He planted himself in front of her. “What’s wrong?”
How could he tell that something was wrong? She’d had years of practice at hiding her feelings, but Seth always seemed to see through the layers of protection that blinded everyone else to the truth.
She’d joked to Harriet that he was like an X-ray machine, or an MRI scanner, but the truth was he was just scarily perceptive. Or perhaps what she should really say was that he was perceptive, and she was scared.
If she’d wanted people to know how bad she felt most of the time, she would have told them.
“Nothing is wrong.” She didn’t mention the fight with her father. She never talked about it with anyone. She didn’t want people to know. She didn’t want sympathy. She didn’t want pity. Most of all she didn’t want people knowing how bad those fights with her father made her feel, not just because she’d learned to hide her feelings, but because part of her was afraid that saying the words aloud might give them credence. She didn’t want to give voice to the niggling thought that maybe her father was right. That she might actually be as worthless and useless as he believed her to be.
But Seth wasn’t so easily deflected. “Are you sure? Because you don’t look like a woman celebrating her eighteenth birthday.”
Woman.
He’d called her a woman.
It made her giddy. Right there and then, she felt the age gap evaporate. Poise and power replaced doubt and insecurity. “I wanted time to myself.”
“On your birthday? That doesn’t sound right to me. No one should spend their birthday alone, especially not an eighteenth birthday.”
She’d known Seth for years, but they’d grown closer than ever this summer. Unlike her father, Seth never seemed outraged by her antics. When she’d gone skinny-dipping in the ocean late at night, her twin, Harriet, had begged her not to go, but Seth had simply laughed. He hadn’t joined her, but he’d waited on the rocks until she returned safely. Because Seth Carlyle always does the right thing.
Still, he hadn’t judged or lectured, simply handed her a towel and sprang down onto the sand as if his job was done. He never touched her, and she’d wished a million times that he would, ev
en though she knew he was watching over her because he was Daniel’s friend and a responsible person.
She found herself wishing it again now. Which proved she was anything but a responsible person.
To be sure she didn’t give in to temptation and fling her arms around him, she wrapped them around herself.
His gaze dropped. “You’ve cut your hand. You should be more careful on these rocks. Does it hurt?”
“No.” She snatched her hands behind her back, one half of her hoping he’d leave while the other half hoped he’d stay.
“If it doesn’t hurt, why are you crying?”
Was she crying? She brushed her cheek with the heel of her hand and discovered that they were wet. “I kicked sand in my eyes when I was running.”
He thought she was upset because of the wounds he could see.
He had no idea about the wounds she kept hidden.
“Why were you running?” He closed his hands over her arms and drew them gently in front of her. Then he turned her hands over so he could examine them. His fingers were broad and strong, and her hand looked small in his. Delicate.
She didn’t ever want to be delicate. Her mother was delicate. Watching her navigate her stormy marriage was like watching a single daisy struggling to stay upright in a hurricane. Fliss wanted to be hardy, like a thornbush. The sort of plant people treated with respect and care. And she was fiercely determined to earn a good living so that she would never, ever find herself trapped in the situation her mother had found herself in.
If I leave your father, I’ll lose you. He’d make sure I don’t get custody, and I don’t have the money or influence to fight that.
Seth bent his head, and she watched as strands of dark hair flopped over his forehead. She itched to touch it, to slide her fingers through it, to feel its softness under her hands. And she wanted to touch the thick muscles of his shoulders, even though she already knew they wouldn’t be soft. They were everything hard and powerful. She knew that for sure because last summer someone had tossed her in the water and it had been Seth who had hauled her out. Being held by him was something that no woman would forget in a hurry.
Unsettled, she dragged her gaze to his face. His nose had a slight bump in it thanks to a football injury the summer before, and he had a scar on his chin where he’d head-butted a surfboard and needed fourteen stitches.
Fliss didn’t care. To her, Seth Carlyle was pretty much the most perfect thing she’d ever laid eyes on.
There was something that set him apart from the others. It wasn’t just that he was older, more that he was so sure. He knew what he wanted. He was focused. He made doing the right thing sexy. He was studying to be a vet, and she knew he’d be good at it. He was going to make his father proud.
Unlike her.
She’d made her father disdainful, exasperated and angry but never proud.