Her sons, large, burly alpha males themselves, did exactly as their mother asked.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Faith said as she slipped around the table, worked her way behind all the chairs and met Levi in the doorway.
“Hi,” she said.
“Why don’t we go into the living room?” he asked.
“Okay.”
They walked out into the living room, where his presence was no less absurd. Where, in fact, he looked even more ridiculous standing on the hand-braided rug that her grandmother had made years ago, next to the threadbare sofa where she had grown up watching cartoons.
She had known she wouldn’t be able to bring this man home with her.
He had followed her home, anyway.
“Is everything all right with the design?” she asked, crossing her arms to make a shield over her heart. As if she could ever hope to protect it from him.
As if there were any unbroken pieces that remained.
He tipped back his hat, his mouth set into a grim line. “If I needed to talk to you about your design work I would have come to the office.”
“Well, you might have made less of a scene if you would have come to the office.”
“I also would have had to wait. Until Monday. And I couldn’t wait.” He took off his hat and set it on the side table by the couch. And now she’d think of his hat there every time she looked at it.
This was the real reason he should never have come to her parents’ house.
She’d never be in it again without thinking of him, and how fair was that? She’d grown up in this house. And Levi had erased eighteen years of memories without him here in one fell swoop.
He sighed heavily. “It took some time, but I got my thoughts sorted out. And I needed to see you right away.”
“Yes?” She tightened her crossed arms and looked up at him. But this time she didn’t let herself get blinded by all that rugged beauty. This time she looked at him. Really looked.
He looked...exhausted. His handsome face seemed to have deeper lines etched into the grooves by his mouth, by his eyes, and he looked like he hadn’t been sleeping.
“Alicia came to see me,” he said.
Her stomach hollowed out, sinking down to her toes. “What?”
“Alicia. She came to see me. She wanted us to get back together.”
Faith’s response was quick and unexpected. “How dare she? What was she thinking?” Even angry at him, that enraged her. The idea of that woman daring to show her face filled Faith with righteous fury. How dare Alicia speak to him with anything other than a humble apology as she walked across broken glass to get to him?
And if there had been broken glass he would have mentioned it.
“It was a perfect opportunity to find a way to make her pay for what she did to me, Faith. She handed herself to me. Told me her troubles. Told me she needed me to fix them. I wanted to destroy her, and she handed herself to me. Gave me all the tools to do that.”
Ice seemed to fill her veins as he spoke those words. Those cold, terrifying words.
What had he done? What would he do?
“But you’re right,” he continued, his voice rough. “You were right all this time.”
“About?” She pressed her hand to her chest, trying to calm her heart.
“I do have a choice. I have a choice about what kind of man I want to be, and about whether or not I choose to live my life in prison. I have a choice about what path I want to walk. I was worried I was on the same road as my father. That his kind of end was inevitable for me, but it was only ever inevitable if I embraced the hatred inside myself instead of the love. You showed me that. You taught me that. You gave me...something I didn’t deserve, Faith. You believed in me when no one else did. When no one else ever had. You gave me a reason to believe I can have a different future. You gave me a reason to want a different future.”
“I don’t know how,” she said. “I don’t know how I could—”
