beautiful.”

  Aaron’s hand on her thigh squeezed, just the teeniest little bit. “I love your voice.”

  It felt like his hand was against her bare leg, his palm hot against her thigh. The thick woolen coat she’d pulled on at the last pit stop was now stifling in its heat. Her cheeks, neck, and chest were like live wires in a toaster oven, heating up within the narrow space.

  “You,” she swallowed and gathered her thoughts, “you grew up in all of this.” Celeste gestured at the woods that seemed to surround them on both sides of the road. “How could you ever leave?”

  His hand shifted on her leg again. “I had something more beautiful to admire.”

  Her heart ached in her chest and she shifted again on the seat, turning slightly toward him, bending her knee so it could rest on the bench seat between them. “You have so many pretty words, Aaron Winter.”

  “Just for you.” She heard a hitch in his voice. “I’ve been saving them up. Every time I saw you. Every time you let me near. I wanted to say so many things to you.”

  “And what stopped you?”

  Oh goodness. Did she really want the answer to that?

  Heaven help her, she did.

  “You’re a dedicated mom, Cel. You lived and breathed for those kids, just as it should be.”

  “But now it’s different?”

  “Now,” she heard a rumble in his voice, “you’re looking for something new, a change in your life. I’m hoping that part of that life will be with me.”

  “Is it wrong,” she felt the scratch of worry at the back of her throat, knowing that she was about to suggest something that he might not feel, “that I wish you would have said something before this? Awhile before this?”

  “I thought about it, Cel. So many times I played the possibilities over and over in my head, but I didn’t want you to worry about how it would affect your kids. How it would affect my place in their lives.”

  She leaned her head on the back of the bench seat and gave him a smile. “You were always a part of their lives, Aaron. Ever since their father left, you were the one who took care of us. I never really understood why.”

  “Why would anyone take care of people for years on end, Celeste? What could drive a man to do that for the most amazing woman he’d ever met, and the two best rug rats he’d ever had to corral.”

  Her laughter spilled into the space between them. “Oh, now I know you’re lying to me.”

  “Me?” She heard the confusion in his tone and saw the hard line of his jaw in the glow from the dashboard. “Cel… I don’t- I mean, how could you think-”

  “Hey, stop.” Lifting her hand from his, she touched her fingertips to his jaw and smoothed out the hard line of muscle that she found there. “I was just joking with you, Aaron, but you have to admit the twins, even at their best back then gave me more than my share of early silver hair. They were a handful on good days. A full meltdown on others. I was always surprised when you came back to visit, let alone came by to help with the things we needed.”

  “Maybe I liked the house?”

  She looked up and caught the twist of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Oh, so now you’re going to tell me you came by because you liked the house?” Celeste let her hand fall to his shoulder. “I know. It was Mrs. Braddock’s biscuits. You liked the way she made them with all that butter.”

  “Honey,” he argued back, and she saw the flex of his hands on the steering wheel, “she had that amazing honey.”

  Celeste laughed. “I guess I’m lucky I kept that contract open with Missus Cramer when she took over her father’s hives. Otherwise you might have gotten your honey elsewhere and- whoa.”

  Her heart leaped up into her chest as he pulled the car over onto the snow-covered shoulder of the road.

  When the wheels came to a shuddering stop and the break was thrown, Aaron reached over and unhooked both their seatbelts in a flurry of movement she hadn’t expected for a man so big. His hands filled with her hips a moment later and pulled her close until her thigh was resting against his and his breath was warm on her cold-stung cheeks. “Tell me you know it wasn’t about the biscuits, Celeste. Tell me that you saw me looking at you over and over again throughout the years like a man starved for your kisses.”

  To say she was stunned was an understatement.

  “I don’t know what I saw in your eyes, Aaron. I saw what I hoped was the same hunger that I felt when I saw you. When you’d walk up behind me in the kitchen and reach around me to steal something off the cutting board it was like I could feel your heat. I wanted to believe you felt mine. And after the years came and went I assumed that it was just my imagination. That it was all in my head.”

  “Celeste.”

  Oh, she did love the way he said her name sometimes. The ending ‘ss’ sounded like he flicked his tongue off the back of his teeth.

  “I can’t believe you had doubts about what I felt. I was sure that I’d slipped over and over again and you were just being kind, trying not to hurt my feelings.”

  A strange expression crossed his face as if he was listening to something far away and struggling to hear it over the noise. But there wasn’t much noise between them. The well-tuned hum of the engine, the soft sounds of old music on the radio, and the steady click-click of the hazard lights that he’d switched on when he’d pulled over.

  “What can I say?” She shrugged her shoulders, still bracing for the moment when he came to his senses. “To me it was a dream. Wishful thinking. A late-night fantasy that I’d allow myself under the covers.”

  “Celeste-”

  “I’m a big girl, Aaron. A grown woman. I’m not going to try to lock you into anything. I’m not going to hold onto you, digging my fingers in like claws. I want to see where this thing between us is going to go, but don’t think I need any grand gestures.” She moved her hand a few inches to the side and slipped her fingers into the collar of his woolen shirt. “I don’t need to be everything to someone else. I just want to be something to them.

  “What I want is a man who enjoys spending time with me. I don’t want to be a burden to anyone. And I certainly don’t want to be anyone’s pity date. If that’s why you’re bringing me home-”

  His hands.

  His amazing hands.

  The soft scratch of calluses on his palms.

  The heat from his skin against her cheeks.

  He came within a heartbeat of kissing her, but he held back and she wanted to scream.

  She’d waited so long.

  “I’m a man who values the small things in relationships, Celeste. And you just gave me hope.”

  Celeste�
��s brows furrowed in confusion, but she didn’t shake herself loose. “Hope? How so?”

  He looked at her with an expression so intent it stole her breath.

  “You called it home.”

  He covered her lips with his and felt her lean into the kiss. Lean into him.

  There was a heady pleasure in that moment, a frantic driving beat of blood through his veins.

  Celeste. His one. His only.

  Celeste.

  The name sighed through is head and tasted like honey on his tongue. Thick and earthy, only serving to make him even more hungry than it served to slake his need.

  And her lips rubbed against his with the gentlest of caresses. Passing over them again as her hands fluttered down to his forearms as if she didn’t know where to grab or how to hold on.

  Aaron knew that he was in the deep depths of trouble when her lips parted under his.

  He had to hold back.

  Had to back away.

  Grasping her shoulders with his hands, he barely managed to put any amount of air between them. “Not now,” he said the words for his own sadistic benefit, “not on the side of the road.”

  “Why not?” Celeste didn’t help. She leaned heavily into his hands, sighing with a soft hum in her voice. “I feel like I’ve been waiting forever.”

  “And we,” he had to put a little emphasis on the word so she would know she wasn’t alone, “will wait at least another half an hour until we’re on my property and in my house. It’s too cold out here for you.”

  Her laughter was a little hoarse as her eyes lit up with promise. “Is it wrong that I want to see if you could keep me warm out here?”

  His only answer was a near-strangled version of her name on his tongue.

  Celeste shrugged. “It’s been a long time for me, Aaron, and your kiss just woke up all of the nerve endings that I’d forgotten I had. So, you better get us back onto the road.”

  He wasn’t going to argue.

  And when they did pull into the long driveway to his cottage, he knew before he pulled the vehicle into the garage that Celeste was fast asleep.