“I’m a medic. I can look after of myself.”
“You can’t treat yourself or your family. I do have some training in basic first aid—comes in handy on survival treks.” Staring down the icy steps, she flung aside her bra, goose bumps raising on her flesh. “And the sulfur in volcanic springs carries healing, revitalizing qualities.”
Her eyes as steamy as the waters, she shimmied out of her jeans and waded in, magnificently naked.
***
Misty sat on her bed in her bathrobe, towel-drying her hair. She’d never expected to be back in this familiar shabby-chic room she’d decorated with her mother and sister, painting all the reclaimed furniture white. They’d worked together on patchwork curtains and a quilt made from outgrown clothes. Rag rugs lay on the floor to warm her feet in the morning.
Tonight should have ended so differently. She should have been back in civilization, meeting up with Ted and Madison, her heart breaking over saying good-bye to Flynn while trying to convince herself that Brett was really “the one.”
But Ted and Madison were dead. Many more were gone as well. She’d dreamed of leaving here for so long, and now she could only mourn how the place would never be the same. She didn’t even know what to think of her brother and Astrid disappearing. At least her little nephew was settled downstairs with his grandparents, who’d insisted on helping and staying here so he could sleep in his own bed.
She tossed aside the towel and reached for the comb beside her bed.
A cold rush of air blasted over her. She straightened, her stomach lurching with fear. The air smelled of outside, of an open window.
She started to scream just as the patchwork curtains flapped and Flynn’s big head poked through. He pressed a finger to his lips. Just like all the times he’d climbed through her window during high school. She closed her mouth, her stomach flipping with a wholly different sensation that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with anticipation.
Flynn swung his legs through and stood in her room, his head almost touching the sloped ceiling. “I’m not here to push you. I just needed to see you, to reassure myself that you’re okay, and the stuffy old watchdogs downstairs insisted you need your sleep.”
Her skin tingled with heated awareness under her robe. Her naked skin. She should tell him to leave.
But she didn’t.
“Well, close the window before we both freeze to death.” She swung her legs off the bed, waiting to take her cue from whatever he said next.
He shut the window and draped his parka over a bentwood rocking chair, then turned away abruptly to toss another log in the wood-burning stove, seeming hesitant. How strange to see him unsure, when his body and presence filled her room so vibrantly.
Abruptly, he dropped to his knees in front of her so they were eye to eye. He searched her face, his throat moving with a slow swallow.
His eyes glazing with unshed tears?
“Flynn?”
His chest pumped, his breathing ragged. “Everything’s gone so crazy, all those people dead. And it could have been you. If that deputy hadn’t died, if Sunny hadn’t come back in time”—his eyes squeezed shut tight as if to hold the tears, the emotion, inside himself—“it could have been you.”
True to his word to keep his hands to himself, his fists stayed plastered against his sides. The pain on his face was so real, so intense, it took her breath away. She thumbed a lone tear escaping from the corner of one eye. His weather-toughened skin felt so familiar, so dear.
She cupped his cheek. “Why did you sleep with June four years ago?”
“I honest to God don’t know.”
“That’s bullshit.” Her hand fell away.
He opened his eyes, finally meeting her gaze dead on. “I was scared.”
“Bullshit.”
A wry smile tucked dimples into his cheeks. “God, I’ve missed you.”
“You have a funny way of showing it.” Her pride still stung over his silence. Sure, he’d made an effort at first, but before that first year was out, he’d given up. People who loved each other never gave up, they never stopped fighting for the people they cared about, even going to the ends of the earth. Her parents had taught her that.
“I was an eighteen-year-old idiot. I heard you and your sister discussing what kind of wedding you would like to have, and I freaked out. I self-destructed. And I would do anything to change that day, anything. I knew it was a mistake the second after—”
She held up a hand. “I do not want to hear about your postcoital thoughts. Although it sounds to me like the sex sucked, and for that I am so, so glad.”
His mouth went wide with laughter and her heart ached all over again that she would never hear the sound. She placed her hand on his chest to feel the vibrations. He stopped.