Page 120 of Worth the Risk

“No. You’re not.” He shakes his head as he lowers it back down and the gravity in his eyes tells me all I need to know. I’ve already lost him. “You let me fall in love with you when you knew there wasn’t a future here.”

“Please.”

“Save it, Sid. You knew what you were doing all along.”

“No. I didn’t. I mean . . . I knew the project was going to end, but you, I never expected you.” My voice breaks right alongside my heart. “Believe me when I tell you I know I messed up. I should have told you.” The first tear slips down my cheek as that all-consuming panic takes hold. “I should have, and then we kept getting deeper into this thing, and there was no perfect time to tell you, so—”

“So you let my son tell me.”

Those seven words have every thought in my head die a quick death . . . because he’s right. I knew Luke would tell Grayson about our conversation. I knew he would connect the dots I didn’t connect for Luke.

Is it possible to hate myself any more than I already do?

I hiccup a sob and push against the door. This time he lets it go. This time I reach forward and touch his face. The rough of his stubble scrapes against my hand. The hitch of his breath fills my ears.

This time, I use his words back on him. “I’m not very good with apologies, Grayson. I seem to keep screwing them up when it comes to you, so I’ll show you in the only way I know how.”

When I press a kiss to his lips, there’s hesitancy there. And then there isn’t. I taste anger on his tongue. I can sense the violence beneath the edge of it. I can feel it in his touch, the desperation for him to be wrong about my intentions. But there is nothing satisfying about the kiss because I know I’m trying to use it to save myself.

I love you.

And I know when I step back and look into his eyes, that it didn’t do a single thing to fix this.

“I believed you were different. I thought you’d changed. I should have known better.”

And with those words, Grayson turns on his heel and leaves.

I scream in my head for him not to go. Silently, I shout I love you.

But there is nothing I can say that will fix this. There is nothing I can say other than I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do that will take the look he just gave me out of my mind.

All I can focus on is that he didn’t say he hated me.

He didn’t ask me to stay.

He said he loved me.

What am I going to do now?

I turn the paper over in my hands. The one that was sitting on my desk when I got in this morning.

Meet me at Miner’s Airfield at five p.m. Wings Out Hangar.

—Gray.

I think back to how well I held it together when I saw the note on my desk. The sob I held back. The tears I blinked away because God knows I’d shed way too many in the past few days.

I’ve sent what feels like a hundred texts to apologize. Left a dozen voicemails.

None of them have gotten a response, and now this.

I look at the hangar in front of me and wonder what he is doing. What this means. I try to rein in the hope that maybe he wants to try to fix things. Maybe he wants to ask me to stay.

What would I say if that were the case? Would I agree? Would I give up my life in San Francisco? Would I give up the job at Haute? All for a chance at love? All for a life with him, here?

I don’t have the answers. I don’t know.

That’s a lie. I do know. And maybe that’s why nerves rattle around as I get out of the car and head to the hangar with the big Wings Out sign above it.