The tenderness in his voice only seemed to make her hurt more.
Johanna shook her head once before staring toward the elevator doors across the lobby. “You don’t understand.”
“Then help me understand.”
“When you left the first time…” She stopped briefly, fighting for composure before continuing. “I spent years telling myself I was dramatic for feeling abandoned because technically you didn’t leave me. We were already broken up.”
Blaze went completely still.
“But now I’m sitting here realizing you were already planning your next escape before we even found our way back to each other.” Her voice broke slightly before softening. “And suddenly I feel twenty-three again.”
Dammit.
At twenty-three, Johanna had been soft-hearted, hopeful, and trying so hard to support his dreams even when those same dreams terrified her. Now he realized he had accidentally triggered the same fear.
“You think I’m still that man?”
Johanna didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. The silence saidenough.
Blaze leaned back slowly against the wall behind him, jaw tight with frustration and regret. “I’m happy here with you.”
Johanna lowered her eyes to their joined hands.
“And what happens if you wake up one day and Sheraton Beach stops being enough again?”
Blaze lifted her hand slowly and pressed a kiss against her knuckles.
“I’d still want you.”
Pain moved across her face yet he could tell that she desperately wanted to believe him. But fear was louder right now.
Johanna gently pulled her hand from his. “I can’t do this right now.”
Blaze’s chest tightened immediately. “Do what?”
“This.” She gestured weakly between them. “The convincing. The reassurance. The trying not to panic every five minutes.”
He stared at her.
She turned before he could answer.
“Jo—”
“I better get back to work,” she said softly, her voice fraying around the edges again. “Unlike you, some of us actually love living in this town.”
Then she stepped onto the elevator and disappeared behind closing doors, leaving Blaze standing alone in the lobby with the awful realization that fear might steal her from him all over again.
“Dammit.”
As Blaze walked back out into the cold toward his truck, he scrubbed both hands slowly over his face while guilt and helplessness battled inside his chest. This was exactly what he’d been afraid of all along. Not the argument itself and not even Seattle. What terrified him was Johanna’s fear, because it livedso deep inside her that once it woke up, neither of them seemed to know how to quiet it again.
And now he’d handed that fear a reason to grow.
Chapter15
By the time Johanna stepped off the elevator on the second floor, emotional exhaustion had settled deep into her bones.
Milan's office sat at the far end of the executive corridor. Unlike the corporate offices downstairs, the space reflected her role overseeing guest experience throughout the Beaumont Hotel brand. Guest satisfaction reports covered one wall. Framed photographs from hotel openings, employee recognition ceremonies, and community events lined another.
