“Is she the one wearing the chartreuse green spandex shorts?”
“Yes,” he said. “And for the record, we were stupid punk-ass seventeen-year-olds who thought we had something to show off to the world.”
“Oh, you do have something to show off, Dr. Scott.”
Shaking his head, he reached for her, pulling her into him as the music slowed. She fit against his body like the last pieces of a puzzle, and he felt himself relax for the first time in days.
“So what are some of your other lies?” she asked.
“Hmm…” He thought about it. He’d just lied to Ty and Matt about this being nothing more than a diversion. Not that he planned on saying that. Which probably counted as yet another lie. “This morning I told Toby that Santa Claus was alive and well and making toys as we speak.”
“Aw. That’s sweet, Josh.”
His jaw was pressed to hers. He could feel her thighs and br**sts pressing against him. She had one arm wound up around his neck, her fingers playing in his hair, making him want to purr like a big cat. “Sweet,” he repeated.
“Yeah.” She nudged closer. “Sweet.”
“I’m not feeling sweet, Grace.”
She very purposely rocked against the zipper of his pants. A zipper that was slightly strained. “Mmm. I suppose not,” she murmured. “Just as well, really. Sweet’s overrated.”
Then she rocked again, laughing softly when he tightened his grip on her. He had a hand low on her back, itching to go lower, to run up her bare leg and beneath her skirt. He’d been thinking about doing that, or some version of it, all damn day. For two damn days really, ever since the pool, when he’d had her bare, wet body in his hands.
Scratch that. He’d been thinking about getting his hands on her since he’d accidentally hired her to walk Tank and gotten the call that she’d lost the dog. He could still see her, standing on the beach, her sundress plastered to her like a second skin, completely see-through.
She’d looked like a sun-kissed goddess.
Another couple bumped into them. Lucille and Mr. Wykowski. Mr. Wykowski was eighty, but he had all his own teeth and still had a driver’s license, so every female senior citizen in Lucky Harbor was constantly chasing him. He winked at Josh. “It’s a night for getting lucky, eh, boy?”
Josh met Grace’s gaze as the other couple had danced off. “It’s a night for something,” he said.
The music was shifting again, gearing up for a faster-paced song. Night was upon them, the sun a mere memory on the horizon. All around them people danced, laughed, talked, drank. No one was paying them any attention, so Josh took Grace’s hand and led her off the dance floor.
The bar was run by an old friend, Ford Walker.
“How’s it going?” Ford asked. “Hear the little guy is doing great.”
“Student of the week,” Josh said proudly. He looked at Grace. “A drink?”
“A beer, please.”
Ford served them up two longnecks. “So now that you’re going to have all this free time, I can finally get you on our basketball team, right? Three on three. It’s been just me and Jax ever since Sawyer pussied out. Pulled his Achilles. We need your height.”
“Count me in,” Josh said, and took Grace down the pier, lit by strings of white holiday lights that twinkled in the dark. Instead of walking to the end, where they’d be highlighted as if they were in a fishbowl, he directed her to the wood stairs that led down to the beach.
The sand was damp and giving, the water pounding the shore hard enough to drown out most of the sounds of the festival as they walked and sipped their beers. It’d been a long week, a big week. A week of irrevocable change. Josh had made a lot of mistakes in his life, and he’d tried to learn from all of them. He definitely tried to not repeat them.
Hiring Grace had been his favorite mistake so far. That he’d gotten to this place where he’d sold the practice and was going to live his life in a way far more suited to him was because of her. Even knowing she was going to leave, he still felt that way. “Have you heard back from any of the jobs you’ve interviewed for?” he asked, trying to sound neutral.
“I think Seattle and Portland are both going to offer. They’re both good, strong opportunities in my field.”
He wasn’t the only one who sounded carefully neutral. She had her face averted. He tilted her head up and searched her eyes. “Is that what you want?” he asked.
“I’m working on figuring that out.” Her gaze was unguarded, letting him see her hopes and dreams and doubts and fears. It was the last that got him.
She was at the proverbial fork in the road, and he’d been there, right there, wanting to do the best thing, the right thing. “I gave up my dad’s expectations for me when I sold the practice,” he said quietly. “I let it all go, knowing, or at least hoping, he’d understand.” He paused. “Maybe you need to give up your parents’ expectations and do what’s right for you.”
She drew in a deep breath and nodded. “I know. But I’ve been living for their expectations so long, it’s taking me some time to figure out what mine are.”
Around them, the ocean continued to batter the shore. The silence was comfortable as he took in the fact that oddly enough, their problems weren’t all that different from one another.
“How about you?” she asked after a few minutes. “What do you want for yourself?”
What did he want? For things to be different. For this to be what she wanted. “I want to have time to breathe.”
“You think that will happen now?”
“Christ, I hope so,” he said. “I haven’t seen enough of Toby.”
“I helped him with his homework earlier,” she said. “It was that family tree thing.” She paused. “You and his mom weren’t married?”
“No. Technically, we weren’t even dating.”
“A one-night stand?” she asked.
“Sort of.”
She gave him an expectant look, and he blew out a breath. Was he really going to do this? He never did this. “You don’t know this about me,” he said. “But I wasn’t exactly the cool kid on the block growing up.”
“I do know. You were the late-bloomer nerd.”
He sighed, and she smiled. “People like to talk about you,” she said.
Yeah, and how he loved that. “Well, nothing much changed for me between being that kid who’d get stripped and tied to the flagpole and graduating high school.”
“What?” She straightened, eyes flashing fury for the kid he’d been. “Who did that to you?”
“Easy, Tiger. I’m just saying, you grow up getting picked on, you aren’t exactly prepared when the summer before college you suddenly grow a foot and women start paying attention to you. Then add a few years and the initials M. and D. after your name, and it gets even worse.”
She blinked. “So women started throwing themselves at you? That must have eased your pain quite a bit.”Yeah. A lot, actually. But it didn’t mean he’d instantly known what he was doing. “I met Toby’s mom at a friend’s wedding. She was from Dallas, and just in town for the weekend.” It’d been the day from hell. He’d lost his first patient that day, a teenager who’d coded out on the table from an overdose before Josh could help him. Josh had gone to the wedding in a fucked-up frame of mind. Aided by a few beers, a beautiful stranger, and apparently one faulty-as-hell condom, he’d done his best to forget the day.
Which had turned out to be impossible. “Ally had been working as a waitress to earn enough money to go to Nashville and have a singing career,” he said. Wildly enthusiastic about everything, she’d sucked him in like a crazy breath of fresh air from the only life he’d been living at the time—the hospital. She’d done everything big—live, laugh, love. And God, that had been his undoing, her abundant passion. He’d fallen for her, hook, line, and sinker. “When she found out she was pregnant, things changed.”
“Did she stay in Lucky Harbor to be with you?”
“For a little while.” Josh had thought Ally would come to love him, too, but love hadn’t been the draw for her. She’d liked the idea of being a doctor’s wife and had figured it’d pay off better than being a singer. “She was going to have a perfect life,” he said, “but she figured out pretty quickly that I was about as far from perfect as one could get. Not to mention already married—to my job.”
Grace’s eyes flashed with fire again, but when she finally spoke, her voice was gentle. “So what happened?”
“Toby was born. I caught him, actually, held him in my hands and cut the cord.” His heart still caught at the memory, every single time. One minute he’d been living the selfish life that came with his job, the life he’d always wanted. And the next, he’d been holding this gloppy, squirming, pissed-off little rug rat. He’d held Toby in his hands, stared down into his own dark eyes, and had felt something open wide deep inside him.
Then Toby had yawned and gone to sleep on him. “He changed my entire life.” Ally’s too, but in a different way. She hated the 24/7 care the baby demanded. She hated the changes in her body. She hated that Josh was gone so much working. “One day I came home after a brutal double shift, and Ally handed me Toby. Said he was changed and fed. Then she grabbed her keys and her purse and walked out the door.”
She hadn’t looked back, not once in the past five years.
Grace looked horrified. “So she left you alone with Toby? She just walked away from you?”
“I really was a pretty crappy partner,” he said. “I was at work all the time. And she wasn’t cut out for the domesticated sort of home life a baby required.”
“But to just leave you and Toby. That must have been awful for you.”
“I didn’t have much time to dwell. A month later, a drunk driver hit my dad’s car head-on and killed both him and my mom. And then Anna came to live with me too.”
“Oh my God, Josh.”
He shrugged. Yeah, those first two years with Toby and Anna and his work had been a deep, dark hell. He didn’t like to remember the terror of having a baby, of dealing with Anna’s injuries, not to mention her mental state—which hadn’t been anything close to the downright sunny nature she displayed now in comparison.
Grace was quiet a moment. “Did you know I’ve never even so much as had a dog?”
He smiled, rubbing his jaw against her hair, loving that she wasn’t going to shower him with sympathy that he didn’t want. “That fact wasn’t on your dog flyer.”
She let out a low laugh. “My parents were too busy trying to save the world to have pets. I’m surprised they made time to adopt me. I have this recurring nightmare where I’ve turned into a rocket scientist and my ass has gone flat.”
He laughed, and the hand he had low on her spine slid down a little, giving her a quick squeeze. “It’s perfect.”
She smiled up at him.
“What?”
“I like your laugh,” she said.
“Maybe it’s the hand on your ass that you like.”
“Why, Dr. Scott, are you flirting with me?”
“Desperately,” he said. “Is it working?”
She laughed. “Depends on the end goal. And also, if it matches my end goal.”
“Maybe you should spell yours out for me. Slowly and in great detail.”
She smiled, a demure little smile that belied the heat in her eyes, and hell if the woman didn’t turn him completely upside down and sideways.
And turn him on…
Then she went up on her very tiptoes and leaned in, her lips brushing his earlobe as she did what he’d suggested, telling him in detail exactly what her end goal was.
He nodded solemnly, memorizing everything, every last little detail, before taking her hand and heading up the stairs.
Chapter 18
Chocolate is better than sex. It can’t make you pregnant, and it’s always good.
Grace had to take three steps for every one of Josh’s much longer strides, but she was laughing as she did. “Gee, Dr. Scott, in a hurry?”
He didn’t bother to answer her, just continued to steer them across the sand with the single-minded purpose of a man on a mission. She laughed again, and he tossed a look over his shoulder at her that had her swallowing the amusement and shivering in anticipation.
All her life she’d done what was expected, taken the “right” path. But Lucky Harbor, and her time in it, was supposed to be different.
She’d made it different. She’d made it hers. She’d never forget it.
Or him. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“Somewhere more secluded than this.”
“And the hurry?” she asked.
“I want to get you alone before you forget any of your end game or we’re interrupted again.”
“No worries,” she said. “I was very serious about my end game.”
Their eyes caught. “Thought you don’t do serious,” he said. “You do fun.”
“Is that what you’re looking for tonight?”
His gaze was fathomless. “It’s a start.”
She quivered. “I need to tell Mallory and Amy I’m leaving. Give me a minute?”
“I’ll get the car.”
Grace found Amy and Matt sitting at a booth sharing a pitcher of beer and trying to swallow each other’s tongues. Since Mallory and Ty were still on the dance floor doing the same thing, Grace texted them both without disturbing them. This had the additional benefit of not having to explain that she intended to go do the same thing that they were doing.