They’d met, fallen in love and gotten married in a whirlwind three months while he was at the training centre for new police hires down south. When it was time for him to come home, he’d brought her with him as his bride. She’d had no clue what she was in store for. Neither of them did.
Six years later, she was leaving him, but it still felt likehewas the one who’d failed her. Failed to be enough for her.
She sniffed quietly into his shirt, and he stopped talking. There wasn’t anything else to say. No words would magically make the pain disappear. They were well and truly over and it fucking hurt. So he just held her, fearing it might be the last time he ever got the privilege.
After a time, his stomach growled. He cursed himself as she sat up, the moment slipping away, but then she patted his mid-section and gave him a too bright smile. “Come on, let me feed you.”
It didn’t take long to reheat the sauce and cook up noodles. They ate in surprisingly comfortable silence, given the pile of emotion they’d just slogged through, and after they cleaned up the dishes together. Rafe knew he should leave. He just didn’t know if he could.
He leaned against the open arch between the hallway and the kitchen and notched his thumbs into his pockets. “You’ll let me know if anything needs to be done to the house before we list it?”
Liv turned toward him, wiping her hands on her jeans and drawing his attention to the gentle roundness of her hips and thighs. He dragged his gaze back to her face, trying not to notice the swell of her breasts under her snug purple t-shirt. She nodded sadly and he fisted his hands to keep himself from dragging her in for another hug. He’d undone so much distance in a few short days. Tumbled so far down the mountain it felt like he’d never be able to climb back up again. She belonged in his arms. Too little, too late on that realization.
“I should go. Thanks for dinner.”
She followed him out to the door, grabbing his jacket off the side chair in the living room before he could. “Maybe we should have done this more often after…”
“Might have made it too hard.” He said, not caring if his voice sounded rough and raw.Hewas raw.
“Yeah,” she whispered.
He pulled out his keys and lifted his hand in a silent goodbye, but she shocked him by reaching out and grabbing him. She squeezed his fingers, her eyes big and bright blue under a glossy sheen of unshed tears.
“Don’t cry over me, Liv, I’m not worth it.”
“You like to pretend you’re so tough.” She smiled, a delicate, shaky curl of her lips. “How about you don’t cry overme, okay?”
He lifted their hands, still gripped together, and kissed her knuckles. “You’re totally worth my tears, baby.”
She hesitated for a minute, indecision warring with something else in her eyes, then she pressed up on her tiptoes and covered his mouth with hers, a bittersweet goodbye. He wanted to haul her tight against him, but he’d done that twice already and it had only made things worse. So instead he cupped her face with his free hand and let the kiss linger. She parted her lips to take a hitching breath, and he thought long and hard about licking into her mouth with his tongue, stirring the passion he knew would never die between them.
A part of him wanted to push her, to fight and force his way back into her heart, but that only served his own purposes. His own happiness.
Letting Liv go was the only way to makeherhappy. Passion had never been enough to make up for his home town being a claustrophobic let down for her. He pulled back in regret and kissed her nose, then her forehead.
“Night, Rafe,” she whispered, pressing two fingers to her lips.
“Sleep tight, Liv.”
— FOUR —
SLEEP tight. What a crock of horse manure. Olivia had tossed and turned in her stupid eggplant-coloured bedroom that seemed to leak R-rated Rafe memories from every nook and cranny.
Why on earth had she kissed him? He was going to walk out the door and out of her life. She’d managed to get through dinner—and a cuddle on the couch—without allowing the one thing she needed not to happen. And then she was the agent that made it happen.
As far as kisses went, it hadn’t been anything naughty. Which only made it worse. Because as long as Rafe was the aggressor, she could push him back and pretend he was going too far. But now she had no cover to pretend she wasn’t disappointed.
Disappointed. Holy crap. She’d wanted Rafe to kiss her, wanted him to touch and grope and grind against her. She was all kinds of messed in the head. She needed to focus on all that hadn’t worked in their marriage, all the reasons they got divorced. Attraction and desire had never been lacking. It was more surprising that it had taken this long for one of them to try something.
Her alarm beeped at her again and she ground the heels of her palms against her gritty eyelids. Time for work. Monday mornings were busy but had a predictable routine to them. The semi-retired cottagers often didn’t head back to the city until after breakfast, to avoid the glut of cars on Highway 9 across Sunday afternoon and evening. As it had been one of the nicer weekends of the early fall—not too hot, not too cold, gorgeous colours in the trees—that population would have been up en masse.
And then there were the handful of people who worked in town who would want the four dollar special before their nine o’clock start. Shannon the bank teller and Lindsay the town clerk, sisters from another mister, for example. They’d snicker at that joke, or one just like it, and Olivia would laugh along for real. She liked the twins, as she called them, and Barry the insurance salesman and Kurt the…wood art guy. Rafe called it folksy shit that cottagers paid far too much for, but she kind of liked it. She liked everything about Pine Harbour.
It took her a long time to stop feeling like an outsider. Maybe because it was cottage country, and for half the year, more than half the population was so-called “city folk”, but no one had ever made her feel like an intruder. That was all in her head.
Well, hers and her mother-in-law’s.Ex-mother-in-law.
And now she was leaving, and maybe the only person who would be happy about that would be Anne Minelli.
