Falling for Summer by Bridget Essex Read Free Book Online

only a few hours ago?—back home, back in Lake George, I've felt that the twenty years separating me from my sister's death have been erased.  It's strange, weird, if I'm being really honest.  Like Summer said, it's as if no time has passed at all.
    But I guess this is what happens when you go back home after too long of an absence.  Back home to a vacation town that can't really ever change.  That's part of its charm.  Generation after generation, Lake George is supposed to look the same for all of the tourists who come to its shores.  Nostalgia is one of its most important attributes, and Lake George excels at it.
    Summer holds me in her gaze, and for a long moment, neither one of us moves or says anything.  But then she breathes out, her nostrils flaring.  “You've changed, though,” she tells me then, still holding up the sheet for me.  She sighs, her mouth downturning into a sensual frown.  The warmth in her brown eyes contains something more now—something glittering and dark.  And as my lips part, as I breathe out, too, I realize that my heart rate is even faster now, that I can feel the blood pounding through me, my skin dancing with electricity.  Maybe it's just because I was caught in a thunderstorm, but I know better.  This isn't the lightning that I'm feeling.
    I'm the queen of sex without attachment, which really sounds a lot worse than it is.  I don't hurt women, using them and breaking up with them...  But I do date a lot of them with a clear, no-strings-attached policy from the start.  With that sort of love life, I don't think you'd be surprised to find out that I haven't had very many long-term girlfriends.  It's because—as my last long-term girlfriend so bluntly put it—I'm impossible to get close to.  She told me, just as bluntly, that that's because of all my unresolved issues regarding my sister's death, which I admitted, very calmly, was probably true. 
    The thing is, how can I be perfectly happy when my sister is dead?  When my sister never got a chance to date someone, to fall in love, to marry someone, if that's something that she wanted to do?  How can I be happy when my sister never got to make any of those decisions for herself?
    As I stand there now, as I feel myself teetering on the brink of a Possible Bad Decision, I take a deep breath.  I'm attracted to Summer, deeply attracted to her.  I don't know if she's attracted to me, but there have been a few hints since we first met to make me think that she possibly is.  What I do with all of this now is up to me.
    Am I going to complicate the week this way?  Am I going to sleep with her?
    I watch Summer standing still, the tip of her beautiful, black braid dripping gently onto the floor, her tan arm holding up the sheet for me, steady and unwavering.  My eyes follow the length of that arm, dwelling on the slight muscles, the curve of her arm and shoulder and neck that my gaze keeps being drawn back to...
    Maybe...maybe I need a distraction.  As I step forward, my heart pounding, I know that I do.  I need something to help me stop thinking about my sister.  I'm back home, back at Lake George, after thinking for the past twenty years that I would never come back here again.  I've taken that first, brave step to try to put my sister to rest in my own life.  And it cost me more courage than I was really ready to give. 
    I slip under the sheet curtain that Summer is holding up for me, and she lets the sheet fall behind my back.  My blood rushing through my ears, I peel my own shirt up and over my head, unclipping my bra as I try to make a decision. 
    And then the universe seems to force my hand...
    Because the sheet so tenuously tacked into the wall swings free, the tack pinging out of the wall and falling to the hardwood floor somewhere as the sheet artfully, softly, swishes to the floor, too.
    I reach up and draw my arms across my breasts, but I'm already turning, and the heat is already rising in me, and I