“That’s too bad,” I lied through my teeth. “You seemed happy.”
She flinched like I’d slapped her, and I knew I’d said the wrong thing. Again.
“It was good seeing you, Weston,” she said, heading for the front door.
“Yeah.” I sighed. “You, too.”
I watched her walk away, every step like a knife to a heart that felt like it was bleeding out.
Fuck, I’d missed her.
I’d missed her so goddamn much that it was a miracle I was still breathing. She haunted my dreams, but it was never enough. In my dreams, she was mine. I could still touch her, still taste her on my lips–hear her when she laughed. But the morning always came. I’d wake and she was gone, and once again I was left with nothing but the memory of what I’d thrown away.
Standing there, all the despair I’d felt when she left Odin hit me again all at once, and I felt like I was drowning. I missed everything about her. Her smile that lit up my whole fucking world. The way her hair always smelled like wildflowers and sunshine. How her lips would twitch when Pete would explain something she already knew, but she’d let him talk anyway because she loved him too much to hurt his feelings. I missed the way she used to look at me like I was her everything. I missed her so fucking much.
The screen door creaked open and out stepped Pete. He took one look at my face and shook his head. “Are you finally going to get your head out of your ass and fix this bullshit between you and my granddaughter?”
I sighed, running a hand through my hair. “She hates me, Pete.”
The old man shrugged, taking a long sip of the beer in his hand. “There’s a thin line between love and hate, boy.”
“I don't think that’s actually true,” I muttered.
“You don’t know shit about women if you think that,” Pete said with a snort. “That girl’s been carrying a torch for you since she was thirteen years old. Just because you hurt her doesn’t mean she stopped loving you.”
I wanted to believe him. Fuck me I wanted to believe him more than I wanted my next breath, but I’d seen the way she looked at me—or rather, the way she tried not to look at me.
“Come on,” Pete said, pushing off the porch railing. “Let’s go fix this fence. Maybe some manual labor will knock some sense into that thick skull of yours.”
I followed him out into the pasture where we spent the next two hours in the blazing Florida sun, replacing fence posts and restringing wire. Pete kept up a steady stream of commentary about everything from the weather to the state of the economy,but I could tell he was working up to something. Finally, as we were packing up the tools, he hit me with it.
“You know she's leaving in a few days.”
I stilled, a coil of wire still in my hands. “What?”
“Yep.” Pete’s eyes glinted with something that looked suspiciously like mischief. “Way, I see it. You’ve got time to change her mind.”
Short of kidnapping her and chaining her to my bed, I wasn’t sure I could get her to change her mind.
My brows pulled together. That might be an option. It had worked for Bane, after all.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to talk her around to giving me another shot to make things right, but I knew without a fucking doubt that I wasn’t strong enough to let her go again.
Chapter Five
Hattie Lynn
“What the heckam I supposed to wear to this thing?” I grumbled under my breath.
I had a towel wrapped around my body and my hair twisted up in another. I’d showered, exfoliated, and shaved every inch of my body, but I didn’t have a single thing to wear to the Kings’ party.
“Are you talking to yourself again?” Sondra giggled from her perch on the end of my bed.
My eyes met her laughing ones in the mirror. “Yes. I don’t have any clothes. I didn’t exactly have time to pack a bag when I was fleeing Nashville in the middle of the night.”
After catching Shawn screwing another woman in our bed, I called Sondra and told her I was leaving Nashville and never coming back.
Then I proceeded to tell her what I’d walked in on, and she had promptly agreed that I needed to get the heck out of dodgefor a few days–probably not forever, but for the rest of my days off.
