We’d come back to that later because I had questions.And I had worries. A lot of them.
“You’re right,” I said softly. “I do resent money.”
“I know—”
“I resent what money can turn people into. I resent what people do to get money. I resent a lot of things, but I don’t resentyouwith money,” I continued over him. My thoughts were a little scrambled, but I needed to say everything before I stupidly talked myself out of it. “I’m not good at this. Aidan was always an asshole about money and needing to take care of me.”
“I’m sorry,” he replied.
“I don’t want your apology,” I snapped. I scrubbed my hands down my face and took a deep breath. “I don’t know how to let people take care of me. No one’s ever wanted to, at least not without strings attached.”
My chest ached with the admission. I was so tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop with people. And I hated how I was putting that on Harley. It wasn’t his fault that other people had fucked me over every chance they got.
“Here.” I held the receipt out to him as a pathetic sign of trust. “I just ask that sometimes you let me pay for things. You’re not the only one who likes to take care of the people you love.”
“I can do that,” Harley said as he took it.
“I’m sorry, I’m fucked up.”
“We’re both fucked up, Mav.” Stepping closer, his lips brushed against mine in a brief kiss. “It’s just who we are.”
He wasn’t wrong, but it also didn’t mean that I wanted to be.
CHAPTER 64
harley
Iwas so screwed up in the head.What the hell was wrong with me?What was I doing? There was no way any version of this with Maverick ended well. At least, not that I could envision.
I could picture all the ways it’d blow up in my face. I could picture the fallout with Vivienne, especially considering we were trying to have a kid. It didn’t matter that she was fucking her golf instructor. There were just things I wasn’t allowed to do. I was aware of the double standard, but it hadn’t been an issue inthe past. I could picture all the ways it’d hurt Maverick when he finally found out I was lying to him. When he genuinely believed I was choosing him in a life we could finally have together. That should’ve been more than I needed to run away—to leave him alone and never come back. That’d be the right thing to do. That’d be the smart thing.
But I’d spent my whole life doing the smart thing. I’d done everything I was supposed to do. I married the woman I hated. I took over the company I didn’t want. I lived in the city I couldn’t stand. And now I was trying to have a kid that I wasn’t sure was a good idea.
All of it got me nowhere. I was miserable. I didn’t want to do the smart thing. I didn’t want to do the logical thing. I wanted to do whatever I wanted.I just wanted to be happy.Was that really such a bad thing? Why did it have to matter how I did it?
Because this was Maverick.
That was why. This wasn’t some baseless escape like my wife’s golf instructor. This wasn’t someone I didn’t know. Maverick was the only person who had ever made me feel alive and calm. This was the only person I had ever loved.
This whole thing was a convoluted mess that I didn’t know how to fix. It consumed every corner of my mind in an ugly, obsessive kind of way. Every touch felt like a countdown to disaster. It hadn’t even been two days, and I already knew the fallout of this would ruin us.Ruin me.
Because I chose him, and I’d keep choosing him. My body recognized him like muscle memory. Being with him was as easy as breathing, even if my pending doom lurked on the horizon. Every question I had about attraction came rushing back to me. I wasn’t surprised I wasn’t attracted to Vivienne—I never had been—but in six years with the hundreds of people I’d met, no one made me feel the way Maverick did.
It was all so confusing.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Maverick asked over dinner, his voice cutting through the anxious spiral building inside me.
“What?” I blinked as I glanced up at him.How long had he been talking?
His eyes were on me, searching and concerned. We sat in a quiet corner atThe Lakeside Reveriefor that dinner I’d negotiated out of him. After the clinic yesterday, I went back to my mother’s house while he took Roxy home. I got blow-by-blow updates from him via text about the whole thing, which kept me out of my head most of the night until I fell asleep.
That didn’t help keep me busy during the day, but at least this dinner was something to look forward to.If I could get my head out of my ass long enough to enjoy it.At least I’d found a way to keep Vivienne off my back for a while, but it wasn’t hard to satiate her with the right gift—a spa weekend, an expensive vacation, a new set of never-to-be-used golf clubs for the golf lessons she never used, and so on. She’d be preoccupied for a while. It wasn’t a trick I could use often, but it wasn’t the first time I’d used quiet bribery to get my wife to back down for a while. The only perk to being married to me was my money, after all.
“You’re a million miles away, princess,” he whispered. “What can I do to help?”
“I’m sorry,” I replied. I ran my hands over my face and pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. Focusing on deep breaths, I tried to recenter myself. Date night was supposed to be a good thing.
I wasn’t supposed to be on this date.
