He places the scarf into my hand and my heartrate kicks into a higher gear. Hope kindles inside me but I’m afraid to give it more fuel. Not until he tells me why it took him so long to decide to reach out to me. So, in a show of defiance, I shove the scarf into my apron pocket.
“You’re late. It’s been two days.”
I hear myself say it and the rawness of it sits between us like a living thing. Two days. I counted every hour and he knows it now.
“I have other tables, Alec.” It’s true enough. I have customers to serve and side work to handle, and an afternoon that does not include falling apart in front of the Tuesday regulars. “I’m working. This isn’t the time or the place for this.”
“I know it’s not. But this is where you are.”
His voice drops lower and the sound of it, the tone that used to wrap around me in the dark when we were naked and tangled together, pulls at the frayed edges of the heart he broke two daysago. I start to take a step away and he reaches for me. I stare down at the strong fingers wrapped tenderly around my wrist.
“Please. If you walk away, I don’t know if I’ll get another chance. So, please Ella, don’t go. Not again.” He swallows. I watch his throat move. “Five minutes. That’s all I need. Just hear me out.”
The corner of his mouth shifts. Not a smile. Not even close. Just the faintest suggestion of the left dimple, the one that always shows first, the one that has been ruining my ability to make rational decisions since I met this aggravating, devastating man.
Something in the way he pleads with me, his confidence faltering, his fingers still grasping my arm, makes some of the wall I’m trying—and failing—to build crumble now.
“All right. Five minutes.”
I sit down. His knee is inches from mine beneath the table, close enough that I can feel the heat of him in the gap, and the proximity sends a low current up my thigh that I can’t even pretend to ignore. But it’s his raw gaze that holds me riveted to the seat.
Behind me, I catch the faintest clink of Lisa setting something down at the counter very, very carefully. She’s watching. She knows who he is. She’s been listening to me cry about Alec since I got home, and now the cold toaster who hurt her friend is sitting in our diner looking like he crawled here from the East Coast, and I can feel Lisa’s attention on the back of my neck like a warm hand.
I fold my arms on the table because I need them somewhere that isn’t reaching for him. “Go ahead, then. Talk.”
“Everything you said the other night was true. I messed up. Every day that I kept the truth about myself hidden from you was wrong. I didn’t trust you at first because I haven’t been able to trust anyone for so long. You changed that. After I got to knowyou, I wanted you to know everything about me. But by then, the lie of omission felt even bigger. I told myself I’d find the right time, the right place, and then I’d tell you everything.”
“You had numerous chances for that, Alec. You chose to let me go on believing the lie. You didn’t trust me.”
“Yes, I did.”
I shake my head. “No. You couldn’t have, or you would’ve known that your net worth wouldn’t change a thing about what I feel for you.”
He glances down. “I know that now. I’m an idiot, Ella. I was afraid of losing you.”
“Then why did it take two days for you to come and tell me?”
“Ella, I was in the hospital until this morning.”
The hospital? I swallow hard, hearing the anguish in his voice. I see it in the way his hands clench atop the table. When he looks at me again, his eyes are raw with emotion.
“When you walked away from me and got into that car, it felt like my entire world was crumbling. I know you didn’t want to hear me say that I love you—not after I hurt you like I did—but it’s the truth, Ella. I love you.”
He says it fiercely, a look of intense determination in his eyes. “After you pulled away from the curb, I went back into my brownstone to get my keys. I was going to find you and bring you back with me. The only thing that mattered to me was making it right with you and doing whatever I had to for you to forgive me.”
He pulls in a sharp breath. “I got as far as the front door.” He stops. Looks down at his hands resting on the table between us. “My chest seized up. My heart. It just… locked up. Pain like I’ve never felt before.”
My hand goes to my mouth. “Oh, Alec.”
He stares at me. “I couldn’t move, could barely breathe. I was on the floor calling 911 before I knew I’d fallen.”
I can see it all as he talks. I don’t want to see it, but my brain builds it anyway: Alec on the hardwood of his hallway, his phone in his hand, his heart failing him in the same house where I left him only minutes earlier.
And I’d had no idea.
My hand is across the table, on his wrist, my fingers pressing into his pulse because I need to feel it. The beat is right there, steady under his skin, and the relief of it makes my eyes sting so fast I don’t have time to brace.
“Alec, your heart?—”
