Nobody But You (27 page)

“Then let's make the most of it,” she said, and using his weight against him, pulled him down to her.

I
t was two in the morning when Hud pulled up to the cabin on the lake. Next to him, Jacob took a deep breath of the Rocky Mountain air and for the first time in three months felt alive.

And hopeful. “Have you seen Sophie?” he asked. “Is she staying here?”

Hud didn't answer that. No one had and Jacob hadn't pressed, not sure if he was ready to know.

“Feels good to have you back,” was all Hud said.

Two arms came around Jacob tight from behind. Kenna in the backseat. “
So GOOD
!” she whispered fiercely, hugging him for what must've been the hundredth time since they'd picked him up at the airport in Denver two hours ago.

He twisted and did his best to hug her back. She tightened her grip and…didn't let go.

“I thought maybe we'd had enough hugs,” he managed to croak out past the arm around his neck.

She still didn't let go.

Jacob loved her. Ridiculously. But he needed to get inside, needed to know if Sophie was in there. Seeking help, he looked at Hud.

“He's turning blue,” Hud told Kenna.

She sniffed.

Hud winced and backed up against the door, hands up.

Shit. Jacob wrapped Kenna up as tight as he could. “Hey,” he said. “I'm done. I'm out. I'm not leaving again.”

“You swear it?”

“I swear it.”

“And you'll buy me breakfast?” she asked soggily. “At least twice a week?”

Ah, there she was. “You're wearing a ring. You have Mitch for that now.”

“It's just a promise ring and he's a boy, which means he could muck it all up at any moment. You're my brother. Say it, Jacob. Promise me.”

“I promise to buy you breakfast two times a week.”

“In perpetuity.”

“In perpetuity,” he said.

“And you'll take over as events manager?” she asked. “And be codirector with me of the ski school, seeing as the resort has been saved and so have our asses?”

Jacob pulled back. “What?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Forgot to tell you. Lucas went on a whole fix-his-bad-karma thing and was able to work out a deal with the bank so we'd have more time and lower payments. All will be paid off in two years, with the resort still making a comfortable profit if we're careful. We're rebuilding and we need you. Plus, we already had the plaque made for your office door.”

Jacob looked at Hud in the dark ambient light of the truck's cab. “You know about this?”

“We all do,” he said. “We want you back where you belong. With us. And if those jobs don't appeal to you, then we'll find something that does.”

“They appeal,” Jacob said. More than he'd imagined they could.

He got out of the truck.

He entered his cabin, tension curling through him. He was beyond exhausted after traveling for the past seventy-two hours to get back here and had no idea what to expect. He and Soph had communicated via email and Skype here and there, but connections had been spotty and she'd been vague about her plans.

Terrifyingly vague.

Was she here? Would she stay? And if so, for how long? He wanted forever, but he didn't very often get what he wanted.

The cabin was dark, and he didn't turn on any lights as he dropped his duffel bags and walked straight through the living room to his bedroom.

The glow of the moon slanted in through the window, casting the room in blue shadows. He moved to the bed, his knees nearly giving out when he saw the mass of long red hair scattered across his pillow.

Sophie lay sprawled in the center of the bed, deeply asleep, taking up all of the space. It took him a few seconds to realize what was different about the room.

The closet was open, filled with her clothes. She had several pairs of shoes scattered on the floor. One peek into the bathroom assured him that she'd taken over there as well, bottles and brushes…How many brushes did one woman need?

Moving back to his bedroom, he noticed the blanket on the bed was hers. There was a plant in one corner and her jewelry box was on the dresser. And a pair of undies on the floor by the bed gave him hope she was in there naked.

That she was there at all was a miracle on its own.

His hand shook as he shut and locked the door, doing the same for the window, making them safe for the night.

Then he sat down heavily on the chair by the bed and just watched her breathe. She was here.

She was his.

And he was absolutely hers…He closed his eyes for a second and then opened them.

And found her looking at him.

Sophie had been waiting for this moment for so long she could scarcely breathe. She'd done her best to go on with her life and continue to make it as good for herself as she could. She'd started her concierge service and had more business than she knew what to do with.

She'd spent time with Kenna and the other Kincaids. She'd settled into Jacob's cabin, feeling warm and safe and deeply attached to the place, unlike anywhere else she'd ever lived.

That was all Jacob.

He wasn't there, but she could feel his presence, and she thought about him a lot. Thought about what it would be like when he returned home.

And here he was, leaner than he'd been, tanned from long days in the sun, hair once again military short, eyes dark and filled with things that caught her breath.

“You're a sight for sore eyes,” he said.

“You too. Jacob—” She broke off, nervous. He seemed content to wait for her to gather herself. He was excellent at that. God, she'd missed him. “Just so you know,” she murmured, her heart pounding hard. “I did as you suggested. I made myself at home.” She trailed off as…
victory?
satisfaction?
…flickered across his face. Maybe both, but what caught her by the heart and wouldn't let go was the intensity of his eyes and a smile that warmed her to the bone.

“You've made another choice,” he said.

“Yeah,” she breathed. “I'm home.”

He stood and strode straight for her, leaning over her to kiss her long and deep, one hand sliding up her spine to cradle the back of her head.

She gripped him tight, her fingers running up his arms, bared thanks to his T-shirt. His skin was chilled. “You're cold,” she said. “Come in here. Let me warm you,” she whispered, and lifted the covers in invitation.

Holding her gaze, he stripped and climbed into the bed, pulling her into the circle of his arms. A low, rough, heartfelt groan escaped him as he pulled her naked body to him. “We're
both
home now,” he said.

S
ophie had never been so happy and so miserably sick at the same time. Currently she was kneeling on the floor in the bar's bathroom, trying to decide if she was done. She hadn't had any alcohol, but upon reflection, the second order of hot wings might've been a serious error in judgment.

Kenna was helping to hold her hair back. “Honey, you should've canceled tonight if you were sick.”

“I'm not.” Pretty sure she was over this latest bout, she sat back and eyed the diamond wedding band on her finger. Jacob had put it there two months ago, on a weeklong vacay in Hawaii, where they'd stood together and exchanged vows. It still gave her a thrill to see the ring. “I'm okay now.”

“You're not,” Kenna said. She brought Sophie some dampened paper towels while simultaneously speaking into her cell phone. “Sophie's sick,” she said. “Yeah, she's thrown up, like, four times.”

“Three,” Sophie corrected weakly, “and are you really tattling on me?” She rinsed her mouth in the sink. “What are we, twelve?”

Ten minutes later Jacob came barging through the women's bathroom door looking very much like a warrior soldier ready to kick ass, making another woman squeak and rush out.

Jacob didn't even glance at her. All he had eyes for was Sophie. He dropped to his knees next to her where she was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. He pulled her in, hugging her tight, and Sophie found herself laughing and crying at the same time as she clutched at him.

“Why didn't you tell me?” he demanded incredulously.

“I didn't know until this morning, I was going to tell you later tonight, after I warmed you up to the idea…”

“Babe…” He stroked her hair from her damp forehead. “Why would you need to warm me up to the idea of having a baby?”

“You don't remember?” she asked on a low laugh. “Last week at the ball game, the woman next to us had a two-year-old who kept having a temper tantrum. And you said, ‘Let's never do that.'”

“I meant because she had him dressed up in a mini Raiders uniform. No kid of mine is going to wear anything other than a Broncos jersey.”

Kenna dropped to her knees next to them. “Okay, someone needs to tell me right here, right now…We're
having a baby
?”

Sophie felt her eyes fill again at the look on Jacob's face—pure, radiant joy.

“Yeah,” he said, leaning in, pressing his forehead to Sophie's, his own eyes suspiciously misty too. “We're having a baby.”

“
That's
why you wouldn't drink!” Kenna grinned. “Even when I said vodka was made from potatoes and potatoes are a vegetable, which practically makes vodka a salad.”

Sophie smiled. “No alcohol for eight more months.”

“We're having a baby,” Kenna repeated in marvel, a wide grin on her usually taciturn face.

“Well, I don't know much about the ‘we' part,” Sophie said wryly. “Seems to me most of the work is going to be mine.”

“I'll be right there with you,” Jacob vowed, voice deep and rich with the promise. “You won't ever be alone in this.”

Her heart nearly burst it was so full. Him. His family. A baby…It was all so much more than she could've ever hoped for. “You might feel differently when the pregnancy hormones kick in,” she warned.

He cupped her face. “I fell hard for you, Soph, and I haven't gotten up since. Never will. We're in this together, heart and soul.”

She couldn't think of anything she'd ever wanted more.

A
fter fighting a brush fire at the base of Cedar Ridge for ten straight hours, Aidan Kincaid had only three things on his mind: sex, pizza, and beer. Given the way the day had gone, he'd gladly take them in any order he could get them.

Not in the cards.

He and the rest of his fire crew had finally managed to get back to the station. They'd been there just long enough to load their plates when the alarm went off again.

“What the hell!”

“Gonna break the damn bell and shove it up someone's—”

“This is bullshit…”

Whoever said no one could outswear a sailor had never lived in a firehouse. Ignoring the grumbling around him, Aidan pushed his plate away and met his partner Mitch's gaze.

“Gotta be a full moon bringing out the crazy,” Mitch said.

“Maybe the crazy just follows you,” Aidan suggested.

In turn, Mitch suggested Aidan was number one. With his middle finger.

They'd been playing this game since first grade, when Mitch had stolen Aidan's lunch and Aidan had popped him in the nose for it. As punishment they'd had to pick up and haul trash for the janitor for two weeks.

The two of them had become best friends and had spent the next decade being as wild and crazy as possible.

Eventually they'd grown up and found responsibility, going through the fire academy and now working as Colorado Wildland Firefighters for their bread and butter, volunteering on the local search-and-rescue team as needed. And here in Cedar Ridge they were needed a lot. Lost hikers, overzealous hunters, clueless novice rafters—you name it, they'd been called to save it.

Tonight's fire call came in as a possible suicide jumper off the courthouse, which at five stories high was the tallest building in town.

As they pulled up, they could see a woman had climbed out a window on the fifth floor. She stood on a ledge that couldn't have been more than a foot wide, wearing nothing but her bra and panties.

“Well, at least Nicky left her Victoria's Secrets on this time,” Mitch noted.

Nicky was a bit of a regular.

And Mitch was right. The last time Nicky had gotten upset was after finding the town councilman she'd been sleeping with going at it on his desk with his assistant. She'd stripped all the way down to her birthday suit before covering herself in Post-it notes. Aidan wondered what had set her off this time.

“I changed my mind,” she screamed, jabbing a finger down at them. “I don't want to die! He's not worth it!”

No Post-it notes this time. A bonus. The police had blocked off traffic, but the scene was still chaotic.

“Somebody get up here and save me!” Nicky yelled. “If I fall and die, I'm going to sue every one of you for being so freaking slow! Honest to God, what does a girl have to do to get a rescue around here?”

“So she's changed her mind,” the captain said dryly to Aidan and Mitch. They exchanged glances. No one could reach her from inside the window. And climbing out on the ledge wasn't an option; it was too narrow—and decomposing to boot. And thanks to the layout of the building and the hillside, their truck couldn't get close enough to the building to be effective either.

They all knew what this meant. One of them was going to have to follow the half-naked crazy chick out onto the ledge. There were a few problems with this.

Aidan and his team had a reputation for being unflappable and tough as nails, but the truth was, plenty unnerved them—including a half-naked crazy chick on a ledge five stories up. They'd just learned to do whatever needed to be done, no matter what.

“Let the fun begin,” Mitch muttered.

Plan A was for the captain to head inside and attempt to talk Nicky back inside the window. Since Plan A had a high potential for going south, Plan B was to be run simultaneously—head to the roof and begin setting up rigging for an over-the-roof retrieval.

Through it all, Nicky never stopped screaming at them, alternately begging them to hurry and hurtling insults their way.

Then came the cap's radio message. “Yeah, so she's declining to crawl back in the window because there's no press here yet. Last time she was front-page news.”

Onward. The team found a good anchor spot on the roof. As Mitch and Aidan were the two most senior members of the unit, one of them always took lead. Mitch looked at Aidan. “Okay, go make like Spider-Man and rescue the damsel in distress.”

“Why me?” Aidan asked.

“It's your turn.”

“Hey, you're the one who likes her undies,” Aidan pointed out. Not that he objected to a rescue, any rescue, but this one had shit show written all over it.

“I weigh more than you do,” Mitch said logically.

Only because he was six foot four to Aidan's six two, but whatever. The team got the line set up, and then Aidan got into his five-point harness and hooked himself to the first of the two lines. Mitch hooked himself up to the second one just in case Aidan got into trouble, and the rest of the unit prepared for go time.

Aidan dropped over the edge. The plan was to rappel him down until he hung ten feet above Nicky. He'd then kick out from the building at the same time that his team lowered him eleven more feet, bringing him to just below her, putting him between her and the fifty-foot drop. He'd attach a harness to Nicky, and the team would give them enough slack so that Aidan could rappel down with her.

And the team indeed lowered Aidan to just above Nicky. Aidan kicked out. But as usual, nothing went to plan. Just as he started to swing back toward the wall, Nicky leapt off the ledge like some rabid raccoon and wrapped herself around him.

Not more than a hundred and ten pounds, she clung to him like a monkey as they hurtled at neck-breaking speed toward the wall. Aidan managed to grip her tight and twist in midair so that he was the one to slam into the brick.

Even as lightweight as she was, it still hurt like hell.

“Jesus Christ,” Aidan heard the captain and Mitch say in stereo as they watched helplessly—one from above, one from below, at the window.

They didn't know the half of it. With Nicky's legs wrapped and locked around Aidan's waist, her arms squeezing his head like a grape and her breasts literally suffocating him, he couldn't breathe. Somehow he managed to turn his head sideways to suck in some air, but he still couldn't see. “I've got you,” he said. “I'm not going to let go, but you need to loosen your grip.”

Nicky was too busy screaming in his ear to hear him, not loosening her grip at all. “Omigod, don't you fuckin' drop me or I'll sue you the most!”

Mitch had dropped over the edge as soon Nicky leapt on Aidan's back. He was rappelling down as fast as he could, laughing all the way. Aidan couldn't see shit, but he could hear him clearly, the asshole.

“Got his six,” Mitch said into the radio as he came even with Aidan, still laughing. “Though I can't tell where Aidan ends and Nicky begins.”

You can kill him later, Aidan promised himself. “Listen to me,” he said to Nicky. “I've got you. I need you to stop yelling in my ear and look at me.”

She gulped in a breath and relaxed her hold only enough to look at him. Her eyes were wide, wet, and raccooned from her mascara.

“I'm not going to let go of you,” he assured her, staring into her eyes, doing his best to give her an anchor. “You hear me, Nicky? No one's falling to their death today.”

She nodded and started to cry in earnest at the same time. Aidan preferred her screaming.

“She's not attached to anything,” the captain reminded them via radio.

“You don't have to worry about that, Cap,” Mitch responded. “She's not letting go of Aidan.”

Nope, she wasn't. She'd embedded her nails into him good, and her legs were crossed and locked at the small of his back, but at least he could breathe. “Just get us down,” he said.

As the team lowered them, Mitch kept alongside, offering encouragement, cracking his own ass up as they went.

On the ground, Aidan's new companion was peeled off of him and taken away for further evaluation. Aidan took his first deep breath since the rescue had begun. Aching in more muscles than he'd realized he even had, he gathered his gear.

“You okay?” their captain asked. “You took a few hard hits up there.”

“I'm fine.” He could feel where he'd have bruises tomorrow, and he was pretty sure his back had been scraped raw from the demolition derby collision with the brick wall, but he'd had worse.

Mitch grinned at him. “Man, you just had your bones totally jumped by a nearly naked chick. We almost had to resuscitate you. ‘Fireman Asphyxiated by Boobs, news at eleven.'”

Their captain eyed Mitch and then Aidan. “You remember we have a strict no-killing-each-other policy?”

Aidan reluctantly nodded.

“I'm going to lift that rule for a onetime exception,” the captain said, cocking his head at Mitch.

Mitch's smile faded. “Hey.”

But the captain had walked away.

“Whatever,” Mitch said to Aidan. “If you kill me, you'll never find out what I know.”

Aidan slid him a glance. “You never know anything.”

“I know lots, starting with a rumor that you're about to get a blast from the past.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I hear Lily Danville's back,” Mitch said.

Aidan froze at the name he hadn't heard in a very long time. Years. Ten of them to be exact.

Mitch raised a brow. “Gray hasn't mentioned it?”

No, Aidan's older brother had not told him a thing, which raised the question.

Why?

“How did you hear?” Aidan asked.

“Lenny. He caught the gossip at the resort. Your family runs the place. How did you not hear this?”

Lenny had gone to high school with them and now worked at the Kincaid resort as a big-equipment driver. Aidan stared at Mitch, unable to process that everyone had known before him.

Lily Danville…Damn. Turning, he started to walk away.

“It's no big deal,” Mitch said. “It's not like you're seeing Shelly anymore, right? You're a free agent, so if you want to try to get Lily back…Hey, wait up.”

Aidan didn't wait. And it was true he wasn't seeing Shelly anymore. Technically, they'd never been “seeing” each other. They'd had a satisfying physical relationship whenever they both felt like it, and neither of them had felt like it in more than a month now. He hadn't thought about her once since.

But Lily Danville…

He hadn't seen her in forever, and yet he still thought about her way too often.

“Hold up,” Mitch called out. “Your half of the gear's still—” He broke off when Aidan kept walking. “Seriously?” And when Aidan didn't so much as look back, Mitch swore and worked to gather the load, making some of the newbies help. He was quiet on the ride back to the station but only because they weren't alone and also he was playing a game on his phone.

Aidan reached over and swiped his finger across Mitch's screen.

Mitch swore, nearly lost the phone out the window, and then turned to glare at Aidan. “You owe me a Candy Crush life.”

“Tell me more about Lily being back.”

“Oh,
now
you want to talk? You done pouting then?”

When Aidan just gave him the I-can-kick-your-ass gaze, Mitch grinned. “You know you were.”

“It's all over Facebook,” one of the guys said from the back. “The news about Lily.”

“Aidan forgot his password,” Mitch said. “A year ago.”

Aidan ignored him, mostly because his brain was on overload. Lily. Back in town…

He'd long ago convinced himself that whatever he'd felt for her all those years ago had been just a stupid teenage boy thing.

Seemed he was going to get a chance to test out that theory, ready or not.