“I hurt people,” Shaun whispered miserably, burying her face in her hands. “I hurt the people that I love because I’m too prideful to let myself be vulnerable.” Her shoulders shook pitifully as she sniffled, “I said really mean things to him, Jodi.”
“You are under a lot of stress,” Jodi conceded quietly. “And I’m sure his version of a proposal was less than romantic.”
“Oh god,” Shaun moaned, covering her face with her hands. “He told you guys that?”
“He knows how he did it was wrong,” Jodi murmured. “Once he calmed down, stopped pacing like a damn madman, he was able to see how ambushing you wasn’t the proper way to go about it.”
“It’s not that I never want to get married,” she whispered, removing her hands from her face and stacking them under her cheek again. “I just… I don’t know. I want to know if it's right. How am I supposed to know if it’s right?”
Tommy’s words came back to her.You deserve that big kind of happy, too.Is that what this was? Because right now, it bigsucked.
Jodi smiled gently. “You just do, Shaun. I don’t know how to explain it. Do you love him?”
Rolling her head to bury her face in the pillow, she groaned into it. “Yes,” she said, her voice sounding muffled through the padding of the pillow. “I still hate him.”
She heard her sister laugh, then she said, “Yeah, you’ll have that.” They were both quiet for a long time before Jodi asked softly, “So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to let him walk away?”
Shaun took a deep breath in, as deep as her battered body would allow, and rolled her head back so she could look at her sister. Tommy’s parting advice came to her.Don’t let that pride of yours get in the way, okay?“What do you think I should do?”
Jodi shrugged, smiling gently. “I think you know. In your heart. Listen to it.”
“Bossy,” Shaun whispered around a yawn.
“I am the older sister, it is my birthright,” Jodi teased gently. “Go to sleep.”
Shaun’s lips pulled in a small smile. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, sissy.”
They were quiet for a long time, and Shaun was nearly asleep, when she whispered, “I think I know what I want to do.”
“I knew you would. Sleep first, then you can get back to your regularly scheduled badassery in the morning,” Jodi murmured, and Shaun nodded.
“Deal.”
FORTY-FOUR
“Dammit, K.C., where the fuck is your head at? What the fuck are you doing?!”
Kasey gritted his teeth as he pulled up in front of his team spot on Pit Row for a speed gas fill up. His team moved like a well-oiled machine, and in less than twelve seconds, he was headed back out, rocketing into his first corner as he reentered the race, the first of the season.The Clash at the Coliseumwas a one hundred and fifty lap race in Los Angeles, California, and the roar of the crowd and the scream of the machines hurtling around the track at over two hundred miles an hour made an intoxicating mix on his senses.
“You’ve got two laps to make up,” Randy, his pit crew boss, shouted over the roar of the engines, the mic set in his helmet speaking to him. “And we’ve only got twenty-two laps left. Haul. Your. Ass.”
Rocketing around each corner, he pushed his car to its limits, gaining inches, then feet on the vehicles in front of him. He flexed his fingers briefly, one at a time, stretching them from the strain of keeping them wrapped around the steering wheel for an extended period of time.
“Move, K.C., move!” Randy bellowed, and Kasey gave the gas another punch. “Six laps left, let’s go, kid!”
He would be lucky to place in the top ten today, which was a disappointment to Kasey, but he only had himself to blame. All he’d thought about for two days was Shaun.
Shaun and their baby that she was carrying. His baby.
His baby.
The damn woman was so unbelievably stubborn that she would rather push him away at all costs than to let him in. Even as she was laying in that bed, bruised and in tremendousamounts of pain, violently ill… and he’d let her push him away. He’d walked away when she needed him the most.
Her words still stung. Stung like hell, to be honest. But he knew she hadn’t meant it; knew it in the way her throat had closed over the lie she’d told him. Knew it in the way her eyes had betrayed her, beseeching him to see the truth behind her words.
They had a lot of work to do. A lot of communicating to work on. Because he wasn’t giving up on her. No, he was just giving her time. Time to accept that she knew just as he did, that she was his. Had always been his. Just like he was hers.
