Her therapist was right about one thing … when Sarah gave a part of herself to someone, she didn’t get those pieces back, leaving her not quite whole.
And the spiral had repeated itself for a year while she’d rekindled that friendship with Dylan, resulting in the fiery end to what had started out as a hesitant companionship.
Now, with another three years behind her, she was finally back in control.
Kind of.
Maybe.
Turned out, she had never managed to forget that night or the man she’d come to refer to as her distraction. Dylan was the first boy she had ever kissed back when she’d been a hope-filled freshman in high school, the last man she’d been with back when she had all but accepted that all hope was gone. Unlike high school, when she’d been a na?ve teenager, she had no excuse for that night. She was old enough to know better, but still, she’d allowed her hormones to lead the way.
Nope, they weren’t in high school anymore, and he definitely wasn’t a boy, nor was he the sexy jock every girl swooned over, every boy wanted to be like, and no matter who you were, you just wanted to be near. Sarah had been one of those girls, the ones who’d fawned over him, worshipped the very ground he walked on, although she had done her best to hide it. And for the briefest moment, Dylan had been hers.
Back then.
Yep, that was until he had fallen in love with the beautiful, kind-hearted Meghan Carpenter, who would later become Meghan Thomas. Ever since stumbling upon Dylan, and his son, Nate, at a school function—the last place she would’ve expected to see him—Sarah hadn’t been able to completely shake her thoughts of him. No matter how hard she tried.
“Thinking about him is not helping,” she said aloud. “Not helping at all.”
Pulling her thoughts out of the clouds, Sarah peered down at her feet.
“What?” she asked, looking down at her two sweetly mischievous cats when they wandered into the room. “It’s just a little rain.”
The sound could be heard on the roof, and Smokey and Blue had never been fond of storms. The weatherman had been predicting it for the past couple of weeks, and it appeared that Mother Nature was finally coming through for him.
Her thoughts instantly drifted back to Dylan as she peered out the window once more. For a brief moment, she wondered what he was doing right that minute. Was he at home? Was he out with a woman? Was he happy? Was he sad? Dylan Thomas might be tall, dark, and obscenely handsome, but the man was more than just a little cracked—he was irrevocably broken.
Though she’d reluctantly accepted her therapist’s diagnosis that she was a fixer, Sarah knew deep down, there was no fixing Dylan. When he was ready, when he found the right woman, he would move forward. Of that, she had no doubt.
Which meant…
“I’m not the right woman.” Sarah shook her head. “Nope,” she told her cats, “I’m not her. Never will be. He made sure I understood that.”
Sure, Sarah knew what Dylan saw when he looked at her. Well, maybe not the woman she was now, but before. He’d seen a sweet, innocent schoolteacher with short, curly hair and a petite, curvaceous figure. Although her hair was longer now, and she’d shed the sweet-and-innocent vibe she’d been plagued by, along with the extra fifteen pounds she’d been carrying around since college, Sarah still wasn’t the leggy, dark-haired bombshell like Meghan had been. Nor was she graced with exotic beauty like the women married to the men Dylan worked with.
The truth was, men had never looked at her and thought sexy blond. They’d never fantasized about her, never imagined wild monkey sex.
She snorted.
Despite the outer appearance, she damn sure wasn’t Sandra Dee. Sweet and innocent, she definitely was not. Only no one had ever really noticed. Instead, the men from her past—startlingly few that there were—had always wanted to coddle her, protect her.
No, not only did she still get carded for alcohol though she was thirty-eight years old, she was also blandly plain despite the tattoos and the makeup. Oh, and then there was the fact that she was short, which, unlike the way the romance novels depicted, didn’t mean she fit nicely into the crook of a man’s arm, it simply meant she wasn’t tall enough to do anything without a damn stepladder.
A gruff snort escaped her as she made her way to the kitchen, noticing the stepladder stuck in the narrow nook between the refrigerator and the wall. Yep, at four foot eleven and three-quarters inches, Sarah couldn’t reach the second shelf in the upper cabinets. Paul used to enjoy making fun of her, even though he hadn’t been but a few inches taller.
“I wish you were here to laugh at me now, Paul,” she whispered into the otherwise silent house.
And he would have. Every time.
But unlike Paul, Dylan was tall. And although she had liked the way Dylan had towered over her, making her feel incredibly feminine by comparison, other than at that moment in time, being short didn’t do much for her.
“Ugghh.” She really had to stop thinking about him.
Attacking the few dishes she’d left in the sink that morning, Sarah tried desperately to forget about the man who had somehow wormed his way back into her brain in the last week. But it wasn’t because she lusted after him.
Although there was that.
No, Dylan had caught Sarah’s attention again, all right, but he wasn’t the strong, sexy boy of yesteryear whom she’d had some hot and heavy make-out sessions with during high school. The man she had glimpsed at that company function was the same man she’d given in to three years ago—quiet, reserved, and still very damaged. A man who had lost his wife yet had never gotten over it. A man who had stopped living his life because he was too busy feeling as though he didn’t deserve to live it to the fullest.
At one point, Sarah had thought they were kindred spirits. Now, she knew they weren’t. She wasn’t the sad, broken-hearted woman she’d been back then. She had reinvented herself, forced herself to move on. They were too different to ever work. No matter how hot she found him.
Gone was the Sarah who sat idly by, waiting for life to come to her, or befriending every single lost soul because she wanted to give them some sunshine in their lives. That girl was gone forever, and there were too many reasons that woman had been chased out of town, told to never return, and in her place was the new Sarah. The go-after-what-you-want-until-you-get-it Sarah.
At least that was the woman Sarah was striving to be, even if it killed her.