AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“‘Ack! I need to talk to you! Now!’ Which you did try to give me. So a signal plus a pact that we’ll listen and not presume we know what the other person means, like me thinking you were just concerned I couldn’t fish, when you were trying to tell me there were no fish.”
“And a pact that we will signal, even if it means admitting to something embarrassing, like not knowing how to swim.”
“I—” he began, and then made a face. “I was going to say I could teach you, but then I realized that if you live on a lake and don’t swim, there’s probably a reason.”
She shrugged. “No huge trauma. Just something when I was a kid. First day of swimming lessons I got pushed in, and no one noticed until I passed out.”
“Oh, is that all?” he said. “Nearly dying? Not traumatic at all.”
“It wasn’t like that. Not really.” She pulled up her knees, hugging them with one arm. “Okay, a little, but mostly because it happened a few days after my dad walked out.”
His breath caught, and when she glanced over, she was scrunching her nose in an expression that could seem like distaste, but he’d come to know was self-consciousness. She’d cracked open her door more than she intended to, revealing a vulnerability she’d rather keep hidden.
“It was fine,” she said. “He was an ass, and we were better off without him.”
Chris clamped back a reply. He wasn’t a therapist, but even he was sure having a shitty father walk out still left a lasting dent in your psyche. Pairing that with a near drowning would explain why she didn’t swim. In her place, he might not have even been able to live on a lake.
He sipped his hot chocolate, looked into the flames, and considered his next move. She’d opened up a little, and he really wanted to know more. Did he dare nudge that door? Zane would shove it open. Chris Ainsworth would just casually stroll in, as if he hadn’t noticed it’d been closed. Chris Stanton would hover on the other side, frozen in uncertainty.
Maybe it was time to borrow from Zane and Ainsworth. Just a smidgen.
“I think you said you grew up in BC, right?” he said as offhandedly as he could. This wasn’t exactly top secret data, he reminded himself. Just normal conversation between two people sitting on a deck, sharing cocoa and a fire and a setting sun. “Is your mom still there?”
A pause. Such a long pause. Okay, maybe it wasn’t top secret data for most people, but Daphne wasn’t most people. He’d overstepped.
He caught her expression, and his heart dropped.
“Oh,” he said. “She’s…” He struggled for a word. “Gone.”
“Four years ago. Cancer.” Daphne’s fingers kneaded the blanket. “We had some warning. Time to do everything she wanted. Not enough time, but…”
She shrugged. Then she abruptly stopped kneading the blanket, and he was ready for a quick change of subject, but she smiled and said, “She’s the one who convinced me to move up here after she was gone. I’d been in the Yukon on a project. I won the contract to design a government building. A small one. But still, I got to spend two seasons here and fell in love.”
“You’re an architect?”
She frowned at him. Then she made a face. “I never even mentioned that, did I? Sorry. I don’t mean to be all secretive. If it’s not something I have in common with Zane, it just wasn’t important for you to know it. Yes, I’m an architect by trade. I run my own business, and I haven’t taken on new projects since selling Edge, but I haven’t quit, either. Writing isn’t usually a forever job. Anyway, Mom knew I loved it here and encouraged me to buy property. I got lucky and found this.”
“Did you…” He looked at the house. “Did you design this house?”
That shrug, pushing off anything that might lead to a compliment.
“Wow,” he said. “That is—”
“Mom also encouraged me to write Theo’s story.”
Chris bit his cheek to keep from laughing at the way she dove into the topic change, like swerving to avoid an out-of-control eighteen-wheeler. If starting a compliment got her to switch tracks to other personal things, he was going to need to do that more often.
Still, the little she had revealed about the house told him something—that living up here was no temporary whim. The Yukon was her dream place, and she’d moved up here and built her dream home. That wasn’t temporary.
Shit. He didn’t want to think about what it meant for the hope of a committed relationship, and committed was the only way he was doing this. That wasn’t selfishness, either. It was the dawning acknowledgment that a fling with Daphne would leave a bigger hole than if he’d never scratched that itch, because it was an itch that went a whole lot higher than his boxers.
He shook off that thought. She’d given him a chance to pursue a personal conversation, and he wasn’t going to miss out on it.
“Your mom knew about Edge?” he said.
Daphne nodded. “It was a little different back then. The main character wasn’t named Theo. And I wasn’t writing it down. It was just a story I was telling Mom to get her through chemo. She made me promise to write it, which is why…”
Daphne turned away, looking over the lake.
