A Time for Us - By Amy Knupp Page 0,35
his job. Even though he was primarily a firefighter, she knew a lot more about what he did on medical calls, and picturing him in action as she stared at his hands made her shiver. She’d bet in addition to saving lives and putting out fires they could do magic on a woman’s body....
God, Rachel!
Her cheeks burned as she reined in her thoughts. Then she made the giant mistake of glancing at his face to see if he’d noticed her fixation. It was too much to ask for him to be sidetracked by something, anything, else—he was looking straight at her and flashed a heart-gripping smile as if to put her at ease.
Such a beautiful, kind man.
Her sister’s man.
Rachel looked away quickly as guilt washed through her and threatened to overwhelm her—and maybe make her puke, to boot.
Focus on the meeting. The benefit. Anything but him...
As the head of the finance committee, a woman she didn’t know, started reciting the latest numbers, Rachel straightened in her chair, took the cap off her pen and began taking notes in earnest. The numbers, without context, meant nothing to her, but she was damn well going to get every last one on paper.
When the finance queen took a break for a swallow of bottled water, Rachel checked her watch. Only forty-four minutes and twenty-five seconds to go, if her mom stuck to her plan for an hour-long meeting.
When it finally ended—seven minutes late, not that Rachel was counting each torturous second—she hopped up, wishing she could make a run for it, or do anything other than the thing she’d made up her mind she needed to do. She turned toward Cale and took a covert deep breath. Making contact with his emerald eyes nearly took that breath right back out of her.
“Hi,” she said stupidly.
“Hey. Imagine meeting you here. Glad you made it.”
“It wasn’t as bad as the first one I went to.” Unless you counted the horrendous episode of guilt she’d brought on herself. “Can we...?” She gestured to the hallway with her head. “I need to talk to you.”
“Sure.” He put his hand out for her to precede him.
“I’ll be outside,” Rachel said to her mom as they walked by her.
“Oh. Is Cale giving you a ride home?” Jackie eyed them with curiosity.
“No,” Rachel answered.
“Yes,” Cale said at the exact same time. “I can give you a ride if you need one.”
She would walk home as soon as she said what she needed to say to him. She went out of the room ahead of him without another word to her mom.
Without thought, Rachel proceeded to the shore, her eyes on a pair of kayaks gliding on the bay as the sun dropped behind the horizon of the mainland. Cale came up beside her and surveyed the awesome scene before them.
“I guess I missed this while I was in the Midwest,” Rachel said.
“You guess?”
“I never gave it much thought while I was in school doing my residency. I was always busy,” she admitted. “But there’s nothing like this in Iowa.”
He chuckled. “I don’t imagine there is.”
She took in the muted colors as dusk descended on them—the lavender and blue-gray of the sky, the same reflected in the water, the dark silhouettes of the towering palms on the opposite shore.
“What did you want to talk to me about?” Cale asked, rattling the calmness she was trying to absorb from the scenery into every cell.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted out before her nerves could make her overemotional.
There was a pause before he said anything, but Rachel refused to look at him.
“For?”
As if he didn’t know. As if it weren’t blatantly hanging there between them like a cringe-worthy neon sign.
He was going to make her say it.
“Let’s see,” she began, trying to make her tone flippant. “For kissing you. Multiple times. For crawling all over you. For making a fool of myself. Embarrassing both of us. Screwing over my sister.” Her pulse throbbed in her temples. “I think that about covers it.”
“Is that all?”
“For now. I...I don’t know what came over me.”
He touched her elbow, nearly sending her into the stratosphere because she wasn’t expecting it. He pulled his hand back as if realizing she was tightly wound and that any kind of physical contact between the two of them was, yeah, a sensitive issue.
“Rachel,” he said softly, maintaining a good eight inches between their shoulders as they stood side by side. “You are not going to take the blame for any of that—”
“Too late.”
“Nope.