“I will,” Colin replies in a rush.
As she disappears out of the room, I look at Colin with my brows raised and my mouth set in a thin line.
Now, I’m the one waiting for validation.
“I don’t know what to do,” he whispers.
“You don’t have to do anything, ya ken,” I reply.
He nods. Then, he appears flustered as he drives his hands in his hair. “Why couldn’t you have just shown me all of this sooner?”
With a shake of my head, I shrug.
“Dammit, Declan,” he mumbles before turning toward the chaise lounge and dropping into it as if in surrender.
Even with him on the other side of the room, it’s like there is a string from him directly to my heart, and the farther he is, the more it hurts.
“I just…need to think,” he says, sounding flustered.
I don’t respond. I can’t even move. I’m just standing in a seaof Colin, staring at the sketch on the easel and the living sight of him in the same frame.
They both belong to Pierce.
I’m too numb to move, wondering if that kiss was the last one I’ll get. Will he still marry that man after everything? Have I messed things up so badly?
What is the point of wanting? It only brings pain.
Eventually, I do what I always do when it hurts. I reach for my apron, and I lift it over my head. In a drunken-like stupor, I begin preparing my paints, like I’m moving on autopilot. Somehow I can do these tasks while also replaying the events of this week from the moment Colin arrived to this one right now. How every single encounter was a minor tipping of the scales.
And I never saw this coming.
This longing. This doubt. Thislove.
Colin reclines on the couch in the same position he was in two nights ago. The kiss we just shared lingers between us and neither of us speak of it. We ignore the fact that there are things to do today and a wedding tomorrow. I get to work and he watches me as I do, and for one more precious hour, we exist asus.
When we are together like this, I live for him and him for me. As if we were designed to be together. Like I am the night sky, and he is the stars.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Declan
Regardless of the lovely morning spent painting and briefly kissing Colin, I still have a massive hangover and another shitstorm of things to deal with before this godforsaken wedding. If there even is one.
God, I hope there’s not.
He can’t possibly go through with this after feeling what we did this morning, can he? It’s like we opened a book we can’t just close now.
After my shower, I take enough aspirin to kill a horse and pound a cup of coffee to try and cure this hangover. When I come downstairs, the grooms are nowhere to be found, but the house is abustle with activity.
“You look like shite,” a sweet voice says, finding me in the kitchen with my forehead pressed against the cool marble of the countertop.
“I feel like shite,” I reply, not bothering to clarify that I mean physicallyandemotionally.
“I’ve got a good hangover cure,” Blaire says as she opens the freezer and comes back a moment later with a cold bottle of something, placing it on the counter. When I lift my gaze and see the frosty glass of a vodka bottle, I nearly throw up.
“Get that godforsaken thing away from me,” I bark.
“Relax,” she says with a laugh. Then, she goes to the fridge and retrieves a pitcher of orange juice. She pours it into a glass and adds a dash of turmeric, some grated ginger, and a shot of vodka. “Drink it.”
