Summer Beach Reads. Natalie Anderson

in her gut. And now he wanted out. Whatever he needed to make him want to stay, she lacked it. She’d thought this connection they had would be enough to ride out the obvious disconnect between them.

      But it wasn’t.

      The high-tech properties of the sleeping bag did their job, slowly forming a warm blanket of air around her. Her muscles relaxed. Her goose bumps eased. Her eyes grew heavy.

      Yet they didn’t close. Not quite.

      She stared into the thick black of the night around her and waited for morning.

       CHAPTER TWELVE

       Ziiiiiip.

      The sound morphed, in her dream, into the long, teasing tug of a dress zip lowered by warm, exploring fingers. She wriggled against the pleasant sensation.

      But then came a rummaging, a huff, a sigh, and those sounds struggled to find a logical place in her subconscious.

      She stirred. Turned.

      A dark shadow sat hunched in the camp chair in the corner of the little tent silhouetted by the high moon outside.

      ‘Hayden?’ It was only as she whispered his name that the memory of their conversation just hours ago returned. She stiffened.

      ‘I’m sorry, Shirley,’ he whispered. ‘It’s freezing out there. The truck’s door seals are shot. I’m going to wait out morning here.’

      In a chair? Wrapped in a sleeping bag? Watching her sleep?

      She rolled back over. ‘Suit yourself.’

      Silence.

      Then a heavy breath.

      She rolled back over. ‘Were you hoping I’d relent and let you in?’

      His low voice smiled. ‘Kind of, yes.’

      If he’d denied it she would have left him there to freeze. But the smile she could hear in his voice said so much about his amazing ability to compartmentalise his emotions. He was who he was. It wasn’t his fault he was built differently inside to everyone else. He hadn’t invited her affections or been dishonest with her. He was just a leopard with very definite spots. Not at all interested in changing them. Not for her.

      Plain and simple.

      He’d only called things as he’d seen them.

      She rolled away from him again but spoke softly. ‘Fine. Get in.’

      The bed lurched before she’d even finished the sentence and Hayden tossed the second sleeping bag over them both, taking care not to touch her. But his cold radiated every bit as much as her warmth and she felt it across the gulf of inches between them. She slid her leg across to touch him experimentally with her toe.

      ‘Oh, my God, Hayden …!’ She lurched up.

      He was ice-cold. Hypothermic kind of cold. He flinched as though he’d touched her.

      ‘I’m sorry …’ he slurred.

      She turned. ‘You’re freezing.’

      ‘This is like some bad porno,’ he said, his laugh constricted by the spasms of his chest. He’d gone past shivering to a place of rhythmic, full-body muscle contractions.

      ‘You need to get warm.’

      His shaking head rustled against the sleeping bag he’d hiked up to his face. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea for either of us.’

      She wasn’t in a hurry to have him pressed up against her, either.

      ‘Take the underneath layer,’ she ordered, ‘and wrap it around you like a cocoon. It’s got my warmth.’

      He did it and the shifting and tucking let in a whole lot of cold night air. Her goose bumps returned. But then he was done and he curled onto his side and let her remnant body heat do its job.

      ‘You’re so warm,’ he murmured as her toasty thirty-seven degrees centigrade soaked into him from the high-tech fabric.

      Her lips quirked and she rubbed at the gooseflesh. ‘I was.’

      He roused. ‘Now you’re cold.’

      She pushed him back down. ‘I’m not hypothermic. I’ll make some more heat. Don’t worry. Go to sleep.’

      She turned away from him and scooted as best she could to her side of the double bed. It really wasn’t big enough for much separation, especially with him curled. But she understood why he needed to be. His body was protecting its vital organs.

      In the silence, the time between his convulsive muscle clenches slowly lengthened. Then eased altogether. His pained sigh was a kiss of cold air on the back of her neck.

      ‘Better?’ she whispered back over her shoulder.

      ‘Getting there.’

      It wasn’t tawdry. He was about as protected from any accidental contact as he could be, wrapped in a full-body sheath of goose down. But she wasn’t going back to sleep either. He was way too close for that.

      ‘Thank you,’ he whispered into the darkness.

      ‘You’re a jerk, but you don’t deserve to freeze to death.’

      ‘No …’ His breaths drew out and his words sounded close against her ear. ‘Thank you for finding me. That day.’ He breathed again. ‘Thank you for saving me.’

      Every muscle in her body paused to listen.

      ‘I was on a path nowhere good when you pulled up to my cottage that day. I’d quit drinking but the whole downward spiral hadn’t really changed. You forced me back out into the world and made me engage with it again.’

      A deep ache started up in her chest. What could she say to that?

      ‘I love doing what I do, but I don’t always like what I do,’ he murmured between tremors. ‘I don’t like the expression I imagine on my mother’s face when I think of her looking down at me from above and seeing who I’ve become. I didn’t like the look on your face when you found out. The judgement.’

      She opened her mouth to apologise.

      ‘That’s not a criticism of you,’ he whispered against her back. ‘It’s me. It’s my choices. But you’ve shown me a way forward that I think I can live with. The road ahead is no longer a dark abyss.’

      She lay in silence, understanding that he needed to do this. Fearing he’d stop if she spoke. Greedy to understand him better, even if it was their last night together.

      ‘My parents split when I was sixteen,’ he breathed into her hair.

      Just split? That was less dramatic than she’d imagined.

      ‘My mother finally found the courage to leave. He wouldn’t let her go before that. Or me.’

      Her heart squeezed. Domestic violence. Closer to what she’d imagined.

      ‘My father told her she could only go if I stayed. Knowing she’d never leave me behind. That’s what he traded on. Our love for each other. If she stayed, I was powerless. If I stayed, she was. But with her gone …’ He swallowed. ‘I made her go. I was nearly sixteen, close enough to independent. By then I could play him like a piano, keep myself safe. But I couldn’t keep both of us safe at the same time.’

      His cold-slurred speech tapered off and she wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

      ‘She left you with him?’ she risked, not wanting to break the spell.

      ‘And set up on her own across town. But she didn’t get all her bone breaks treated professionally. One of them grew an abscess and