Fairytale Not Required (5 page)

Jason chuckled. "I doubt it. It's not really a fan of cobwebs and dust. Any chance you have the key?"

"No, but I know where Harlan keeps the keys to the places he represents. I'm sure I can find it." Astrid looked around at her small apartment, and suddenly she wanted to get out. She stood up and grabbed her car keys. "I'll bring it over now. Are you still at the store?"

"Yes, but I'm leaving. Noah's crashing and I need to get him to bed. We're heading home."

"Where's home?" When Griffin answered, Astrid blinked in shock as he gave her the address. She knew exactly the house. A huge Cape on a rolling lawn that went right down to the edge of the lake. It had a charming guesthouse with a widow's walk on the roof that looked out across the mountains. It had been empty for a long time, and she'd spent more than a few hours sitting on the hill beside the house watching the sunset, figuring that someone needed to be appreciating the scenery since no one was living there. And that's where he lived? In her dream house.

Lucky man.

Excitement rippled through her. Maybe she could get inside and see it? She'd peeked in the windows before, but she'd never been inside. "It's no problem to swing by there. I'll be by in an hour or so."

"Really?" Jason sounded distracted, and she could hear Noah chatting at him. "You don't need to do that. Morning is fine."

"No, I want to." She headed for the door, needing to get out of the home that was no longer hers. She stepped over a cardboard box, gave up getting the door shut around the load Eppie had dumped there, and headed down the stairs.

Anything to get out of her life for an hour.

Jason leaned against the door jamb of Noah's room, watching his son sleep. The boy had passed out on the floor while Jason was still putting his bed together. He hadn't woken up even when Jason had finally transferred him to the mattress, the race car sheets and comforter in place. Of course he wouldn't wake up. Once asleep, Noah would be oblivious to a thunderstorm in his own bedroom, a merciful gift which had kept the youth unaware of the nights Jason spent pacing sleeplessly along the hallways of their condo in New York.

In their new home, a beautiful old lake house with dark wood beams and huge windows, Noah had found sleep again, despite the chaos, for which Jason was grateful. Moving boxes were piled high, and he'd managed to find only one box of Noah's toys. The poor kid had been relegated to playing with toys he hadn't used for two years while Jason had been assembling the bed.

There was nothing to see in the room and hallway but an ocean of cardboard, and a few boxes ripped open in search of basic necessities. Chaos and disorder. Not the home he'd promised his son. Not the new life he'd promised them both.

Instead, it was even worse than New York had been. The house was too silent. With a driveway almost a quarter of a mile long, there was no noise from passing cars. His twelve acres of property, surrounded by lake on one side and forest on the other three, meant there were no neighbors to thud on the walls or play their music too loud. No hum of electronics or even humanity. No light from the street or neighbors. Just darkness. Just emptiness. Just nothing.

It was an empty house without a single memory, which is what he'd wanted. But now...shit...it felt overwhelming, like death itself. He needed to find a way to hold onto the memories that mattered, but he hadn't even been able to find the pictures of Lucas. Jason felt lost without the images of his younger son surrounding him, as if he'd lost hold of the memories of his son once he'd left New York behind.

As if Lucas was fading from his grasp, slipping away like he had that night he'd died—

"Shit!" Jason slammed his palm against the doorway and tore himself away from Noah's room. He shoved his way through the crowded hallway, trying to fight off that same overwhelming sense of loneliness that had consumed him in New York.

Nothing had changed with the move. It was the same. He'd brought it all with him. He'd brought all the hell, the guilt, the inexorable punishment of memories that were eating away at him, stripping him of the ability to function as his son's father.

Swearing, Jason grabbed his utility knife and sliced open another box. No pictures of Lucas. What box had he put them in? He couldn't even remember. He slashed at another, and then another, but all he found were towels and sheets and other crap that didn't matter. "Come on!"

Desperate guilt and loneliness surged through him, and he braced himself on the last box in the hallway, which held only Noah's old stuffed animals. Sweat trickled down his brow as he fought for composure, as he fought to fend off the overriding sense of doom.

In the silence of the night, Noah's breathing was loud and steady, and Jason tensed. What if he failed Noah, too? He'd failed Lucas. He'd failed to keep his marriage intact and his wife alive. He'd completely failed everyone and now...shit...was he finally dragging Noah the rest of the way down as well?

Loneliness surged over him, that same darkness that haunted him every night. Jason knew that there was no point in setting up his own bed. Sleep wouldn't be attainable in Maine any more than it had been in New York—

The loud crunch of tires on his gravel driveway caught his attention, and he jumped to his feet. Who the hell was here?

A car door slammed, and Jason tensed. Shit. He wasn't in the mood to be sociable right now. If the little old lady from his fantasies had finally shown up with a plate of cookies, she was too damn late. She was just going to have to leave them on the porch.

Jason sheathed the blade back into the casing, waiting for that inevitable ring of the doorbell. How many times had he answered his door to find another note of condolence or another casserole after Lucas's death, and then Kate's? Well-meaning acquaintances who thought that a smile and a slab of meatloaf would ease the gaping void in his soul. He'd stopped answering the door, because there was no way to pretend to be appreciative when all the darkness was consuming him.

And now, after fighting like hell to get past that, after scraping his way back into a place from which he could function, all those emotions had returned, brought on by the overwhelming silence of his house. That same silence that had flooded him when he'd come back home after watching his son die at the hospital and felt the gaping absence of Lucas.

Silence fucking sucked, but a doorbell was no better.

But the doorbell didn't ring, and the car didn't drive away.

Scowling, Jason walked across the landing to peer out the back window at the driveway.

Astrid Monroe's rusted junker was in his driveway.
Astrid.
He'd forgotten she was coming.

Adrenaline rushed through him, breaking him free from the tentacles of the past. His heart suddenly began to beat again, thudding back to life with a jolting ache. He tossed the knife aside, spun away from the window and vaulted down the stairs, taking them three at a time, almost desperate for the air he knew Astrid would feed back into his lungs.

He jerked the back door open and stepped out onto the front porch, unable to keep the hum of anticipation from vibrating through him. "Astrid?"

Her car was empty, and she was nowhere in sight.

Trepidation rippled through him. Another woman dead? He immediately shook his head, shutting out the fear that had cropped up out of habit. Instead, he quickly scanned his property, knowing she had to be there somewhere.

But there was no Astrid. Frowning, Jason jogged down the pathway that led around the house toward the lakefront, urgency coursing through him to find the one woman who had brought that brief respite into his life, that flash of sunshine, that gaping moment of relief from all that he carried. Where was she? He had to find her.
Now.

Jason was almost sprinting by the time he rounded the rear corner of his house and found her. The moment he saw her, he stopped dead, utterly awed by the sight before him.

"Son of a bitch," he whispered under his breath as he stared at the woman who'd rocked his world only a few hours before.

Astrid was standing on one of the rocks on the edge of the lake, silhouetted by an unbelievable sunset. The sky was vibrating with reds, oranges and a bright violet, casting the passionate array of colors across the lake's surface. Astrid's hands were on her hips, her face tilted up toward the sky, as if she were drinking the beauty of the sunset right through her skin. Her brown hair was framed in the vibrant orange and violet, a wild array of passion that seemed to mesh with the wild woods around her.

Her sandals were on the ground beside the rock, her bare toes gripping the boulder. She was wearing the same jeans and tank top as she had earlier, despite the slight evening coolness cropping up in the air. It was as if she hadn't bothered to notice, as if she couldn't deign to succumb to something so mundane as a cool breeze.

She was above it all, and Jason felt the tightness in his lungs easing simply from being in her presence.
Astrid.

He knew then that he hadn't come to Birch Crossing for the town, or for the plate of cookies, or even for the damn pizza store he was planning to open. He had come for her. For Astrid. For the sheer, raw passion that she exuded with every breath.

She was the epitome of freedom, of passion, of life. Rightness roared through him at the sight of her on his land, basking in the sunset, breathing in the air that he suddenly noticed. The fresh, clean scent of woods and crystalline water filled him, as if Astrid's reverence of their surroundings had brought his own senses back to life.

She was beautiful. Not simply beautiful. She was beauty itself, the definition of all that it could be in a person's wildest, most desperate imagination.

Yearning crashed through Jason to lose himself in her, to use her vibrant energy to wipe away the smut covering his soul and give him the chance to breathe again, to find his path in this second chance that he'd tried to give his son. He was captivated by her, even by the way she ignored protocol and had helped herself to his rock and the sunset, not even bothering to ring the doorbell. She was a free spirit, a woman who didn't fit into the town and didn't care.

He wanted that freedom. He needed to get caught up in her spell. He would never survive if he didn't find a way to forget, even for a minute, all the burdens crashing down on him. There was no choice, no other path, no other option, than to lose himself in the aura that was Astrid. To remember that there was something else in life besides the darkness that consumed him.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" She didn't turn around, but her voice drifted to him, a melody that seemed to crawl under his skin and ignite flames within him.

"Yes, it is." He began to walk toward her, tentative, almost afraid of spooking her and losing the moment. But he couldn't keep from approaching her. He was drawn to her as if she were a magnet, calling to his soul, to the part of him that had once been alive. His need for her was pulsing through every cell of his body, so intense that it almost hurt, as if something inside of him was fighting its way to life after an eternity of being dead.

"This is the best place in town to watch the sunset. Is that why you bought it?" She spoke softly, almost as if she were afraid to disturb the beauty of the sunset.

"I haven't noticed a sunset in years," he admitted as he reached her. He stopped beside the rock, suddenly uncertain of how to approach her. Of what to do next. Of how to get closer. "I bought the house because it has lakefront, and I thought Noah would like it."

Astrid turned her head slightly to look at him, and he caught his breath at the sight of her face. The sun was casting a soft glow, illuminating her face so that her eyes seemed to vibrate with depth and passion... He realized suddenly that there was none of the levity in her expression that he'd seen before. Just pain and emotion, fighting to be free. His chest tightened for the agony he saw in her face, for the depth of trauma that seemed to echo what beat so mercilessly in his own soul. Outrage suddenly exploded through him, fury that someone had inflicted such damage on this angel that she could harbor such pain. Astrid was so free, so untamed, that she should be gallivanting across the surface of the lake, not looking at him as if her heart had been carved right out of her chest.

"You don't notice sunsets?" she asked.

He barely heard her words or registered his response to her. All he could think about was the woman before him, the depth of her spirit, his need to somehow chase away the shadows and bring back the spirit that he knew was coursing through her veins. "No. I wouldn't have noticed this one if you weren't out here."

She shook her head, and that teasing glint sparkled in her eyes again, making his stomach leap.
Yes, Astrid. Come back to me.
He moved closer to the rock, ruthlessly drawn toward her.

She grinned at him. "Well, you've got some learnin' to do, Sarantos, if you're going to be living in this here town. Sunset appreciation is mandatory for all residents, and you'll be quizzed every morning at Wright's when you show up for your coffee." She held out her hand and beckoned with her fingers. "Up," she ordered.

Jason grinned at her bold command, and he immediately set his hand in hers. Electricity leapt through him as his skin touched hers, and she sucked in her breath at the contact. Wariness flashed in her eyes, and Jason sensed she was about to retreat.

No chance.

He wasn't missing this moment.

He immediately tightened his grip on her hand and hauled himself up onto the rock beside her. The peak of the boulder was smaller than he'd expected, bringing them dangerously close to each other. For a moment, neither of them moved. He just stared down at her, and she gazed at him, her brown eyes wide and nervous. Her pulse was hammering in her throat, and he instinctively pressed his index finger on it, trying to ease it down. "Your heart is racing."