The Road to Rose Bend, Naima Simone [jenna bush book club .TXT] 📗

He glanced away from her, strolling over to the empty booths, standing ready. He didn’t have to hear her follow behind him to know she did. He could sense her. In the visceral awareness that skated over his skin like dancing fingertips.

I see right through you, Coltrane Dennison.

The words reverberated through him, humming deep in his chest, echoing in his head. They both terrified and...liberated him. Terrified, because he’d become so used to hiding in plain sight. Pretending to be fine, to be on the mend. Giving people answers that made them comfortable, happy, relieved, when all along he was lying. The words scared him, threatened that wall he’d erected around himself. He worried she might be able to peer past it into the real him. Into the darkness that hadn’t abated since his family’s deaths. While the pain, the grief and anger were ugly, they were his. Not to be spied on, not to be shared. In a completely toxic and illogical way, they connected him to his wife and son.

But even as he felt threatened, he also felt liberated, because he didn’t have to pretend with Sydney. She hadn’t been here to witness his breakdown, so he didn’t need to make her believe he was fine.

Fine. God, he hated that word. For once, he could be honest in a way he couldn’t with his parents, brothers and sisters.

There was a certain freedom in that.

“You’re half right. I love this town. The family it gave me. The security and sense of safety it offers me.” He paused in the middle of the aisle bisecting the booths, staring into the distance so he didn’t have to look at her when he added, “The wife and child it gave me. And my way of thanking Rose Bend for those gifts is to make sure it’s a refuge. A place where its residents know their welfare always comes first. Honestly, though?” He turned around, facing her. Looking at her when he gave her this truth. “Another reason I ran for mayor—the reason I couldn’t include in my campaign—is I needed to lose myself in work, or else I would’ve been lost. To the bottle. To the grief. To the depression. But that sounds much less altruistic or heroic than the first reason.”

“No,” she said. Emotion flickered in her eyes, that same something spasming quickly across her face before she moved to stand in front of him. Until her fingers tangled with his. Until her small, warm palm cupped his cheek. Shock, jagged, bright and almost painful, whipped through him, freezing him in place. “It makes you even more heroic in my eyes. It would’ve been easier to crawl into bed and not get up. And if you had chosen to do that, Cole, I couldn’t judge or blame you. But you didn’t. You pushed through and even in your pain, decided to enrich a town and empower the people you care for. What’s that saying about courage not being the absence of fear but acting in spite of it? Well, your kind of heroism isn’t about the lack of grief but persevering and making lives better in spite of it.”

He briefly closed his eyes and barely managed not to turn into her hand and brush his lips across the palm. Just stopped himself from groping for her other hand and placing it on his face, his throat, his chest, hell anywhere. Hunger for more of her touch roared so loud inside him, he damn near shuddered with it. Not just for the physical. But for the sense of not being so fucking alone. Her touch, her scent, her voice—they beat back the loneliness. For a few precious moments he didn’t fear going under.

This wasn’t good.

Not for him.

Not for her.

He stepped back, away from her heat, her kindness.

From the temptation of her.

Because if the press of her palm to his face called to him so strongly he had to physically resist it, what would the silken, tight embrace of her sex around his cock do to him?

Undo him.

Air shuddered from between his lips, and he tunneled his fingers over his head.

“You keep doing that,” she murmured. “Running your fingers through hair that isn’t there anymore. You must miss it.”

Her softly uttered observation crashed over him like a frigid wave of salt water—freezing, punishing.

Leaving him shivering and numb.

“Cole?” She recovered the space he’d placed between them, her fingertips glancing the back of his hand, but he drew back. Somewhere deep inside him a dull throb of shame pulsed at her flinch.

Later...later, when his heart thawed and this moratorium on feelings lifted, he would regret hurting her with his abrupt rejection. But right now? Now, he was haunted.

“I shaved it off after Tonia died. She used to love to play with my hair.” She’d constantly run her fingers through it, tease him about his curls and how they were prettier than hers. He clenched his jaw, worked it for several seconds while the memories flooded him. “After she was gone, I didn’t want it anymore. Couldn’t stand to touch it or look at it in the mirror.”

Only the faint drone of traffic and the distant hum of voices punctuated the silence that fell between them. Whereas before the silence had been easy, comfortable, now a ragged tension existed, crackling like electrified currents.

“When Carlin...” Sydney’s voice trailed off. She rarely mentioned her dead sister, and when she spoke again, a rasp deepened her voice. “When Carlin’s hair fell out while going through chemo, my mother saved it. She’d gather the strands from her pillow when Carlin wasn’t looking and store them in a plastic bag that she kept in her top dresser drawer. Carlin had such beautiful hair. Soft, dark brown natural curls with hints of red. If she spent any length of time outside, the sun would bring out those red highlights. Which didn’t happen often, so I learned to treasure those streaks, because they meant my sister was feeling well enough to