Page 9 of Big Island Horizons
Tara startled and turned to look at him. “Apologize for what?”
He ran a hand through his silver hair and looked out the window, searching for the right words.
“For coming on too strong, I guess.” He looked at her with a slight smile. “The ink wasn’t even dry on your divorce papers, and I went and loosed ten years of pent-up feelings on you in one big word.”
Her jaw dropped at ‘ten years’ and Liam looked down, laughing at himself.
“See? I’m doing it again. I’ve forgotten how to do this, Tara. If I ever knew to begin with.”
“You haven’t loved me for ten years,” she protested. His wife had been gone that long, and Liam had worshiped the ground that she walked on.
“I loved you even before that, for your kindness to Laura and Maddie. But you’re right. I haven’t been head over heels in love with you quite that long, not like I am now.
“After I lost my wife, I never thought I would feel that way about anyone again. And while my feelings grew for you over the years, I knew that I wouldn’t act on them. Not while you were married.
“So, I don’t know… I didn’t really look them in the eye. I focused on raising my daughter and running this place.
“But then last month, when Maddie told me that you and Mitch had split up… it was like something was let loose in my chest, something that I had tamped down for years without ever fully realizing it.”
She stared at him, speechless. He had drifted closer to her as he spoke, but now he shook his head and moved away.
“I started with an apology and just dug myself a deeper hole.” He offered her another bashful smile, so out of step with his usual calm and quiet steadiness that she felt her heart lean further towards him.
“I’m sorry, Tara. It isn’t like me for my words to run away on me like that. I just don’t know how to say what I feel for you, so I end up spilling out this jumble of words hoping some of them will be the right ones. You make me feel like a teenager again, and I don’t entirely like it.”
“Same,” she said. And she smiled.
With that one syllable, that bare acknowledgment of reciprocity, most of the awkwardness between them seemed to drain away. They were two old friends standing in a kitchen – standing at the cusp of something.
Liam opened his arms, and Tara walked into them. She wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned into him, breathing him in.
His arms settled around her, a warm comfort against the cold of the day.
A sense of calm settled over her, a stillness that she had entirely forgotten the feel of in the midst of her harried life as a mother, farmer, and now entrepreneur. There were always a million things to keep track of, and her brain never fully settled.
In that moment, though, it did.
They stood there for a long while, just holding each other. Breathing together. Long enough for the rightness of it to sink into her bones. She began to remember what contentment felt like.
Eventually, he leaned back just enough to look her in the eye. One hand rested lightly on her hip. The other came up to push a strand of hair behind her ear.
“When’s the last time you got away from the farm and did something fun? Just for you?”
She blinked up at him, thinking. Just for her? No kids?
“Never?”
A laugh rumbled through his chest.
“What if you took an afternoon off and we went on a date?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Well, there’s not a restaurant in town that can hold a candle to what you make every day, but you deserve a night off from cooking all the same. What if we went for a hike up north someplace, just you and me? Then we could grab some dinner in Hilo on the way back.”
“That sounds good.”
He put a hand under her chin and bent down to kiss her, slow and sweet.
