There was a time when we’d study the Bible together. He’d just been teaching me about God and had been helping me understand the words in red. And that’s something else I left behind when I fled from this place. I haven’t touched a Bible, attended a church service, or even prayed since that night.
“How have you not changed at all?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper.
Zane’s gaze lifts to mine, and my mouth goes dry. “I’m not the same man I was.”
“You still read your Bible. Still carry everyone else’s problems like they’re your own. Seems to me you haven’t changed much.”
“That hasn’t always been the case.”
I snort. “I doubt that.”
Zane smirks, and if I weren’t already sitting down, I would have fallen over. The power of his smile has always made me weak at the knees, and it seems the years have only made it more so.
Gorgeous, gorgeous man. If I stay here too long, I’ll be at risk of losing more than my life.
“You don’t even know the half of it,” he replies, piercing gaze pinning me.
“Then tell me.”
“I think it’s better if I don’t.”
I watch him as he goes back to reading the Bible, studying his profile in the dim overhead light. He’s always been handsome. Even when we were thirteen and I barely understood what attraction was, I remember staring at him whenever we were together. Shocked that someone like him would ever be interested in me.
I mean, he came from a good family. Graduated from high school and went to college at fourteen. Handsome, smart, strong, dependable—yet he claimed I was the only one who held his heart. It didn’t make sense to me back then, and it still doesn’t.
And now the baseball player has transformed into a rugged man with a short beard and scars mostly shielded by the ink on his arms, that attraction burning in my gut has only grown tenfold.
Though, if I’m honest, I guess he is right about being a different person than he was before. Because I never would have pictured Zane Knox with tattoos. Yet, here he sits, muscled, inked, and far too good-looking for my own good.
He glances up, and our gazes lock again.
In this breath of a moment, a million things are said even though not a single word is uttered. Clearing my throat, I shift my attention anywhere but him, choosing to focus on the bandage covering my thigh.
A future with this man was all I’d ever wanted.
We’d even planned on taking his father’s boat—this very boat—around the world together afterward. An extended honeymoon where we’d sleep in, sail, and spend our evenings beneath the stars.
Peace.
Home.
That’s what he’d offered me. Now I’m sitting across from him, not as his wife but as a hunted woman. A woman who nearly got him killed only a few hours ago.
“You really should let me go,” I tell him. “I’ll be fine on my own.”
“You can barely walk.” Those sharp green eyes pin me in place.
“It’s not the first time I’ve been hurt, and it probably won’t be the last.” The night of my wedding, my father had snapped my ankle. I’d had to push through the pain then, and I can do it now. Though I don’t elaborate on that.
His nostrils flare. Is he thinking of the time I was seventeen and he’d come home from college break to find me barely moving after walking in on my father and a random woman in our living room?
Or the year before that, when I’d been pushed down the stairs and broken my clavicle?
I shove those poisoned memories aside. They’re in the past, and that man is long dead. He can’t hurt me from six feet under.
That was only proven tonight when I stepped into his empty trailer.
He really is gone. The man who always seemed indestructible was destroyed by the alcohol he refused to put down.
