Kacen was right. The truth always finds a way out, but Ruby had promised she’d wait. She said she’d let me control the timing of letting everyone know I was the man behind the start-up funds and investments. I should’ve known better.
Now Scarlett knew. And I had no idea what that meant.
I paced to the edge of the room, my hand brushing the letter on the mantel as I passed. It was still sealed. Still untouched. I’d written it eight years ago in a cell I’d tried to forget. I’d addressed it to the woman I’d loved since I was seventeen and never stopped loving, even when I told her goodbye.
I couldn’t bring myself to mail it back then. Couldn’t bring myself to destroy it either.
A knock sounded on the massive front door. Three sharp raps. I froze. It was her. I knew it in the depths of my bones.
I crossed the room in four slow steps. As I tugged a baseball cap on and pulled it low over my eyes, I opened the door.
There she was.
Scarlett Monroe. All fire and ice and dark wind-blown curls, standing on my porch like a storm I no longer knew how to weather. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, her big brown eyes blazing hotter than the fire behind me.
“So,” she said, no greeting, no preamble. Just fire. “You’ve been living right under my nose all this time while I grieved you like a goddamn widow?”
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.
“No.” She stepped past me and into the cabin. “You don’t get to talk yet.”
She smelled like cinnamon and vanilla and memories of the past. Like holidays we never got to share. Like everything I’d lost.
“Scarlett—”
She turned on me. “Don’t you dare say my name like that. You don’t get to say it like I still belong to you.”
I closed the door. Not because I planned to keep her in, but because I didn’t want the cold to ruin the one thing in this place that still felt warm.
She looked around the room. Her eyes landed on the untouched tray of food. The sealed letter. The unopened laptop.
“So this is what your exile looks like,” she said, her voice low and streaked with pain. “This is where you’ve been hiding while the rest of us wondered what the hell happened to Kingston Raines.”
“I wasn’t hiding,” I said.
She snorted. “No? Then what would you call it?”
I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck. “Protecting you.”
That was the wrong thing to say.
She laughed but it didn’t reach her eyes. “That’s rich. You disappear without a word, go to prison, fake your own emotional death, and I’m supposed to be grateful you did it for me?”
“I didn’t fake anything. I didn’t want you to wait around for a man who might not survive what was coming.”
Her mouth parted. For a second, she looked like I’d slapped her. “You think that was your decision to make?”
I looked toward the fire. Toward anything but her.
“Jesus, Kingston. You weren’t just some high school boyfriend. We were building a life. You were the man I loved.”
Every word cut deep into my heart.
“I still am,” I said, my voice coming out too damn soft, too fucking broken.
She didn’t answer. Just stared at me, her brown eyes brimming with tears I didn’t deserve.
After a moment, she reached past me and picked up the sealed envelope from the mantel. I’d scrawled her name across the front along with the address of the house where she’d grown up.
