Wait for you, p.1
Wait For You, page 1
part #1 of Fireweed Harbor Series Series
Wait For You
Fireweed Harbor Series
J.H. Croix
Contents
1. Tessa
2. Adam
3. Tessa
4. Adam
5. Tessa
6. Adam
7. Tessa
8. Adam
9. Tessa
10. Adam
11. Tessa
12. Adam
13. Tessa
14. Tessa
15. Adam
16. Tessa
17. Tessa
18. Adam
19. Adam
20. Tessa
21. Tessa
22. Adam
23. Tessa
24. Adam
25. Adam
26. Tessa
27. Adam
28. Tessa
29. Tessa
30. Adam
31. Tessa
32. Adam
33. Tessa
34. Adam
35. Tessa
36. Adam
37. Tessa
38. Tessa
39. Adam
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2024 J.H. Croix
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Chapter One
Tessa
Me: Do you happen to have Adam’s number?
Five minutes pass, and I fervently wish I could un-send the text I just sent to my friend.
McKenna: Adam? My brother Adam?
I hesitated for a moment, my heart pounding unsteadily in my chest and my belly twisting with churning anxiety. What white lie could I tell one of my closest friends so she would give me her brother’s phone number?
Me: Yeah. I had his phone number in my contacts, but when I got my new phone, I lost some of them.
Okay, that was actually true, so I wasn’t lying.
Me: I need to ask him an accounting question. He said something about some kind of software he recommended. You know how much I hate doing my taxes.
I did hate doing my taxes, so that was only kind of a lie. And I had overheard Adam recommending some tax program to someone at the potluck. So really, it was all true. Of course, spring and tax season had just passed, but that was a minor detail.
Ha! My cynical mind mocked me.
McKenna is too busy being in love to worry about why I need her brother’s phone number, I told myself.
A second later, she shared his contact. I bit my lip. With seven siblings, the Cannon family was unusually large in this modern day.
I giggled when I saw what McKenna named this brother in her contacts. Adam #4. The smart one.
My heart kicked a little faster again, and my belly still spun from my encounter with Adam hours ago. He’d set off a chain reaction in me. I felt reckless.
After my disaster of a marriage and divorce over a year and a half ago, I hadn’t dated. At all. I convinced myself that was fine. It was fine. I didn’t want a relationship. I just wanted to see if I could kiss a man and not be terrified. I trusted Adam. Or I thought I did. Trust wasn’t a familiar feeling for me. Not with men.
Before I lost my courage and that streak of recklessness was trampled by common sense and the fear that had ruled my life for too many years, I tapped the contact and saved it in my phone. I renamed it simply Adam.
Opening up a text window, I typed out a text.
Me: Maybe this is crazy, but I wanted to take you up on your offer.
I hit send before I could chicken out and set my phone on the bed. My pulse galloped along so fast I could hardly catch my breath, and all I was doing was sitting in bed alone.
When no reply came for over a minute, a familiar feeling began to rise, a churning sense of panic. It felt like water creeping up my ankles while I was trapped inside a room with nowhere to go. That was how I had felt for… I paused as I mentally calculated.
I was still in college when I started dating Rich. He asked me to marry him six months into our relationship, and I said yes. The next day, he hit me for the first time. That was after months of verbal put-downs and jabs. I should’ve backed out. But I was ashamed, and I believed him when he apologized. I thought it would never happen again. I thought it would get better.
My life then played out like a textbook on emotional, verbal, and physical abuse. I felt completely alone, like no one could ever have been as stupid as I was. Before I knew it, we were married. I rode the whiplash of days of quiet, punctuated by verbal jabs and insults, occasional hits to objects and me. Then he’d calm down. Around and around and around we went. When I was pregnant, he threatened to kill me. I stayed until I learned to cry in complete and utter silence in the darkness and didn’t know if I could ever get out. By that point, it felt as if the water had risen to my chin and occasionally a little higher, and I feared I would drown.
But my son or, as my ex insisted on emphasizing, our son made me want to fight. One day, something just broke inside me. I left with nothing more than a backpack of my clothes, my son, and two bags for him.
As I sat there by myself, I fidgeted, wondering what had set off my panic. While I cataloged the anxiety zipping through me, I realized waiting for a text response was a trauma trigger for me. Because Rich used to do that to me all the time. I couldn’t ever recall him replying to a text quickly. I always had to wait.
Doubts clamored loudly in my brain, shouting that Adam couldn’t have meant what he said. That I wasn’t cute, that he didn’t want to kiss me, that I was absolutely out of my freaking mind to have sent him this text.
Just as I lifted my phone to type in a follow-up message, it vibrated with a response. I swallowed through the tightness in my throat and stared at Adam’s response.
Adam: The offer to kiss you?
Fiery heat flashed into my cheeks. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I said out loud.
My pulse went wild, and a warm, tingly sensation built in my belly.
Adam: Any time. Just say when and where.
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!
“Mom!”
“Oh fuck!” I whispered quickly before kicking back the covers on my bed and scrambling to my bedroom door. “Yeah?”
“Why are you saying ‘oh my God’ over and over?” Eric asked.
“Oh my fucking God,” I whispered under my breath. Six-year-olds could be so nosy and had really good hearing.
“I stubbed my toe. I promise I’m fine.”
For good measure, I opened the door. My son’s worried face was right there, his brown hair sticking straight up. He wore pajamas with bears all over them and had the cutest little toes. These were the silly details mothers noticed all the time.
I hated the look of worry on his face, and I hated even more that I understood where it came from. He had heard many arguments through closed doors and walls when we still lived with his father. As a result, he was hypervigilant. According to his therapist and my therapist and the women I’d met in a support group I went to after I somehow escaped the hellhole of my marriage, this was an expected response. He was constantly attuned to every little reaction from the adults in his world.
Eric blinked, and I watched as the tension softened in his face. “Okay.”
“Why are you still awake?” I asked as I leaned my shoulder inside the doorframe.
“I was reading my comics.” He held up his comic book.
“Okay, lights out in…” I glanced at my watch. “A half an hour ago.” I gave him a pointed look, and he grinned.
“Okay, I’ll go to sleep now.”
I watched as he trotted across the hallway to his bedroom at an angle across from mine. I waited until he closed the door and the light disappeared from under the doorway a moment later.
I took a deep breath. Just recently, Eric told me he didn’t want me to tuck him in every night. Every time I thought about that, I experienced a pang in my heart. He was growing up so fast. In some ways, he was so old for his yea rs.
I padded into the kitchen and got a glass of ice water. After a few sips, I returned to my bedroom and looked down at the phone. All of my recklessness had dissipated. I just felt like a frumpy, un-sexy mom.
I debated not even replying to Adam. I could try to play it off and tell him I had texted the wrong number. But when I reached for my phone, another text from him awaited me.
Adam: I’m guessing you’re freaking out. No need. I’d still like to kiss you, but please don’t stress over it. Good night, Tessa.
I swallowed as my heart began racing again. I was hot all over. It’s not that I’d never noticed Adam Cannon before. He was handsome, like all of his brothers. But I had trained myself to never pay attention to any other man during my marriage. Never. It wasn’t safe.
Just remembering that brought a surge of courage and adrenaline flooding through me. Lifting my phone, I replied.
Me: I’d like that kiss. Promise?
Chapter Two
Adam
Tessa’s last text played on a loop. I’d like that kiss. Promise?
It was a little echo in my thoughts. I imagined hearing it in her low, raspy voice.
I didn’t know what happened the other night when I encountered her in the hallway at my sister’s dinner party, but it felt like a door had been kicked open inside me. Awareness and need rushed through, the force of it intense enough that I couldn’t ignore it.
Tessa was beyond cute and sexy as hell. I was still marveling that I hadn’t noticed her like that before. I knew what McKenna would say if she knew my thoughts. For starters, my only sister had pointed out many times that I was closed off ever since Julie died.
As if I didn’t have enough baggage in my life growing up. Our family had plenty of messy dynamics, with our father dying and our abusive grandfather running through our family like a wrecking ball. I craved stability in my life when I was in high school. Julie had given me that. She’d been pretty and nice, and we fell in love.
She died during our freshman year in college in a cycling accident. Even worse, I found out after she died that she’d been planning to break up with me. College had been a new social world for us. While I’d craved stability and familiarity, she’d wanted something else. I would never know all the details, but she’d started chatting with some guy. I wasn’t mad at her, not even then, but it hurt. I knew what I felt for her had been young and childish and that nobody could’ve ever lived up to my expectations, but I still carried a touch of bitterness.
I didn’t know what the hell happened the other night, but that moment with Tessa had been like dry grass catching fire inside.
I’d answered Tessa’s text with, Promise.
The question remained as to when I would keep my promise to her.
I was impatient to see her, champing at the bit. For the first time, I found myself looking around town, constantly wondering when I might see her in passing. Fireweed Harbor was a small town. For years, I’d been glad to be away from my hometown. Seattle had suited me when we had our corporation’s headquarters there. I could be invisible. I didn’t have to worry about my family’s history hanging over me like a dark cloud.
I was irritated when Rhys insisted on moving the headquarters back to Fireweed Harbor. Surprisingly, it had created a sense of freedom for me. Old wounds healed and all that. As a family, we were doing much better. Yet while my siblings fell like dominoes into love, I hadn’t even felt the slightest inclination.
Tessa had never come to mind in this way for me. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about her now. The subtle flush on her skin. Her big brown eyes. The way I could hear the shallow pants of her breath. The way it had taken almost every ounce of my discipline not to kiss her the other night. Just one brief encounter had lit a flame.
I forced myself to focus on my work. I could lose myself in numbers. I enjoyed numbers because understanding them came to me easily. They were orderly and predictable.
I was working late after the office had closed when I heard Tessa’s voice. “Okay, I’m just going to stop in the bathroom. Is that okay?”
She must’ve come to meet my sister McKenna for some reason. Her voice was like a crack of lightning just after thunder rumbled through the sky in my nervous system.
I waited for McKenna’s response. “Of course. I have to hurry over to the winery because I told Jack I’d be there already, and I’m late. The doors downstairs lock automatically, so don’t worry about it. I’ll meet you there.”
My pulse lunged, and impatience crackled inside me. I waited for McKenna’s footsteps to disappear down the hallway. The minutes ticked by until I heard Tessa come out of the bathroom.
“Tessa,” I called.
My voice was low, but I hoped it was loud enough for her to hear me. I heard her steps approaching. There was a hesitation in her stride before she stopped in the doorway. She studied me for a moment.
“Adam,” she finally said. “You’re working late.”
My eyes never left hers. I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I usually do.”
I stood from my desk, then crossed the office and stopped a few feet from her. She stood just inside the door. It felt like a force field began to vibrate between us, the voltage intense and electric.
“Well?” I prompted.
My gruff voice conveyed my frayed control. I didn’t have to be specific. I could tell by the look in her eyes that she knew what I was referring to.
Tessa took a step closer. My fingers itched to reach beyond her and close the door. But this had to be her choice entirely.
Her hand curled over the doorknob before she closed it with a decisive click. A flush rose on her cheeks, and my lungs tightened. Every cell in my body fired.
And still, I waited.
She took another step closer until she was immediately in front of me. My thoughts flicked back to the other night when I’d encountered her in the hallway at the dinner party. It was as if a path had formed between us. Heat and electricity shimmered in the space now.
“Tessa?” I prompted when I saw hesitation flicker in her eyes.
I could feel her take a deep breath when her breasts rose against my chest as she took one more incremental step closer. She lifted a palm, placing it in the center of my chest. There was no doubt she could feel the rapid drumbeat of my heart.
“Oh, good,” she whispered.
“What’s good?”
“Your heart is beating as fast as mine. Maybe.” Her lips kicked up at the corner in a wry half-smile.
“Do you still want a kiss?” I asked.
Her swallowing was audible in the near-total silence of my office. All I could hear was the rush of my own heartbeat and the subtle sound of us breathing.
“More than anything.” Her voice was a raspy whisper.
I was almost trembling when I lifted a hand and brushed one of her loose curls off her cheek to tuck it behind her ear. Her auburn hair was silky soft. I let my fingers slide into it, lightly cupping the nape of her neck.
My eyes were on her wide brown gaze as I dipped my head. Time felt simultaneously suspended and as if racing forward at a breakneck pace.
Her eyes darkened, her lashes sweeping down just as my lips came within a whisper of hers. I brushed over the plush surface of her lips once and then again. I heard her soft sigh followed by her body melting closer to me.
Finally, fucking finally, I angled my head to the side and fit my mouth over hers. Our kiss started slow with a tease of my tongue over the seam of her lips. Our tongues twined together in a lazy tangle when her mouth opened for mine.
