She brought out odd, untapped feelings in him that he didn’t understand, that seemed to bypass all of his usual outlook and attitude. As he held her, he wanted to be reverent, to cherish what he held as a precious gift. New, intimidating and completely unanticipated, these concepts swelled inside him.
There’d been Linda. He’d cared for her as much as he was capable of doing. She had reciprocated those feelings to a similar degree. But theirs had been a tough, goals-focused relationship. Perfect to him, because she would not have welcomed the gentle things he couldn’t give—that his mother had lamented the lack of as she’d tried to place her emotional baggage, her dissatisfaction with her marriage and her life, onto Troy.
His mum was probably still dissatisfied while she and his father roved all over Australia, part of the grey army living the retirement ‘dream’.
Not your problem, Rushton. It never was.
As for all those tender feelings, was he saying he could give them now?
The question confronted him enough that he shoved it away, rejected it. He knew he couldn’t give those things. He didn’t have them inside him; he didn’t even have what he’d given to Linda any more. He had lost his career and had to rebuild, and lost a part of himself physically as well. Troy hated the limitations that put on him.
And, if he was honest, he hated the loss of relationship and identity that he’d found in the army, a place where his lack of soft side had been a trait of value.
Was he having an identity crisis now? Was that responsible for these strange thoughts and things that seemed a lot like soft feelings as he held Stacie in his arms?
‘What are we doing, Troy?’ Stacie whispered the words against his lips.
What indeed? His hands were in her hair, sifting the soft tresses through his fingers.
‘We’re stealing a moment, and that moment is more than we should have taken.’ He’d meant the words to be practical, to help back the situation off and give them both the chance to walk away without needing to make too much of it. For all he knew, Stacie hadn’t and wasn’t making too much of it.
But his voice was too deep. He released those straight brown tresses too slowly. His hands came to rest too gently, caressing the curves where her arms and shoulders met.
Stacie drew back at the same time he did. Her lips left his and her hands slid from his chest and down his forearms. Also slowly. Also … reluctantly.
Did she find it as difficult to let go as he did? To let her hands fully drop away, as Troy struggled to make his hands release her?
‘I’m sorry, Stacie.’ He didn’t want to apologise for a kiss that had been an unexpected intimacy but he had to.
‘Troy, you’re right. We shouldn’t have done that.’ She took a step back, away from him, away from what they’d just shared. A confusion of thought clouded her gaze as she, too, said what she felt had to be said. ‘I can’t—I made the choice to be alone. I’m not looking for a relationship. Not now. Not ever.’
‘Why not? Who hurt you?’
‘It’s not like that.’ Swift words, spoken in denial as she’d done once before.
She went on. ‘My single future is important to me. The last thing—’
‘The last thing we should be doing is kissing each other when neither of us is prepared to pursue where that might lead us.’ Troy’s tone should have been stronger, more believable. When he spoke again, he made sure that it was. ‘You’re right. I’ve made the same choice you have when it comes to relationships.’
Perhaps if he said it aloud it would help him to cement that thought inside him where it should stay. ‘I don’t want a relationship. I don’t have the emotional …’
How could he explain the reasons? He didn’t want to expose his lack to her. Why did that bother him so much with Stacie? ‘I shouldn’t have let that kiss happen when I knew where I stood with … romance and so on.’ Troy settled for those words.
‘Then we’ll just forget it, Troy.’ She drew a breath and schooled her expression into an outward appearance of calm. ‘I’m sure that’ll be best for both of us.’
‘What made you choose to be …?’ Alone? What had made her decide that she didn’t want to invest in a relationship?
‘It was a broken relationship.’ The words were tight. ‘Thanks for driving me home.’ She rushed on. ‘I’ll contact roadside assistance tomorrow morning and get things sorted out with my car.’
In her back yard, her dog let out a woof of sound. A higher-pitched yip accompanied it. Stacie turned her head in that direction before she met Troy’s glance again. ‘I need to go in, feed Fang and Houdini and do some things. Time’s getting on, and I have a lot of work planned for this weekend.’
Work, not play. Troy had the same kind of weekend planned. It was what he should have stuck to in his thinking tonight, too. ‘Good night, Stacie. I appreciated the work outing as a chance to get to know people a bit better. I’ve got enough of a grip on all of them now.’
The subtext was that they would both draw a line beneath what had happened here. If they both knew it, then that was how it would be.
Troy turned to go back to his car and make the small drive to his house. Distance physically, and distance mentally; if he started with that the rest would surely follow because it wasn’t as though he were emotionally invested in Stacie or anything.
He might have experienced a couple of odd thoughts while he was kissing her, but whatever they’d been he had them more than under control now. Of course he did. Troy put the car in gear and drove towards his home.
Stacie watched Troy get into his car and drive to his house. Once he cut the lights she went inside, took food from the fridge and outside to the dogs. Then she went about all the normal tasks she did on a Friday night.
Except Stacie kept losing track of the cleaning and sorting of laundry and other things. Her mind kept returning to a kiss that had been like no other. To a man she should not have kissed at all, but had.
Troy had made it clear he didn’t want to pursue that path with her, though he’d seemed shaken by the kiss, as Stacie had been. He’d asked about her history, and she’d admitted it, but she’d wished he hadn’t asked.
You’re not dealing with what happened with Andrew, and you need to.
Yes, she was dealing with it. She needed to keep focusing on looking forward, not over her shoulder. Stacie did what had to be done about her place, and went to bed.
When Stacie woke the next morning, her car was parked outside her house waiting for her. There was a note explaining some technical bits of car engineering that she didn’t fully understand. The bottom line was Troy had fixed the problem.
He must have got up at dawn to do that for her, and all without asking her for a car key.
In special-ops, skills like fixing cars, unlocking them and starting them without a key would have perhaps seemed every-day. To Stacie, they represented a whole other world of resilience, determination and way of doing things. One that Troy had lost.
Was that loss his reason for avoiding relationships? He’d said he didn’t have the emotion; had that been drained from him as the result of his loss of career path, and of the injury that had caused that loss? Or did he believe it had never been there?
The weekend passed in separate acts of busyness at each of their homes. She saw Troy out working in his orchard. There