She was finally granted the ability to inhale when he resumed smoothing her hair. He stepped back, although he was careful to keep her cast in his shadow.
“I wish I could remember you,” he said.
“No you don’t. I mean…I’m glad you don’t,” she said with a laugh. “My mother usually wanted my hair short during the summers, because it was easier. It grows so fast, and it took her so long to brush out the snarls after a day at the beach. She just didn’t have the time. She worked too hard. When I was ten or eleven, I looked like an adolescent boy—skinny arms and legs. It was one of the reasons I liked the beach—at least in my bikini, people knew I was a girl.”
He chuckled. “I’ll bet you were adorable. I can’t picture you with short hair, though.” His eyes flickered down over her shoulders and chest. “I definitely can’t imagine you being mistaken for a boy.”
Her cheeks heated from a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment.
“Were you shy? As a little girl?” Liam asked, his voice a low rumble.
“Yes,” she said quietly as she watched her hands dance in the rippling water. “My mother used to say I was coming out of my shell, though. I’d become really involved in ballet classes and started doing recitals. Performing took me out of myself a little bit.”
“You’d been at a ballet recital on the night of the accident.”
She glanced up sharply. She’d been surprised by his statement, but Liam looked even more stunned at his own words.
“Sorry,” he muttered. He glanced toward the beach, a strange expression on his face. “I have no idea where that came from. It just hit me all of a sudden. I must have read it in a newspaper, or heard it on the news back when I was a kid. When you mentioned the recitals, it just sort of sprung up out of nowhere from my memory.”
Her surprise at his abrupt statement about the crash vanished in the face of his obvious discomfort.
“There’s no need to apologize,” she said, her voice even. “It probably was in the papers. My mother and I had been at a recital over in South Haven. We were driving home that night.”
“You and your mother were close, weren’t you?” he asked after a moment.
“Yes. Very close.”
His gaze remained fixed on the beach. She saw his muscular throat convulse and she stepped toward him.
“It’s okay to ask about her, Liam.”
He glanced down at her sharply.
“I’m curious about you and your father, as well.” She hesitated before she plunged ahead. Glimpsing his uncertainty had given her courage, for some reason. “I would have been curious even if it wasn’t for the crash. I would have been, because of you.”
For a few taut seconds, she couldn’t read his expression. Then he muttered something under his breath she couldn’t quite catch and his arms closed around her. She shivered at the contact of his cool, wet skin against hers. He must have felt it, because he pushed her tighter against him, surrounding her with his body, until his heat penetrated into her. He bent his neck and pressed the side of his head against hers.
Natalie suppressed a whimper of rising emotion as her arms wrapped around his waist. Being so suddenly enfolded in his embrace like that had affected her in a way she hadn’t expected. It was a hug of compassion, an acknowledgment of their shared suffering.
As the seconds passed, however, and she became hyperaware of Liam’s near-naked body pressed intimately against her own, Natalie admitted the embrace meant more than compassion. Much more. Desire twined with all those other emotional threads: brilliant, golden and undeniable. His chin moved. He spoke in a low, gruff voice, his warm breath in her ear causing ripples of pleasure to course down her spine.
“This is a hell of a thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” No sound came out of her throat, but the right side of her mouth was pressed against the dense muscles of his chest. She knew he’d sensed her answer, just as she somehow knew he’d been referring to their strange association with one another, their past…the attraction between them that seemed to building to some kind of crescendo.
He trailed his large hand down her spine, and she shivered.
“Are you cold?” he murmured, his palm coming to rest just above her buttocks.
“Not…not really,” she replied with breathless honesty.
He stepped back. The setting sun shone so brightly around his outline it was like he was a haloed hero from a dream in her dazzled eyes. It fit somehow, that description. Distantly, she realized her cheeks were wet with tears, but…she experienced no embarrassment under Liam’s stare.
She felt strangely light-headed at the realization, liberated, her soul seemingly swelling upward, like a weight had just been lifted off her that she’d never known existed until now.
“Are you going to swim?” he asked her soberly.
She shook her head. She’d already plunged way deeper into these emotional waters than she’d ever intended.