I was... I don’t know. Tired of holding it in maybe. Wanting to help you understand why I didn’t...” His voice, full of emotion, trailed as he reached out to her.
She moved away. She refused to let him touch her. She couldn’t do this with him. He wouldn’t get inside her head or her heart. She was tired of losing the things she cared about and she’d already left Levi in the past along with every other heartache.
He was in love with her.
To say it was the last thing she’d ever expected would be an understatement.
She scanned her surroundings, overwhelmed and unsure what to say or do. She headed back toward the Ski-Doo and listened for his footsteps behind her. She just wanted to get away from this place. Needed to get as far away as she could.
Seeing it, being there with him had only made her question just how much she really had left the past in the past and moved on, the way she claimed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE AXE CAME down hard, splitting the log in two, the sound echoing across the forest, but not loud enough to drown out the thoughts in Levi’s head.
He had to be the dumbest man on earth. Confessing his twenty-year-old feelings for Leslie now? In the middle of this huge mess she was in? Quite literally standing among a mess that used to be her family’s cabin?
What the hell was wrong with him?
This situation was already so far out of control and could implode at any second and he went and made it worse.
Smokester lay on the ground a few feet away, playing with his stick. His brown tail flopped back and forth and his pointy ears were piqued. The dog sensed Levi was in a mood and shot him a look occasionally that suggested he needed to sort his shit out fast because he’d like to go back inside but wouldn’t leave him alone out there.
“You can go in,” he told the dog. Levi couldn’t. Not yet.
The dog just sighed and collapsed onto his paws and closed his eyes.
Levi replaced the log and swung again, split pieces of wood falling in opposite directions. Chopping wood usually gave him a sense of accomplishment and the physical exertion was the only way to get his frustration out. Plus, he needed to stay out of the cabin. Away from Leslie. The space had gone from feeling small to feeling impossibly claustrophobic.
Mixed signals.
She’d accused him of that?
She was the one who’d kissed him, who’d tried to have sex with him... He’d been trying to protect her from making a mistake. Because he sure as hell knew she hadn’t been acting on feelings as deep as his were for her.
That had been confirmed by the look on her face after his confession.
He swung hard over and over again, cutting more wood than they’d need all year. Sweat pooled on his lower back and dripped down his forehead, but he kept cutting.
He didn’t know what else to do. She obviously wanted nothing to do with him and now he’d pissed her off and pushed her away even more. Talking to her about it, trying to explain wouldn’t help. He’d kept his feelings a secret for so long, he wasn’t even sure what he could say. And putting all of this on her now had been a horrible lapse in judgment.
He should never have tried to get her to open up. He’d been selfish in wanting his friend back...in any capacity. He missed her. He still loved her. But he needed to accept the fact that he still was nowhere close to getting her back in his life.
And maybe he never would.
* * *
SHE WOULD NOT go out there. It was just asking for trouble.
Leslie stood in the living room window of the station watching Levi chop firewood near the back shed. He’d removed his jacket and the sight of the sweat at his lower back on the tight gray T-shirt he wore made Leslie a little flushed as well. Where had this attraction to him come from? And why couldn’t she shake it off? There had been undeniable chemistry sizzling between them on the Ski-Doo, but she’d blamed it on the adrenaline rush. Then when he’d touched her cheek, there had been a definite spark, but combined with the emotional sight of her destroyed cabin, she couldn’t be sure that electricity between them meant anything.
But she was running out of excuses for the way her body was suddenly reacting