Free Sierra Seduction by Kate Richards Page B

you to meet them.”
    “Sure,” she murmured. “ But once you go back, you’ll be busy again. And I understand that. This is our time. We agreed.”
    Her sad tone increased the pain in his chest. Men died of heart attacks in their fifties all the time. Was this what it felt like?
    Leaning her over his arm, he bent to kiss her, easing the pain. “I’ve made a decision. For years I’ve worked day and night, barely found time for my girls or for the mountains. And when I did hike, I treated the peaks as conquests. Notches on the bedpost of my life. Lots of expensive electronics and fancy equipment, up as quickly as possible, take a picture and back to my desk. I am successful.”
    “I always knew you would be.” Her lips curved up in a smile so sweet, he had to kiss her again. “We can’t talk if you keep kissing me.”
    “You’re right.” He straightened her to rest against him again and wrapped his arms around her, resting his hands on her abdomen fighting to keep them from sliding farther down to her sweet heat. His cock twitched again. No other woman made him so hard with just a kiss. “You are a big distraction.”
    She rubbed her head back and forth, irritating his nipples, and he growled.
    She giggled.
    “Seriously, stop it or I will have to spank you.”
    “Another first.”
    His dick hardened at the thought of her naked over his lap and since she was already almost there… “No. I have a lot to say. Please let me get it out.”
    She stilled. “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”
    “With the girls grown and Julia set for life, between her inheritance and our settlement, my responsibilities have eased. I came out here to think things over, to try to make sense of the mad race that was my life.”
    “And have you?”
    “I have a full wall of pictures of me on mountaintops on my office wall.”
    “Okay.”
    “All alone.”
    She patted his leg and the sweet gesture broke the dam.
    “I don’t want to be alone anymore.” The divorce stirred his dreaming soul and now, lying on a sleeping bag on a sandy beach while the creek burbled past, priorities shifted. “Julia left me for someone else.” He’d been surprised but far less upset than he should have been. “She said we were too old to keep living for other people’s expectations. We needed to find joy and she found it in this other guy.”
    “Funny,” Mickie said, her voice tiny. “She didn’t feel that way the summer she spent ensuring you’d choose her over me.”
    “No, she didn’t. But our relationship was always missing something and she left me for someone who didn’t live in a dream.”
    Mickie tilted her head back to look at him. “A dream? Did she say that?”
    “Yes. And I didn’t get it until I saw you again. Here. Now. You.”
    Her eyes darkened. “I don’t know what to say to that. I’ve been busy, living my life, but you always held a piece of my heart. Silas knew that, but I don’t think he held it against me. He was a good man and I miss him.”
    So much stood between them. A lifetime. “But we’re both free now and I want to see you again.”
    “Other than your divorce, what has changed?” She lifted one of her hands to his cheek and he held it there, aching at her words. “You are a busy, busy man with your career and family. I’m busy too. With my career and my mountains.” Tears filled her eyes. “I think I can say good-bye to you. I’ve done it before. Sort of.”
    He hadn’t even given her that back then. After rejecting her, he’d boarded the bus and left without… “No, we never said good-bye. And I never want to.”
    “I don’t want to move to the city.”
    “Mickie, I came here to decide what I wanted to do. And I am going to step aside, give up my position as CEO.”
    She stared. “You’re quitting your job?”
    He chuckled. “I am the majority stockholder, so I won’t quit, precisely. I will move out of day-to-day operations. I want time! Time to take my grandchildren to the park, to visit