by Lexi Ryan
My gut burns. Of course, I want her to make her choice now. I want to be the easy choice and for her to say she doesn’t need to think about it. But it’s not that simple. Hanna’s heart is too loyal for that, and that’s what I love about her, isn’t it? Her big heart. Her loyalty. And a goodness that runs so deep and so steady that, when she’s close, it becomes part of who I am.
“Stay with me. One more night,” I repeat, and the unsaid words in case this is goodbye electrify the air between us.
I trace my hand down her body, and the tension seeps out of her with a soft moan that gets me hard every time. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken her virginity. Maybe she’ll regret that after she leaves, but I know I never will. Being inside her, watching the pleasure wash over her face as her body adjusted to mine and I finally sank deep… It was the most beautiful gift I’ve ever been given, second only to a woman like her loving me.
She grabs the tequila we left on the bedside table last night and says, “Cheers,” before taking a swig.
Taking the bottle, I grin and splash some between her breasts. “Cheers,” I murmur before I lick away the liquid, following it as it trails down her belly and sides. By the time I’m done, she’s squirming under me.
Gently, I cup her between her legs, where she’s wet from our lovemaking. “Are you sore?”
She shrugs. “A little, but it’s not a bad feeling. More like muscles after a long workout. The good kind of hurt.”
The good kind of hurt. Yeah, I’m feeling that too, even if my pain is more of the existential variety.
“Hmm.” I roll on top of her and pin her hands to the bed as I murmur against her skin and kiss my way down her body. “Let me kiss it and make it better.” Releasing her hands only so I can part her thighs, I sink to my stomach on the bed and position my head between her legs. “Right here?” I trace her opening, and she gasps and parts her legs farther.
When I replace my fingers with my mouth, she fists her hands in my hair, and fuck, do I love that. I stroke her with my fingers and tongue until she’s moaning and so close to coming that she’s fucking my face with jerking, desperate movements. Only then do I pull away and slide back up the bed next to her body.
“Better?”
She pries her eyes open and frowns at me. “You’re…you’re done?”
I have to laugh. “You’re so fucking cute when you’re trying to pretend you don’t care about getting off.”
“I don’t want to be…greedy. I mean, I know we just had sex, so maybe you’re not interested.”
I grunt and lead her hand to my aching erection. “I’m interested, angel. With you, I’m always interested.”
She licks her lips as she wraps her fingers around me and strokes. “Then why did you stop again?”
My hips thrust, moving in her hand. “Because I want to be inside you when you come but I don’t want to make you too sore. I’m trying to be a gentleman.”
“A gentleman? Oh.” She releases me, and I nearly grunt in disappointment. “In that case, I’m going to be a lady. And this lady needs a shower.”
I stay in bed as she saunters into the bathroom. Not because I’m going to lose the opportunity to shower with Hanna—fuck no—but because I like watching her ass jiggle as she walks. There are very few perfect sights in this world of imperfections, and as such, I will never take Hanna’s ass for granted.
By the time I pull myself out of bed and meet her in the bathroom, she’s already in the shower, water sluicing over her curves. I’m jealous of the damn water because it’s touching her everywhere I want to. I’m going to have to lap it all up with my tongue.
I step in behind her and press my mouth to her neck, sucking at the sensitive spot before knotting my hand in her wet hair and turning her to face me. “I love you,” I say against her mouth.
“I love you too.”
The tenderness that swamps me is terrifying. I don’t want to let her go, and the fear that I might have to consumes me. I slant my mouth over hers, pouring everything I have into the kiss—all my love and fear, my vulnerability and desperation. I can’t handle the power of what I’m feeling, so I put it into my kiss.
Soon, her back is against the glass, her leg is hitched around my waist, and my dick is nestled right against her hot, slick pussy.
“Mine,” I growl against her lips.
Then I slide into her and it feels so fucking good I almost come right then and there. I lift her other leg—greedy for more, desperate to bury myself as deep in her as possible—and I fuck her against the glass. Her mouth is on my neck, her hands in my hair, her ankles locked behind my back.
“Mine,” I repeat.
Her moan echoes in the shower, but I need more. I wrap my hand under her thigh and stroke her where our bodies are joined. Her pussy squeezes around me violently, and she bites the side of my neck as she rides out her orgasm. And I’m so wild with lust and jealousy and this soul-shredding love I feel for her that I’ve come inside her before I realize I’m not wearing a condom.
I pull out of her and slowly help her feet to the ground. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
She cocks her head. “Why? That was…amazing.” She winces a little. “Okay, so I’m sore, but it’s really okay.”
I drag a hand through my hair. The shower is still running, and I turn it off before I answer. “I’m sorry because I wasn’t wearing a condom.”
Her lips part as she registers my words.
“There’s probably nothing to worry about,” I say, but I’m thinking of the one other time in my life when I forgot to wear a condom. I was nineteen, and nine months later, Collin was born. Best mistake I’ve ever made, but still. “We’ll be more careful. Are you… You’re on something, right?”
She opens her mouth and closes it. Goose bumps prickle on her arms as she shivers. I lead her out of the shower and wrap her in a towel.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t even think…”
Oh, damn. “You’re sorry? Angel, you didn’t do anything wrong. I should have…” Then it hits me. “You’re not on birth control.”
She shakes her head, and I pull her against my chest and squeeze my eyes shut, cursing myself over and over in my mind. I want Hanna. I want to find a way to make it work with her. But another kid? That’s leaps and bounds beyond what I’m ready for. Fuck it. I can’t even let my thoughts go there.
“It’s going to be okay,” I promise. “The chances of this resulting in an accidental pregnancy are so small.”
She wraps her arms around her middle, holding the towel against her breasts. She studies the floor. “What would happen if I were? What if we had shitty luck and the small chance turns into a baby?” When she looks up at me through water-dampened lashes, I can see the confusion in her eyes.
“It’ll be okay.”
“But what if it’s not?”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Do we really have to have this conversation right now? Isn’t that just borrowing trouble?”
She squeezes her eyes shut and turns away from me. “I’m not trying to be melodramatic, but it matters.”
“I won’t ruin today. I’m not going to have a fight over nothing.”
“Why does it have to be a fight? I’m just asking what you’d do. What we’d do.”
“We’d figure it out. I have more than enough room here. You could move in with me or—”
“You think I’d move to LA?” The horror in her voice is a backhand to the face, a reminder of all the reasons I’ve kept this part of my life inaccessible to women. She points to the bedroom. “Is that what you meant when you said I had to choose? You want me to give up my life for you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you’re saying it now, aren’t you?”
I set my jaw. I wish she’d turn around and look at me. “I said I want to find a way to make it work. I don’t know what that looks like because I’ve never allowed myself to consider it.”
“Consider it now,” she whispers. “In you
r mind, do I have to give up my bakery and move to LA if we’re going to be together?”
“My son is here,” I say slowly. “So in my mind, that’s the easiest solution. Can we please end this conversation? We’re arguing over a hypothetical—”
“No. This isn’t just a hypothetical. This is something I need to know.” She squeezes herself tightly and lowers her head. “If I’m going to choose, I need to know.”
I spin her around and squeeze her shoulders as I growl, “I. Love. You.” Anger tears through me with my frustration. I want my love to be enough for her. I want to be enough for her. But here we are, minutes after making love, and she’s holding me up to this other guy. “Why can’t that be enough for you? Not forever but for now. Please.”
She lifts her eyes to mine, and pain slices through my gut at the doubt I see there. Doubt in us. Doubt in me. “I think it’s time for me to look beyond here and now. Here and now is all I let myself think about this summer, and look where that got me.”
I flinch. “It got you here. With me. Is that so terrible?”
“And what happens next year? The year after that? What happens when I’m ready to have the house with the picket fence and you’re still in LA? What happens when I’m ready for babies?”
“Don’t do this. Don’t destroy what’s between us by asking it to carry more than it can hold. This is new, and it’s not fair to push it like this.”
“You’re the one who told me you wanted me to choose,” she whispers. “These are things I need to think about.”
I crush my mouth to hers and yank the towel from her body. I expect her to push me away, but I’m wrong. Jesus, am I wrong. She’s just as greedy for me as I am for her. Her hands go to my hair. Her breasts press against my chest. Her tongue slides against mine, desperate. This is where we’ve always been good. There’s never been a question of the heat between us. Here’s where we can always find our way—this kiss, the heat of our bare skin pressed together. How can this be so powerful and mean nothing? I know it’s the question we’re both asking ourselves as terror holds us in its steely grip.
“Was it like this with him?” I ask against her ear, my hand skimming her side. “Did you need him the way you need me?”
“Don’t.”
“You didn’t, Hanna. There’s a reason I’m the one you let kiss you here.” I settle my hand between her legs, and her eyes float closed. “There’s a reason you never fucked him and were ready to let me inside you the first night we met.”
“It’s different.”
“Damn straight it is.” I want to slide my fingers inside her, feel the slick walls of her heat, feel evidence of the need I won’t let her dismiss. But I know she’s gotta be sore and I settle for cupping her and the satisfaction of the needy rocking of her hips. “It’s different because you’re mine more than you were ever his. You might love him, but you need me. And if you choose him, you’ll always wonder if you and I could have made it work.”
She wraps her hand around my wrist and slowly removes it from between her legs before stepping back. “And what if I choose you? Will I spend the rest of my life wondering if I could have a family and kids if I’d chosen him?”
I fist my hands at my sides because I’m afraid that, if I let myself touch her, I’ll pull her into my arms and refuse to let her go. I’m afraid one hit of her scent will make me promise things I know I can’t give.
“I don’t want any more kids, Hanna. I have Collin and I can’t do that to him.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Don’t,” I plead.
“There’s a difference,” she whispers. “An important one.”
“Maybe I’ll change my mind, but right now…”
She swallows and her eyes well with tears. “Thank you for your honesty.” Then she leaves the bathroom.
I feel like an idiot and an asshole, but I won’t lie to win her. She deserves better.
After I wash my face and dry off, I return to the bedroom. She’s dressed and her bag is thrown over her shoulder.
“Hanna, I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t apologize for being honest.”
“If I changed my mind for anyone, it would be for you. Don’t go. Not yet.”
“I’m going to fly home tonight. I need to think.”
Stepping forward, I cup her jaw in my hands and tilt her face up to mine. “I wish I’d met you before you started dating him.”
“And I wish we could just be a normal couple in love. But we’re not.” She touches her hand to my cheek. “There’s never been anything normal about us.”
“Only because this is better than normal. You know it is.”
“Give me time. I need to think.”
She’s ending this. She’s fucking leaving me and ending this. “Don’t do this. Hanna…”
“We’ll talk when you get back from London.” She turns toward the door.
“Angel,” I call. She stops but doesn’t turn to me. “You can leave, but you’re taking my heart with you. You can choose him, but part of you will always be mine.”
THE FIRST time Max and I made love, I told him I’d never had sex without a condom.
I was wrong.
I lie in bed with the memory searing my brain like a hot iron. When I close my eyes, I can feel the goose bumps on my arms, the cool tile under my feet, my skin still wet, my body sore from making love to Nate, my legs sore from being wrapped around his waist as he took me in the shower.
“I don’t want any more kids, Hanna. I have Collin and I can’t do that to him.”
Then when I returned to LA after the amnesia, when we were saying goodbye, he met me in the shower again. “Why’d you have to forget?” At the time I thought he meant forget us, but he meant more than that. He meant…everything. His offering more, his taking my virginity, his making love to me in the shower and the conversation that rendered him silent when he discovered I’d made my choice.
I settle my hand on my stomach and imagine the little lives growing inside. My pregnancy was hard for me to accept, and the idea of having a baby at all—let alone twins—still terrifies me. But, despite all of that, these babies feel like a miracle and a gift to me. And to Nate, they’ll be nothing more than a slight to his firstborn.
When my alarm goes off, I’m relieved. I may have spent more of the night pretending to sleep than actually sleeping.
Max reaches for me as I slide out of bed, and I squeeze his hand before padding through the dark to get ready in the bathroom. If I worried that he’d want to have sex last night, I needn’t have. He held me in his arms and fell asleep, and I lay there wondering how I ever made a choice between two halves of my heart.
In the bakery, I find comfort in my morning routine—warming the ovens, pulling the ingredients for today’s recipes, listing the outside orders for the following week, and penning them into my schedule.
As I bake, my mind turns, and to keep myself from spinning my emotional wheels, I make a mental list of what I know to be true.
I chose Max once and I have no reason to doubt that decision given what I know now about the bakery and how he feels about me. Especially considering Nate doesn’t want any more children and I always hoped to have a big family.
Max is exactly what I need now. My future with him will be stable and secure, and most importantly, it’s a future here, at home.
Despite all of that, I find myself trying to make the choice all over again. Maybe because I’m pregnant with Nate’s babies and that complicates things. Or maybe for another reason altogether.
I need to tell Nate about the pregnancy, regardless of how he feels about having more children. When I talked to him last night, I was still trying to digest the fact that he was alive. And trying to defend myself against his accusations. He thinks I just jumped into bed with Max the second I learned his helicopter went down. It’s not that simple—nothing is. He walked away from me. He said goodbye.
I would have ended up with Max again,
even if the whole world hadn’t thought Nate was dead.
Wouldn’t I?
And it’s in the space of that tiny question, in the hesitation between the beats of my heart, that my kernel of guilt sprouts poisonous blossoms in my heart and leaves my relationship with Max in its shadow.
Telling Nate about the babies while keeping Max’s ring on my finger is about the cruelest position I could put him in. I’ll be making him the second family—again and forever—when he deserves so much more.
At six, I go to the front to unlock the door and turn on the sign, and I find my mother standing at the entrance in her church clothes. The moment I open the door for her, she wraps me in her arms.
I will never be too old or too broken to be soothed by the comfort of my mother’s arms. She strokes my hair, and I let quiet tears leak from my eyes.
“I might not approve of your relationship with that rock star,” she whispers, “but I thank God my grandbabies won’t be deprived of knowing their father.”
That makes me cry harder.
She smooths my hair and gently pats my back. “How’s Max holding up?”
I withdraw from her embrace. “He’s fine.” And he is. Poor guy doesn’t even get the opportunity to be pissed off. If Nate had never been presumed dead, no one would have questioned Max’s right to be angry as hell about my summer with Nate. Maybe it wasn’t cheating, but it wasn’t honest either. And that was stolen from him. Since Max isn’t enough of an asshole to wish someone dead, he’s left having to be okay with Nate’s reappearance in our lives.
“I just don’t understand,” Mom says as she walks over to the coffeepot.
I get to work on filling the bakery cases. “Don’t understand what?”
“How all of this happened. The pregnancy, the postponed wedding, your whole relationship with Nate Crane. A few days before your accident, you couldn’t wait to marry Max.”
I freeze with a tray of scones in my hands. “I couldn’t?”
“The sooner the better, you told me. You weren’t even wearing a ring yet, but you just wanted to start your life with him.”