All for This

by Lexi Ryan

  Right. Losing Max is the risk. Fuck. Nothing changes. “You’d have to ask your fiancé.”

  “You know why I can’t do that.” Standing, she pushes her chair back and lifts her chin. “I want to understand. I need you to talk to me.”

  “No, I don’t.” Because she’s made her choice. What would come of rehashing our mistakes?

  “You don’t understand what this is like. Not remembering? I’m planning a wedding to this man I’ve wanted most of my life. Don’t I owe it to him—don’t I owe it to myself—to have the truth out there before we promise until death do us part?”

  Planning a wedding. The words are like red-hot ice picks in my chest.

  “I just need answers,” she says. She steps closer, tempting me without knowing it. “I need the truth,” she whispers.

  “The truth? Is that what you really want, angel?” Suddenly, I want to give it to her. I want to put my mouth against her ear and describe in outrageous detail all the things I did to her body. I want to slide my hand between her legs and prove she still wants me—even if she can’t remember.

  I take another step closer, and when she turns away, I close the distance between us, trapping her between the house and my body as I lower my mouth to her ear.

  “Do you want to know what it was like between us?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  I groan. “Should I start with how wet you were every time I touched you? Or maybe how you begged me that first night?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Have you been telling yourself some wicked rocker seduced you? That I tricked you into my bed? Sorry. You asked for the truth. You begged. Right there outside the club, you begged me until I ripped your panties off and you were too busy biting my neck to talk anymore. Is that what you’re hoping to remember? How you wanted me so badly you let me finger you out in the open, against that building where anyone could have seen?” I just want her to remember. I need her to remember it all and then look me in the eye and tell me she’s choosing him.

  She lifts her hands to my chest, but right when I think she’s going to push me away, she curls her hands into my shirt, and I groan again because my control is hanging by a thread and threatening to snap.

  I can’t help myself and I put my mouth to her earlobe, nip at it with my teeth in the way I know makes her crazy. The crack of thunder overhead reminds me of our first night together, the way the sky opened up outside the club and we got soaked. Then, later, when I peeled those wet clothes off her and warmed her with my hands and mouth.

  “You might have forgotten me,” I whisper now, “but you still like dirty talk, don’t you? And maybe if I made you come now, you’d still scream my name. Because you always screamed my name, Hanna. Never his.”

  She gasps. “You are horrible.”

  “What are you really upset about? That you wanted me? Or that even as you stand here wearing his ring, you’re secretly hoping I’ll tell you about it. Secretly wishing you could remember all the details.”

  “I don’t.” She shoves me back then, and I’m grateful because I was seconds away from taking her mouth like I’m so desperate to. “Tell me why I did it,” she says. “I need to understand.”

  Looking away, I fight to steady my breathing. What the fuck did I think I was doing? “I made you a promise,” I say carefully. I’m reminding myself more than telling her. “I promised that when you made your decision, I would respect it. That if you took his ring, I wouldn’t try to change your mind.”

  A promise I all but broke just now. And as much as I want her—need her—more than she’ll ever know, I could never forgive myself if I stole the future she chose.

  “I always knew you deserved better than me,” I say, still not looking at her. “I hope he’s worthy of you. I sure as fuck wasn’t.”

  Only when my breathing is steady and I think I have the strength to touch her without losing my mind do I turn. I take her hands, meaning to retrieve my cell phone, and for three painful beats of my heart, my gaze snags on her lips and I indulge in the fantasy of one last kiss. She’d let me. I can see it in her eyes. She feels something for me, even without her memories. I want to tell myself that means something. If we have a connection without her remembering anything about me, doesn’t that have to?

  But nothing changes the fact that she chose him.

  I take my phone and walk away into the night. When the skies open and rain pours down, I welcome the deluge and wallow in the memories it brings.

  I’m sitting in the dark on Asher’s front porch soaking fucking wet when Asher finds me.

  “I’m sorry I bailed on the rest of the party.” I offer him the joint burning in my hand, and he sneers at me.

  “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” he asks.

  “Sorry.” I snuff it out and slide the rest of the joint into my pocket. It wasn’t doing shit for me anyway. Nothing can erase Hanna from my mind. “Didn’t mean to piss off the straight-edger.”

  “This isn’t about the pot and you know it.”

  I lift my gaze to his. “What’s it about, then?”

  “What’s between you and Hanna?”

  “Nothing,” I mutter.

  “I saw the way you looked at her tonight, and you’re a terrible fucking liar.”

  “Better than an accomplished one, I guess,” I say, parroting Hanna’s words from the night we met.

  “What are you doing?” Asher presses.

  “I’m not doing shit. She chose him.” I release a humorless chuckle. “And now, conveniently, she can’t even remember me.”

  “Please tell me you haven’t been fucking around with Hanna. I told you she has a boyfriend.”

  Yeah, he told me that the night we met, but it wasn’t true. But that’s Hanna’s secret to share, not mine. “I believe he’s now her fiancé.”

  “He’s a good guy, you know,” Asher says.

  “That’s what everyone seems to think.”

  Asher turns his back to me and looks up at the starless sky. The rain has stopped, but the clouds loom overhead, dark and ominous. “Did you know an anonymous investor set Hanna up with the bakery?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was Max. That’s the kind of guy we’re talking about here. The kind of guy who would sell his house and live in a shit apartment to give the woman he loves her dream. The kind of guy who would do it without getting any of the credit or the glory.”

  “Then how do you know?” I ask.

  “I know people.” Asher shrugs then turns back to me. “I’m not trying to be an ass, but I care about Hanna, and I want what’s best for her.”

  “And you know that’s not me?” That hurts. Especially from Asher.

  “Think it through for a minute. You dodge commitment, and Hanna deserves better than that. And even if you were willing to give her more, how’s that going to work? Are you going to move to New Hope to be with her and leave Collin in LA?”

  Resting my elbows on my knees, I lean forward and study my shoes. Asher’s pulling out the logic I’ve been trying to make myself accept ever since I saw that fucking ring on her finger. Hanna belongs here, in this little picture-book town with its friendly people and quiet streets. And I belong in LA. Near Collin.

  “Do you have any idea how much I hate being away from my daughter?” Asher says. “Three months in the summer, two weeks over Christmas and a couple of long weekends here and there—that’s all I get until I can convince her mom to give me custody. You know I have reasons beyond Maggie for staying away from the city, but I don’t see you making that kind of sacrifice for a woman. Am I wrong?”

  “She chose him,” I repeat, because—fuck—I don’t need to hear this. There’s nothing to figure out. She doesn’t want me. She’s wearing his ring.

  And I have to find a way to be okay with that, because a big damn part of me knows she chose right.

  MY APARTMENT is a clutter of half-packed boxes, and my mind is a jumble of questions and missing memories.

  When
I walk into my living room, Nate is bare-chested and sitting on the couch with his bare feet propped on the ottoman. For a minute, I forget how to walk. My feet seriously don’t recall the order of operations necessary to get me from this spot at the edge of the kitchen island to the family room coffee table, where I left my cell phone.

  Because Nate. Because bare-chested. Because hormones eating away at all the functioning parts of my brain and leaving only the parts that want sex.

  I don’t know if his presence—his body—is evidence of a divine power that loves me or one that wants to torture me. My mouth is dry and my hands itch to touch, to trace the lines of his tattoos and the faint trail of dark hair from the center of his chest all the way down past his navel and into his jeans.

  I’ve followed that trail with my mouth before, and sweet, sweet memory, I know what waits on the other side.

  When I drag my eyes back up to his face, he’s smirking at me. “See anything good?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing. And then I was going to ask you to please refrain from watching porn in my family room.”

  “Wanna watch with me?” He wriggles his eyebrows and spins his iPad so I can see the screen. Comics. Of course.

  “How’d you get in here?” The question comes out with a squeak.

  “With the key you gave me last summer. God forbid anyone see us together if I was in town, so you gave me a key so I could come in the middle of the night.”

  I draw in a ragged breath at the bitterness in his tone. “God forbid anyone see us together.” I wonder if it occurred to me how selfish I was being. “Did you ever use it?”

  “Once,” he says softly. He sweeps his eyes over me in my robe and lets them settle on the knot tied across my growing belly. “I got off the plane from London and hired a driver to bring me straight to you.” He sighs. “My phone was dead, so I used the driver’s, but you didn’t answer. When I got here, I let myself in with the key you gave me and climbed into your bed. Unfortunately, you didn’t know who I was, and we both know how that ended. Frankly, if you would have given me that knee to the balls before, you probably wouldn’t be pregnant now.”

  I bite back a guilty laugh. “Sorry.”

  He shakes his head. “No. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed you wanted me there.”

  My legs seem to be functioning again, so I walk over to the living area and sit on the chair. He’s filling in blanks for me, and I’m desperate to see them filled.

  “Tell me what else you remember from those days.”

  Apprehension flashes across his face. “You’d called me in London. You’d left a message saying you wanted to talk. It was the first time I’d heard your voice since you’d left LA after our fight. You’d been ignoring my calls and my messages. The only reason I knew you were okay was because you were still talking to Janelle, and she assured me you weren’t dead in a ditch somewhere. She said you were thinking. You were trying to make some hard decisions, and I needed to give you space. At one point, she even suggested that she could fly out here herself and check on you if it would make me feel better. But then you left that message, and I thought maybe…” He shakes his head. “Obviously, I thought wrong.”

  “I would have had to leave you that message before my accident.”

  “Yeah. It was Thursday.”

  I lift my eyes to his. The day of the accident. Was I calling to tell him I was going to marry Max? “Why didn’t you call me back?”

  He stares at me a long time then blows out a long breath. “I thought it would be best if we had the conversation in person. And then it turned out you were engaged to him and it became a moot point.”

  He’s silent for a minute, and then his serious face transforms to a smile.

  When I realize his eyes have settled on the cleavage peeking out the top of my robe, I pinch it closed. “Sorry. I’ll go get dressed.”

  “I wasn’t complaining.”

  “Yeah, well…” I shake my head. “I’m not going to tramp around in my robes if you’re going to be spending a lot of time at the house.”

  “So you’ll move? You’ll take the house?”

  I’ve spent most of my day thinking about it, and I nod. “I can’t deprive my children of that home when their father wants to provide it. It’s not reasonable. And when I stepped back and thought about it, it makes sense that you’d want to stay there when you visit. There’s plenty of room and there’s no reason you can’t claim one of the bedrooms as your own. I just wish you’d considered how you phrased it when Max was listening. I’m sure the idea of us living together was a slap in the face to him. We’re friends and we’re parents together, but we’re not a couple. I want that to be clear.”

  “Crystal clear,” he murmurs gently, so much the lion to the sheep.

  I sigh and continue. “And when I can, I want to pay you back for the house.”

  “Hanna—”

  “Please.” I’m quiet for a moment, trying to figure out how to explain it to him. “You are the father of my children, and I will let you provide for them, but I never want to feel like you’re my sugar daddy, providing for his woman on the side.” I drop my gaze to the floor because I sure as heck can’t say the rest while looking at his bare chest. “And that’s why we can’t sleep together again. You can’t move here. I get that. You’ll visit as much as you can, and I’m sure you’ll be an amazing father near and far. But if we make a habit of sleeping together when you visit, I’ll just feel…convenient.”

  He pushes off the couch and comes to stand in front of me. My eyes are glued to his bare chest, so he tilts my chin up. “Are you sure you want to make that rule?”

  I nod and meet his dark, smoky gaze. “I’m sure.”

  “If that’s what it takes to get you to move into the house, I promise I won’t sleep with you until you ask me to.”

  I snort. “I think I remember you making—and breaking—the same promise about kissing me.”

  A slow smile spreads across his face as he traces the line of my jaw with his thumb. “It’s true. I’m pretty terrible about keeping promises that involve staying away from you.” He lowers his mouth to my ear, and I shiver. “How about I just say that, when I touch you, I promise to make it inconvenient as hell.” His mouth hovers over mine for a moment, and I can’t think or breathe. Just when I’ve prepared myself for his lips, he steps back and grins. “I guess that means sleeping in your bed tonight is out of the question?”

  I blink at him. “I— What?”

  “Tonight? I’m not staying with Maggie and Asher. Newlyweds don’t need me around. Do you want me in your bed or on your couch?” He drops his gaze to my lips. “I’ll do whatever you want, angel.”

  “I—” I swallow. Then again. Because I want a lot of things. And he knows it. “The couch.”

  He rakes his gaze over me one last time before turning back to the living room. “Sweet dreams.”

  I’M BEATING the shit out of the punching bag when Will finds me. He doesn’t say anything, just holds the bag and lets me go at it until my knuckles ache from hitting and my shoulders burn from swinging.

  “Wanna talk about it?” he asks when I finally admit defeat and sink onto the bench.

  “He bought her a house. She’s moving in with him.”

  Will exhales slowly and sinks onto the bench beside me. “Well, fuck.”

  And that about sums it up. It’s not so much that Nate bought her a house. God knows that, with his money, he could buy her any damn thing he wanted. It’s that she accepted. Her willingness to move in there proves more than she realizes.

  “You bought her a bakery,” Will says hopefully.

  I grunt. “Not for long.”

  My lawyer emailed with details of Janelle Crane’s offer, and not long after, the actress called me herself about it. I already know that, if Hanna wants me to take it, I will. I need to.

  THE SHOWER rains down on me, hot and delicious on my sensitive skin. Having Nate in the apartment with me last night
was enough to make me lose my mind. I lay in bed waiting for him to come into my room, climb into bed with me, and whisper something sexy in my ear.

  But he didn’t. He stayed on the couch all night long, giving me the space I asked for, even as I wished he wouldn’t.

  Then we had a long day of packing and unpacking, moving and organizing my belongings in the new house. Liz, Sam, Maggie, and Asher helped, and Cally and Drew took care of the bakery. Janelle helped a little, but she had to leave to meet with Max about her offer.

  “You’ve got a really cool thing going here,” she said. “I want to be part of it and never want you to feel beholden to some man.”

  “I don’t feel beholden to anyone,” I said, but in the end, I agreed that she’d be a less complicated choice as a silent partner and promised I’d talk to Max.

  Though Nate and I were too busy to talk much during the move, I’d catch him watching me, and then he’d wink and rake his eyes over me in that way of his. My cheeks would burn and every cell in my body would click into overdrive.

  My new shower is amazing. I relish the hot spray coming from three directions. I wash my hair and body, shave my legs—a task that’s getting more difficult by the day—and then turn off the water. After drying my body, I apply lotion, giving special attention to my growing stomach. I spent most of my life hating my stomach and wishing it were flat, but now my round belly makes me smile. I’m more than okay with it. I feel beautiful with it. Is that because of how much I already love these babies or because of the way Nate looks at me?

  After we got everything moved, Nate went across the street to Maggie and Asher’s house. He and Asher are still working on songs for their collaboration, but he made me promise I’d call if I needed anything.

  I dry off and dress in maternity jeans and a sweater before walking across the street. It’s dusk, and my breath freezes as it hits the air. I knock and no one answers, so I let myself in. The house is quiet, and I assume everyone’s downstairs. I head in that direction and find a tall, blond man standing in front of the stairs. It takes a minute before I remember how I know him. Fabio…er…Drake. Vivian’s bodyguard.