She knew her time with him was over.
“You have to leave, don’t you?”
He hobbled to the side of the bed and scooped up his shorts from the floor. He looked away as he plopped down next to Garrett to yank them on. “Yeah,” was all he said.
Her heart cracked in two. God, she could feel it hemorrhaging.
“But why?” Okay, that sounded whiny as hell, but she couldn’t find it in herself to care. She deserved to know why she was losing her last two days with him.
He balanced his forearms on his thighs and wrung his hands together where they hung between his knees. “The text was from Simon. He scored a meeting with a major architect group in Houston. We’ve been trying to get a face-to-face with the owner of this particular firm since we decided to give our business a go. Well, he got one. And it’s either tomorrow night, or not at all.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“At seven.”
“But you can’t go. That’s a nine-hour drive, if not longer. Your foot—”
“My foot is fine. And I won’t drive it. I’ll have my buddy come pick up the Ducati and store it for the time being so I can fly back.”
Seemed he had it all figured out, didn’t he.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
She only nodded. “Me too.”
Ah hell. She so wished she hadn’t stuffed her head in the sand all week to avoid thinking about him leaving, because right now she didn’t know how to react. She wanted to sob uncontrollably, but going off the deep end like that would only hurt Evan more. And he was drawn tighter than a clam, not saying another word. She wasn’t sure he could. Christ, the way they were all pussyfooting around each other was crazy.
She crawled behind Garrett, kneeling at Evan’s back to wrap her arms around him. “It’s not fair. I don’t want you to go.”
His shoulders slumped even more, if that was possible. “Riley…”
The heat of her tears burned a trail as they fell down her cheeks. “When?” she asked.
He hesitated slightly. “As soon as I can get a flight. I don’t want to stretch this out and make it worse for either of you.”
Oh God. She was afraid he was going to say that. Tears stung her eyes in earnest now and she had to squeeze them tighter than she ever had before to hold them back. But it didn’t do any good. The second she opened them, tears spilled over and cascaded down her face in hot, salty rivers.
Garrett leaned in and pressed his lips to Evan’s shoulder, adding his arm into the desperate hold Riley had on him. “Let us take you to the airport. Give us that.”
Evan was shaking his head before Garrett had finished speaking. “No, no. I can’t…” He nuzzled Garrett’s temple. “I’ll just call for a car. That’d be best. I want to take this memory with me. The one of you two warm in bed, not one of you two brokenhearted at the airport.”
With one final sigh, he stood out of their arms and went for his phone on the nightstand. Sweet mercy, she wanted to scream at him. She was dying to pound her fists against his chest for leaving them, for not staying to try to figure out some way to be together.
But it wouldn’t matter. Commitment was commitment and she had to respect him for keeping his.
She had to love him for it.
Which she did, wholly. And she wanted to tell him so. God, she wanted to shout it at the top of her lungs like she had with Garrett out on the beach. But she didn’t. She held her love for him tightly inside her, counting on it to seal the fracture splintering through her heart.
Evan flung the heavy curtains open, disappearing outside on the deck with his phone in hand. She heard him talking softly a moment later, making his reservations, which just killed her all the more.
“You okay?” Garrett asked.
Not hardly. She wasn’t even close to being okay. “I will be.” In a year. Maybe more. Hell, maybe never.
“Come here.”
She curled into his arms, listening to Evan’s mumbles out on the deck while wondering for a moment how one short week could change her life and alter her outlook so drastically. She was never going to be the same after this. Life as she knew it and the woman she’d been before, they were both gone, consequently traded for a deeper love for her husband, a heartache she’d do anything not to have, and firsthand knowledge that the old adage What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger might not be the bullshit she always assumed it was. Because, while she felt ripped to shreds right now, she knew she’d come out the other end of this more secure in who she was, simply from knowing and loving that man out there on the deck.
When he came back in the room moments later, his body language screamed wrecked. His arms hung loose at his sides, his shoulders slumped, his eyes… Ah God, his eyes. Destroyed. They were destroyed. “Twenty minutes,” he said.
Wait, hold on. “You’re going now? As in right now?” She shot out of Garrett’s arms. Oh no. No, no, no. “I thought you’d wait until at least morning.”
“I booked a red-eye. That way Simon and I can get our shit together before the meeting. And it won’t draw out our goodbyes. I don’t think any of us would handle that well.”
No, she supposed not. “So we’ll just rip the bandage off, so to speak, and…and…” A fresh bout of tears threatened as her throat closed up tight. She was dying here. Sure as anything. Dying, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
He turned his back on her then, digging through his backpack and pulling out clothes before stuffing the dirty ones lying next to it back in. He shook out a pair of jeans and a black t-shirt, but didn’t so much as look their way before he spoke. His voice was gravelly, shaky almost. And just as wrecked as his posture had been. “I, um. I’m just going to shower.”
He couldn’t even look at her. Or at Garrett. All he did was go back in that damn bathroom and shut the door, leaving the window opaque.
Her and Garrett’s eyes met, and she knew he was gauging her, wondering if she was going to completely lose it. She wanted to. Oh how she wanted to. But flipping out wouldn’t solve the problem.
Instead, she scrambled off the bed, grabbing up her shorty robe to slip it on. She knotted the sash too tightly, craving some sort of discomfort other than her broken heart, and bolted outside onto the deck. The night air had turned overly humid, feeling thick and damp against her skin and in her lungs.
A moment later Garrett came out as well. The shorts he’d thrown back on hung low on his hips, and the small bedside light behind him silhouetted his masculine physique against the sliding glass doors perfectly.
At any other time, seeing him like that would have her wanting him so desperately she couldn’t see straight. But right here, right now, all she could manage to feel was an edgy itch scurrying over her skin. His expression was shadowed as she sat on the far side of the deck in front of the copper fire pit, but she could feel him looking at her. She could feel his stare down to her soul.
He was worried about her.
“I want to go home, Garrett. Tell me you’ll take me home first thing in the morning. I can’t be here. Not anymore. Not after tonight.”
He didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely. I’ll call to see if we can get our reservations changed. Whatever you need, baby. You know that.”
God, this man was her rock. Her savior.
“Thank you.”
He stepped over to her and kissed the top of her head. “I’ll do it now,” he said quietly, then slipped back into the bedroom. A light came on in the attached office, and she knew he was in there, switching their plans around, and he was doing it just for her.
She hadn’t sat in front of that cold and dark fire pit all that long before the bathroom door creaked open once again. She jumped to her feet as Evan emerged and started zigzagging around the room, picking up the few things he’d brought with him that he’d left lying out. She wrapped her arms around herself in an attempt to fight back the pain inside her chest, but it wasn’t working. Screams ricocheted through her mind, lamely te
lling her over and over to be strong. To be calm. That this wasn’t the end of the world.
No, it wasn’t. It only felt like it.
Still, she straightened her shoulders and shuffled back into the bedroom. Evan was zipping up his backpack, but he didn’t look at her, not until she came up next to him and put her hand on his arm.
He closed his eyes, as if her touch burned him from the inside out. Hell, maybe it did. “You have no idea how much I’m going to—”
“Don’t,” he said, cutting her off. But it was too late.
“Miss you.”
“Ah, hell.” He dropped his pack on the bed and wrapped his arms around her then, holding her close. So closely and so strongly that his grip almost hurt, but heaven above, she didn’t want him to ever let her go.
And then Garrett was there, nuzzled up behind her. He clutched her hips and pressed hard kisses against her shoulder. She deliberately pulled her strength from him, from that innate power he held so effortlessly in his body. She counted on it, simply because her supply was rapidly disappearing, breath by excruciating breath.
In the next moment, she knew no amount of strength or power she stole from Garrett was going to make a damn bit of difference anyway, not when the weight of reality crushed her where she stood. Evan took her mouth, quickly, fiercely, then swooped in on Garrett and ravaged his lips too.
This was his goodbye.
“I’ve got to go.” He whispered the words, as if he knew saying them any louder would be too much for them all to take.
Sweet Jesus, this was it.
He let her go, stepping back out of her arms. In that final second when their stares locked, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her palm. But he didn’t linger. In his next breath, he turned away from her and grabbed his backpack off the bed.
He stopped to give her one last sad smile from over his shoulder, and then he was gone.
Chapter Thirteen
Thank goodness for routines.
For much of the last three months since she and Garrett had left Florida, Riley had counted on a hectic schedule to get her through each day. She figured her heartache would’ve eased by now, but it hadn’t. She was able to keep her mind busy with her patients during the day, and yes, she worked off her myriad frustrations three nights a week on a punching bag at the gym. In the midst of all that, she spent every other spare moment with Garrett. They’d gone to countless movies over the last couple months, walked endless miles up and down the bike paths adjacent to Lake Michigan’s shoreline, and visited most of the museums in the city more than once, all just trying to stay busy.
But none of that had healed the part of her that shattered when Evan had turned and walked away from her the night he went home to Texas.
The pain from losing him only eased in those moments when she’d get a random text from him, or better yet a phone call. Or the ultimate, what had quickly become their regularly scheduled Friday night video chats. For the hour or so on those nights, when she could both see and hear him, all her misery would disappear. She loved being able to talk to him like that and loved even more hearing about his week while the three of them joked around. He and Garrett had such a similar sense of humor and an even closer outlook on life. They loved each other too. She knew down to her toes that they did, and that meant more to her than little else ever could.
God, she missed him so much.
As she steered into a parking spot in the garage of her and Garrett’s Near North apartment building, her phone chirped. The short, sweet and to the point text lighting up her screen was from Garrett.
Scored a meeting with Kramer. Finally. Going to be late. Have dinner without me.
Garrett had been trying for a month straight to set up a meeting with his boss, but the old guy was always either out of town or booked solid. She was glad their schedules finally synced, but damn. She so wasn’t in the mood to eat alone tonight.
Nevertheless, she pulled up her big-girl panties and climbed out of her car. Luckily, no one else was in the garage with her, so the elevator trip up to the seventeenth floor turned into a non-stop express ride. When she got off and opened the door to their apartment, a blast of cool air hit her head-on. A shiver blossomed across her skin, but the nippiness made her smile as well. Garrett had been the last one to leave this morning, and as he was known to do, he’d cranked the air conditioning setting down so their small two-bedroom-one-and-a-half-bath unit wouldn’t end up feeling like an oven in Chicago’s muggy July temperatures. To combat the chill, Riley ditched her work clothes and changed into a pair of comfy yoga pants and her favorite, albeit threadbare, Northwestern sweatshirt.
Instead of eating something with more substance like she knew she should, she poured herself a glass of Sauvignon Blanc from the bottle Garrett had opened last night and cut a few hunks off the brick of Monterey Jack from the fridge. She balanced the small cheese plate on top of her wineglass, snatched up the latest issue of Cosmo from the stack of mail on the end of the kitchen’s peninsula counter and headed for her favorite spot on the far end of the sofa, the one right next to the western-facing window.
Chicago sunsets typically ranged from hazy blues which quickly died away into a star-speckled black, to the occasional paler pinks fading into a deeper purple before nighttime engulfed the sky completely. Tonight, however, the sky glowed a spectacular orange, interspersed randomly with shafts of gold and yellow. The evening was gorgeous and had her thinking back to those amazing Inlet Beach sunsets, which in turn had her reminiscing about that remarkable week she spent with her two men.
And they were hers. They always would be. Nearby or far away, it didn’t matter. Garrett and Evan belonged to her, just as she belonged to them. The eleven hundred mile distance separating her, Garrett and Evan was a glitch, and okay, it was one she’d spent the last three months trying to figure out how to fix. Every solution she came up with involved a complete upheaval—which actually didn’t bother her all that much, but dropping their life here in Chicago wasn’t as easy as a finger snap for Garrett. He’d shot up the ladder so quickly at his job, had earned praise and won awards—not to mention luxurious beach vacations. He couldn’t just turn his back on all that, or the promise of a killer retirement plan, just as Evan couldn’t turn his back on his family.
Really, sometimes being a conscientious person completely sucked.
But in all honestly, she wouldn’t have the men she loved behave any other way. As undesirable as their personal situation was, they were both doing what they thought was right professionally. So for now, the texts and phone calls and video chats were what they could cling to. They were the only things that were going to work.
As she let the heat of the evocative sunset warm her face, she sighed deeply. A sadness crept up on her, adding to the muscular aches and pains already wearing her down as a result of being on her feet in surgery all day.
She set her wineglass on the coffee table and grabbed the throw off the back of the couch. Covering up and closing her eyes, she snuggled deeper into the cushions. She thought back to that last night with Evan and to the heated and passionate way they’d both made love to her. God, she’d give just about anything to be held like that between them again. To be taken like that again. It was all she dreamed about. It was what got her through each and every day.
But the memory of it was all she had. And as the hectic day closed in around her and she drifted off, she knew deep down that the memory of that night was never—ever—going to be enough.
* * * * *
Just look at her.
Garrett stood in the middle of his dark living room, staring down at the beautiful woman fast asleep on the couch. He had so much love firing through his body for her that he practically sizzled.
It was already well past ten, and since he’d crawled out of bed this morning at an ungodly five thirty, he should be dead on his feet. But he wasn’t. He was too excited to be tired, and he couldn’t wait share the cause of his excitement with Riley.
He snapped on the accent light next to the couch and sat on the edge of the coffee table in front of her. With a gentle hand on her knee, he shook to wake her.
“Rie, baby. Wake up.”
A hint of a smile touched her lips and she stretched before opening her eyes. When she did and blearily met his stare, his heart actually leapt.
“Hey. How’d the meeting go?”
“It went well.” To say the least… “I have a surprise for you.”
Her smile grew. She’d always loved surprises. “Oh?”
He couldn’t help but smile now too. “Mm hmm. I managed to get some extra time off. Want to take a trip?”
“You know I’d go to the ends of the earth with you.” She tossed the throw covering her to the side and swung her legs off the couch, sitting up a little straighter. Hope shone clear as daylight in her eyes and he knew right then that he’d nailed this surprise like he’d never nailed one before. “Where are we going?”
“How about a few days down in Houston?”
She shot off the couch and lunged into his arms, hugging him so hard he almost fell off the table. “Really? Oh my god! When?”
He laughed. “How soon can you clear your schedule?”
“Now! I’ll clear it now.” She scooted out of his hold and went for her purse on the table by the door, practically bouncing the whole time. She dug inside the bag and pulled out her phone. “I’ll just send a quick text to Caryn. She owes me. I covered for her a few weeks ago when she and her husband took off for Vegas.”
“It won’t be too short of notice for her?”
She peered at him as if he was crazy before concentrating once more on her phone, and he laughed all over again.
“Next week is a light one for me, so it’ll be fine. It has to be fine.” On her next breath, her fingers stopped their tap-tap-tapping on the phone screen and she glanced over at him again. “Wait, does Evan know we’re coming?”
Hmm, how to answer that one. And leave it to her to start digging right away too. Eh, let her, he figured. This little surprise was only a drop in the bucket of what he had planned. There was no way she’d expect what else he had in store for her. “I talked to him on my way home. He was pretty stoked and said he could pick us up whenever.”
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