a month ago, bringing her own personal contribution to four, and—”
“You’re kidding!” Claire exclaimed happily. “Angie? Little Angie has four kids?”
Her smile was dazzling, her delight infectious, and Nick couldn’t help but smile, too. “Hey, ‘little Angie’ is twenty-eight years old,” he pointed out. “She’s been married for six years now.”
Claire shook her head in disbelief. “That’s so amazing,” she said. “I remember her tagging along after us when she was just a kid.”
“She always liked you a lot,” he told her. “She wouldn’t speak to me for months after we broke up. She was sure I did or said something to you that made you run off to Connecticut.”
“Nick…” Claire said again, again with clear warning.
“I’m not trying to rehash old business,” he told her honestly. “I’m just stating a fact is all. You can’t expect us to spend any amount of time together and not bring up some part of the past.” He covered the distance necessary to bring him within arm’s length of her. And with no small effort, he refrained from reaching out to touch her. “We were a big part of each other’s lives once upon a time, whether you like to admit that or not.”
Her lips parted fractionally in surprise at his charge. For a long moment, she only gazed up at his face, her cobalt eyes deep and compelling and filled with some emotion he was probably better off not trying to figure out. Claire’s eyes had always been his undoing, he recalled now, too late. So blue. So arresting. So damned expressive. She could never hide her feelings, because invariably her eyes had betrayed her. They’d always been her own undoing, too.
And right now her eyes were telling Nick that she was remembering those times even better than he remembered them himself. Every muscle and microbe, every sense and sensibility he possessed screamed at him to reach out to her. To take her in his arms and pull her close. To relive those moments of the past and create a few more for the future. Even after more than a decade of separation, even after the emotional wringing he’d suffered as a result of her abandonment, he still wanted Claire. With all his heart, with all his soul. Till death do them part.
Great, Nick. This is just great.
“It’s not that I don’t want to admit how important we used to be to each other,” she said, scattering his thoughts, but doing nothing to alleviate the jumble of his emotions. “On the contrary,” she added quietly, “maybe I remember that part of it better than you do.”
Nodding slowly, but unwilling to reveal just how much her statement shook him, he asked, “Then what is it? What’s wrong?”
She sighed again, opened her mouth to say something, then shut it without uttering a word. She only shook her head silently and spun around, but not before Nick caught the shimmer of tears in her eyes. Something twisted tight in his gut at the sight.
Yeah, those eyes, he thought again. They’d always been trouble. Looked like some things, at least, hadn’t changed a bit.
Claire couldn’t imagine what had come over her to make her act this way. As if it wasn’t already bad enough that she’d be responsible—at least in part—for an abandoned baby for another day, perhaps two. As if it wasn’t already bad enough that the person with whom she was sharing that responsibility was a man she’d once banished from her life, a man she’d never expected to see again, in anything other than passing. As if it wasn’t already bad enough that the two of them were traveling down a memory lane that was pockmarked with land mines that might go off at any second.
No, as if all that wasn’t already bad enough, she was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, way down deep inside, in a distant, lonely place she’d thought locked away forever, she was still in love with Nick Campisano. Even after all these years. Even after the emotional upheaval she’d somehow managed to survive upon their parting. Even after all that, she sensed that there was still a part of herself—a rather large part, evidently—that wanted Nick in her life. Substantially. Eternally.
Wonderful, Claire. You’ve just ascended to the next level of stupidity.
She spread one hand open over her eyes, pretending to swipe away fatigue, praying that Nick hadn’t noticed the presence of tears. Why on earth was she crying? she wondered. She was just exhausted, she tried to reassure herself. It was almost three o’clock in the morning, and she’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours straight. Even before that she’d been tired. She’d never been a good sleeper. The holiday season always made that worse. And the emotional stress of the last few hours had helped not at all.
Tired, she echoed to herself. Weary. Fatigued. That was why she was experiencing this strange wave of melancholy memory. It was nothing more than that. She couldn’t possibly still be in love with Nick after all this time. It made no sense.
Oh, really? a little voice inside her piped up. Then why have you never been able to make a commitment to another man? Why have you never found anyone who made you feel the way Nick made you feel? Why is he the yardstick by which you measure every potential mate?
Instead of answering the little voice, Claire commanded it in no uncertain terms to just shut up and leave her alone because it had no idea what it was yammering about, anyway.
Dragging her hand over her face one final time, Claire spun back around to face Nick. He looked as exhausted and dejected as she did. They both obviously needed sleep— and lots of it. She spared a glance for the solidly sleeping infant and told herself they should take advantage of this brief reprieve. No telling when the baby would awaken again, or how long it would be before she went to sleep after that. Even an hour or two of rest would help enormously.
“We should go to bed,” she said.
At the soft sound of disbelief Nick uttered, she closed her eyes. “That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she said flatly, turning to face him again. When she opened her eyes, she saw that he didn’t look quite as tired as he had before. No, in fact, he appeared quite capable of staying awake for hours, if offered the right kind of incentive.
“Hey, I don’t know jack,” he told her. “Why? What were you talking about? My, my, my, Claire. Get your mind out of the gutter.”
“Yeah, you wish it was in the gutter,” she shot back. But somehow she couldn’t quite quell the soft smile that threatened to bloom.
Nick smiled, too, though his own effort was considerably more predatory. “I remember a few occasions when we both had our minds there. It was a lot of fun. To put it mildly.”
Claire’s smile fell at his willingness to continue with what she considered a very dangerous topic. But she couldn’t battle the heat seeping through her at the memories—anything but mild—that exploded fast and furious in her brain. Fast and furious. That was how it had always been between them. As if they both feared they’d never get enough of each other. As if they’d somehow known their time together was limited, and they had to make the most of every second. As if they couldn’t bear to be apart. As if they needed to consume each other in order to survive.
We were both kids then, she tried to remind herself. It was nothing more than hormones.
That was all it had been to make them react to each other with the instant and complete intensity that they had, she told herself again. Hormones. Biology. Chemistry. And okay, anatomy, too. It was all very scientific, very natural. A chemical reaction, nothing more. A really, really hot chemical
