A wry smile kicked through the furrows of confusion. "Great. I was a drunken mistake."
He was making this worse, and that was quite an accomplishment since the situation had pretty much sucked from the start. "You could never be a mistake. You are the most amazing, tempting woman I've ever met. The only mistake was my selfishness that night, because I knew I would hurt you eventually."
Her chin jutted with a quiet stubbornness he'd seen often in her father. "You hurt me by walking away."
And in that stubbornness he could see that, regardless of her words to the contrary, she hadn't forgiven him, not really. So why was she sleeping with him?
He'd assumed being her first meant he was somehow special to her. Now he wasn't sure of anything and he didn't like that feeling one damn bit. "I joined A.A. after our night together. I'd had blackouts before, but not one that led me to hurt someone. It was a wake-up call."
She blinked fast, straightening. "You had a blackout that night?"
"We discussed this before—the reason I didn't remember we never had sex that night."
"A blackout? You didn't remember anything?"
Hadn't he already said that? "Not much, no."
He wasn't sure if that helped her come to grips with this or not, but it certainly sent her eyebrows trenching deeper until she softened and leaned ever so slightly toward him. Her deep freeze seemed to have ended. He could all but see the wheels churning in her brain as she sifted through his words. A promising sign and incentive to keep spilling his guts even if the talk grated all the way up his throat.
Carson rested an elbow on the silver railing, the waves below offering none of their usual comfort or answers. He shifted his attention to the speedboat in the distance. "I've always known I wouldn't get married. That's the reason I dated women with zero interest in commitment, until you came along and I started questioning what I knew, damn it, what I still believe, but am having trouble holding strong all over again."
"Why are you so sure you shouldn't get married?"
"My parents were drug addicts. Two of my grandparents had substance abuse problems, as well as an aunt and a couple of uncles. I've stopped counting the cousins with chemical dependency issues." He ticked off the dreary stat count on his fingers. "It's in my genes and I've seen what it can do to a family."
"Did any of them acknowledge the problem or get help?"
"My dad tried, along with one of my uncles, a couple of my cousins. But even with all the successes in A.A., I've seen failures, too. Hell, I was a selfish failure with you seven months ago."
She shifted to face him, her hands falling to rest on his thighs and searing through his jeans. "So you're doing this totally selfless thing in pushing me away, which proves you're actually a really good man. You've put us in a no-win situation, pal."
He gripped her fingers. "Jesus, Nikki, you just don't know how bad it was."
"Or maybe I know how good it can be."
Her optimism could be contagious, dangerously so. "I'm glad that you've had a life that leads you to trust that easily."
"So you're walking out again?"
"We're on a boat. I'm not walking anywhere." They were definitely stuck here until they hashed this out one way or another.
Her jaw shot out again. "That's not what I meant and you know it."
"Being with you scares the crap out of me, no question about it. That night I saw you at Beachcombers, it rocked me. Hard."
The mast creaked and groaned as an ominous silence stretched between them. "And you've been dry since last May? No more blackouts?"
He'd already answered that once. What was she driving at? Even as he understood he hadn't done squat to deserve her trust, he wouldn't escape the sense of impending doom, thickening the late-afternoon air. "I'll admit, seeing you at Beachcombers that night was tough for me."
The boat pitched to the side, mast cracking, leaning.
Falling.
Seconds away from crashing into Nikki.
Chapter 14
Screaming, Nikki grappled for the boat rail. Anything stable in her abruptly tilting world as the mast leaned, held only by a couple of pathetically frayed metal lines.