Free Dare to Love by Tara Taylor Quinn

seconds and then looked away, out over the deserted swimming pool beside them.
    â€œI don’t. I know I don’t.”
    â€œWho’re you trying to convince?” he asked, remaining where he was, keeping his hands to himself.
    â€œOkay. I like your after-shave. But that means less than nothing. I can’t lose my perspective here, Doug. Too much is at stake. I have to be able to evaluate you as you are, not as I want you to be.” Her tone of voice begged him to let her do the right thing, even as her eyes expressed her regret.
    â€œAnd afterward?”
    Her gaze flew to his. “Afterward, we go back to the real world, to our own lives.”
    His eyes narrowed. “You’re saying we don’t see each other again?”
    â€œWe’ve never run into each other before.”
    â€œOh, but that’s going to change. You can count on it,” he said.
    Before she had a chance to reply, he rose from the Jacuzzi, leapt the couple of steps to the pool and dove in cleanly, with barely a splash. He would give her the rest of the two weeks, but he wasn’t done with her yet, not by a long shot.
    * * *
    D OUG ENTERED the auditorium-cum-lecture room with tight lips the next morning. He wasn’t looking forward to the hour or so ahead—he already knew everything they were going to tell him, probably better than they did. But the session was mandatory.
    He looked for Andrea as soon as he entered the room. She was looking for him, too. He knew it as soon as her eyes met his. He also knew, no matter what she said, that they weren’t finished with each other yet. She had to know it, too. She was too smart a lady to ignore the obvious.
    Andrea pulled her gaze from Doug’s as soon as she took her place at the head of the room. She told herself she hadn’t been looking for him specifically, but she knew she was lying. She had been looking. And she’d been pleased with what she’d seen. He was wearing the inevitable tight jeans and a T-shirt that molded his muscular upper body to perfection. His features still showed years of rough living, but Andrea was used to them by now. Too used to them, she thought wryly, as her nipples tightened in response to his laconic grin.
    She’d spent the better part of the night telling herself that she was going to give her all to teach Doug to care—but not for her. And she wasn’t going to care for him, either—not in a personal way. She was just doing her job.
    She stepped up to the microphone, forcing her mind away from Doug and the minutes she’d spent with him in the Jacuzzi the night before. She had a job to do, a lesson to teach, the most crucial and personally painful lesson of all. She knew every fact like she knew her own name—but she hadn’t once, and she was going to spend the rest of her life atoning for it. She would teach people to see the signs, so that maybe the next time a child would have a chance before the damage was done. She wasn’t going to be sidetracked by an inappropriate attraction to a James Dean look-alike.
    â€œPot smoking, glue sniffing, beer snitched from someone’s refrigerator—these are all factors in the early stages of chemical dependency. Children do not start out as druggies. They start out just wanting to experiment, to feel grown-up, to fill empty weekend hours or long summer days....”
    Andrea spoke to the room at large, but she was talking to Doug. She covered the four stages drug users usually pass through on the road to hell, sparing the people in front of her nothing. It was ugly, it was frightening and it was fact. She wanted Doug to be shocked enough to care.
    â€œThe books will all tell you to start watching for these signs in late-elementary-aged children, or early junior high. They’re wrong. Can I have the lights off, please?”
    Doug’s mind wandered as he listened to Andrea. She didn’t know the half of it. But she didn’t