Free Slow Summer Kisses by Shannon Stacey Page A

over and covered her hand with his, Anna closed her eyes and let the warmth of the sun and the wood soak into her. The quiet was kind of nice and she let her body relax, even if her mind had a hard time following suit.
    Her relationship with Cam was a puzzle she couldn’t solve. No matter how she moved the pieces around in her mind, they didn’t fit, and that meant there was no big picture to suddenly become clear.
    How he could be attracted to a woman who couldn’t stand being still and who supposedly drove him crazy was just as inexplicable as her being attracted to a man who thought a good time was sitting in a folding chair for hours, watching for his fishing line to twitch. But she was attracted to him—there was no denying that—and she was becoming more and more aware of how much she enjoyed his company when they were fully clothed.
    She couldn’t make sense of it, and she told herself not to add any stress to her life by trying. The only thing she could do was enjoy it while it lasted and try not to get so attached to him she’d have a hard time leaving him behind.
    “Jesus, woman, don’t you ever relax?”
    Anna opened her eyes and squinted against the sun. “If I relax any more than this, I’ll be sleeping. I don’t think I’ve ever been this relaxed before.”
    “You’re drumming your fingers on the wood and you keep sighing. That’s not relaxed.”
    “Well, it is for me.” Since Cam had been the one to break the silence, she took that as an opening for conversation.
    “Are you starting to get worried? About the whole job thing, I mean.”
    “A little. I thought I’d have an offer by now and I’ve had a few nibbles, but not a serious bite.”
    “It’s a rough time to be looking for a job. What will you do if nothing comes up?”
    And wasn’t that the million-dollar question that kept her up at night? “I’ll start making sacrifices, like a location I don’t like or less money or something like that. Or maybe I’ll shift my focus. I can be a bank teller if nothing else comes up.”
    “Sometimes the sacrifices aren’t worth it.”
    He said it casually, but she knew him well enough to know it was something he felt pretty strongly about. “Is that why you ended up here? The sacrifices weren’t worth it?”
    For a minute, she didn’t think he was going to answer her and that didn’t surprise her. He wasn’t much of a talker, especially about himself.
    “I was becoming my dad.” And he’d lost his dad to a heart attack, which she’d learned from Gram at the time. She squeezed his hand. “I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t sleep and my relationships suffered. So I got out before my mother had to bury me, too. My wife chose not to join me.”
    He said it so matter-of-factly, but she couldn’t imagine it had been an easy decision for him. Or maybe it had been. She knew it wouldn’t have been for her. “There was nothing in between full stress and Askaskwi Lake?”
    “Maybe if my wife had been willing to compromise and cut back, I could have made it work.” He paused for a few seconds, his thumb rubbing idly over her knuckles. “I thought my stay here would be temporary, until I figured out what would make me happy. Turned out, being here made me happy.”
    She almost laughed, trying to imagine how cranky an unhappy Cam would be, but she didn’t want to ruin the moment. “My stay definitely is temporary. It’s nice to relax for a few minutes, but I can’t walk away from my career like you did. You went to law school, for Pete’s sake and you just…”
    “Threw it all away?”
    “Yeah. I can’t imagine doing that.”
    “I can’t imagine my life if I hadn’t done it.”
    She didn’t know what to say to that. It wasn’t something she could wrap her head around—just walking away from years of education and climbing rungs on the professional ladder—to do odd jobs and build chests out of old barn boards. And she knew that, no matter how long they talked about it, they