Never Too Hot (Hot Shots: Men of Fire #3)(59)
Author: Bella Andre

He was bent down over the sailboat, putting in the finishing touches. The sun was almost rising and he was planning to drag it out on the water. He almost prayed for another storm, for the universe to force him and Ginger together again.

But since he knew that wouldn’t happen, he was tempted to take a hammer to it instead and start over. Because when he was done with the boat, what the hell was he going to have to focus on to keep himself away from her?

The day before, a neighbor down the lake who also had an old log cabin had been sent by a couple of guys at the hardware store to see Connor’s work. Clearly impressed, the man had mentioned that it was pretty much impossible to find anyone to work on a place like this, that modern day contractors all just wanted to tear the cabins down and start over with a Lincoln Log kit. He asked what Connor’s plans were going forward, if he might consider helping out some of the other log cabin owners on the lake with their homes.

Although Connor enjoyed the work, even though there was something immensely satisfying about running a paintbrush over a log in smooth strokes, coating it with a fine layer of varnish to both protect the log and bring out its natural golden sheen, despite the fact that seeing his great-grandparents’ cabin come back to life was a rush, he couldn’t stay here and work on fixing up old cabins full-time. Not because he didn’t like the thought of becoming a carpenter, not even because he didn’t think his hands could take the work, but because he couldn’t stay at Blue Mountain Lake if Ginger was here too.

Watching her marry another man, have his children, would be hell on earth.

He’d rather jump into a pit of flames than stick around to watch that.

* * *

Andrew lay on the bed in his room at the Inn for hours, staring up at the ceiling, Isabel there with him in his head, his body the entire time. He remembered her softness pressing into him, the salty-sweet taste of her tongue sliding against his, the way she’d pulled him down onto her, pulling him closer.

Come five a.m., his eyes having been open straight through, he hoped like hell a jump in the lake would snap him out of it. But although the water was cold, and he was physically tired, his insides still buzzed and snapped as if it had been thirty seconds since he saw Isabel instead of hours.

The sun was just starting to rise when he got back into his car and headed toward Poplar Cove. But when he pulled up to the cabin, he realized it was way too early to bother either Ginger or Connor. He couldn’t just sit out here in his car, so he got out and started walking the path he knew by heart to the one place he’d managed to avoid since coming back to Blue Mountain Lake.

His grandfather’s sanctuary, his most prized place in all of Poplar Cove: the workshop.

Standing outside the old red barn, which his grandfather had preserved on the original property when they bought it in 1910 and started building the cabin on the waterfront, Andrew could almost see his lost dreams worming their way up out of the dirt, the dry leaves on the ground shifting beneath him so fast he lost his balance.

His heart pounding, he put his hand on the wide doorknob and pushed it open. There it was, his wooden sloop at the far end of the barn, right where he’d left it a little more than thirty years ago. He couldn’t believe no one had taken it apart to use the wood for other projects, or at the very least, moved it out of the way. Why on earth was it still there?

And then he realized he wasn’t alone, that his son was squatting down beside the boat.

“Connor?” he said, coming closer. And that was when he realized that the boat was no longer half built. “Did you do this? Finish building my boat?”

“It was a waste of perfectly good wood the way it was.”

Despite Connor’s unemotional words, Andrew was incredibly moved as he kneeled beside the boat, running his fingers over the smooth, golden wood he’d so painstakingly planed and sanded as a teenage boy.

He hadn’t been much older than Isabel’s son when he’d started building the boat, but it had been his dream to make his living with sailing as far back as he could remember. His father had put him on a sailboat as soon as he could walk and they’d spent hours together out on the lake in the Sun Fish and then the Laser.

Andrew had always assumed he’d end up in a boat of his making on the lake with his own sons.

“You’re right,” he finally said. “I shouldn’t have left it unfinished all these years.”

“It’s just a boat,” Connor said and Andrew knew his son was trying to steer them back out of the gray area. But there was no point in trying to steer clear of stormy weather. Not when it would find you no matter how hard you tried to hide from it.

“No, it wasn’t just a boat. I loved to sail. It was what I was going to do, build boats and sail them. I was going to sail around the world.”

“Why the hell didn’t you come back then?”

“God, I wish I had come back, wish I could change everything, but I was just too much of a coward to face up to my mistakes.”

“I get it you had a thing with Isabel, but who cares. You could have come anyway with Mom. You could have spent time with me and Sam. You could have taught us to sail instead of Grandpa.”

“It wasn’t that simple.”

“I don’t see how it could have been any simpler. You had a wife and kids who needed you.”

“I was going to marry Isabel,” Andrew confessed before he could grab the words back. “As soon as she graduated from high school, while we were both in college, we were going to be together. Instead I got your mother pregnant.

One stupid, drunken night. And just like that I screwed up everyone’s lives.”

Realization dawned in his son’s eyes, and then a rage Andrew’d yet to see, even those first days in the hospital bed when Connor’s frustration had been a palpable thing.

“Mom was pregnant with Sam? That’s why you married her?”

“I wouldn’t have married her if I didn’t have feelings for her.”

“But you never loved her like you loved Isabel, did you?”

Andrew knew he’d have to work like crazy to make his son understand. “I never wanted your mother to feel like she was second best. And when she got pregnant, neither of us could just go our separate ways and make the best of it. It wasn’t the way either of us had been raised. It wasn’t the right thing to do. We made the decision together to put a ring on each other’s fingers and we tried like hell to make it work. We didn’t want Sam — or you — to grow up in a broken home.”

“You made the wrong choice.”

“I know that now,” he tried to say, but Connor cut him off.

“You never gave a damn about any of us, did you?”