To Have and to Hold by Serena Bell Page B

the air between them, nearly from the moment she’d taken off her cover-up and his eyes had looked everywhere except at her skimpy bathing suit.
    “I think it would be fun.”
    Those were not the words she was supposed to have said. Nor was she supposed to be beaming at him. But he was smiling back at her, and God, he hadn’t smiled like that since—before. All white teeth and eye crinkles and that almost-dimple and just the sheer ridiculous
glow
of him.
    She remembered the first time he’d smiled at her like that. The day they’d gone to Lakeshore.
    Even though she knew what mistakes she wasn’t supposed to make again, she kept wanting to make them.
    “Do you want to go somewhere other than Lakeshore? Because we’ve already done that?”
    She shook her head. Apparently she was going to undermine all her own best intentions today.
    “It’s a little frustrating,” he admitted. “I have a brilliant idea, and it’s already old and busted.” He wet his hand under the tap and flicked a few drops of water into the skillet, where they sizzled. He poured the eggs in and didn’t make eye contact.
    “It’s different this time, anyway,” she said. “Everything’s different.”
    And she didn’t just mean in the bad ways. She didn’t just mean what he’d forgotten and what she’d lost. She meant it in good ways, too. After spending five days working with him on the tree house, she didn’t see him quite the same way anymore. He wasn’t just the same Hunter she’d left behind, only minus his memories of her. He was—he was different. Harder, with something defensive in the set of his jaw. But also softer. The builder, the creator, a different, more vulnerable man than he’d let her see before.
    The man who’d given himself up so thoroughly in those moments in the dark…
    No, this visit to Lakeshore would in many ways bear no resemblance to their first. It was impossible, now, for her to look at him and see the same remote, self-contained man—Clara’s father—she’d once seen. She knew him too well, knew all the soft and tender spots under his strong and leathery surface.
    It was harder for her to protect herself from this man.
    —
    It didn’t occur to him immediately that this outing would involve Trina in a bathing suit. He’d asked her totally spontaneously, because he needed a day’s break from tree-house work, because the sun was shining brightly outside, because he didn’t want his and Clara’s time with her to just end, without fanfare. He wanted to create an experience they’d remember distinctly.
    If he were honest with himself, he’d say he wanted to create an experience Trina would remember, too.
    But the bathing suit wasn’t on his mind.
    They’d finished eating the scrambled eggs and fucking awesome granola and were doing the dishes, bumping elbows and accidentally twining soapy fingers under the water, when he suddenly realized that he’d just arranged for himself to spend an entire day in the presence of her mostly naked abundance. And that it might be a form of beautiful torture.
    Not an hour went by that he didn’t think about the night he’d woken in the middle of kissing her, or that other encounter, the one he might or might not have dreamt. And working side by side with her this week, leaning closer to show her a technique, or squatting beside her to examine one of the treasures she’d scavenged, it had been increasingly difficult to keep his hands off her. But he’d successfully suffocated his cravings in hard work. He’d kept his hands to himself and the thoughts in the dark quiet of his own mind. Because he would
not
do to her what he’d done to Dee. He wouldn’t let lust lead them both into a trap. If there was no way, now, to fix what had gone wrong with Dee, he would make sure Trina didn’t make the same mistake with him.
    After breakfast, he’d gone upstairs to shower and change, and it had been then, standing under the water, running his soapy palm across