by Alexis Anne
She stood up and grabbed the other towel. “Nothing. Go take a walk or a drink, or whatever it is you need right now.”
What I wanted to do was to explode. But the hurt look on Marie’s face put that out pretty fast. I never wanted to see that look ever again. I dropped my towel and grabbed her instead. “I don’t want a drink. I want you.”
She stared at me, the towel only partially around her breasts, her hands clutching it like a lifeline. I’d just dropped a massive bomb on her and here she was worried about me. She constantly surprised me and never did what I thought she was going to do.
“You have me.” She stepped out of the bath, dropped her towel, and put her arms around my neck.
I carried her into the bedroom and laid her on the bed, toweling her off as best I could. There were so many things I didn’t understand in that moment, and one thing I knew without a doubt. I needed Marie. Her eyes made me forget that I was worthless. Her smile made me think I might be worth saving. Her touch gave me peace. I wanted to get lost inside her and be one with the only thing that made sense in my life.
“Greg?”
I buried my nose in her hair. “Yeah?”
“Let me do this?”
I froze and pulled back to look at her eyes. “What?”
“Fuck you. Make love to you. Whichever it is you’re looking for.” Her fingers gripped the hair at the back of my head, forcing me to look at her. I nodded and rolled to the side.
We didn’t say anything. Not one fucking word. It was the quietest sex we’d ever had. But holy hell did we say a lot with everything else. She didn’t just look at me, she saw me. All of me. Inside and out. Broken and useless. She kissed me and made me feel good. Her fingers were everywhere and her tongue followed.
I got lost inside her body and her eyes because I saw her, too. The woman who was only truly herself when she was with me.
The woman who needed me to want her just the way she was—no conditions or strings attached to my desire.
She rode me with her hands around my face and her breath on my skin until the only thing left was her, me, and this exact moment when nothing else mattered except that I saw her, and she saw me, for exactly who we were.
*****
“How does this change things?” Marie whispered against my skin. She was curled into my side again. We were both naked and dazed by everything that had just happened, but the words were finally starting to come out.
“I don’t know.” I honestly didn’t. Ever since meeting Marie I felt like I didn’t know a damn thing anymore. Maybe I never did.
“How do you really feel about me? And Natalie. Don’t give me what I want to hear, I need to know where we stand.” The edge to her voice broke my heart. It was the same when she talked about Edward. She was putting her defenses up and the last thing I ever wanted was for her to feel threatened by me.
“Sit up.” I wanted her to see everything I was thinking and feeling. “My life has been pointless for a long, long time.” I took her small hand in mine and studied every vein and line in her skin. “And then I met you. I woke up. I felt again. I don’t know what to do with it all—I don’t even know what most of it is. It just takes over and I try my damnedest to not hurt you along the way. It’s a shitty, shitty way to do things and sure as fuck isn’t fair to you.”
I wasn’t a man. I was a ghost. I was nothing.
But Marie? Marie was everything.
She turned my hand over and traced my scar again. It was crazy how much my heart hurt when she did that.
Then she got up on her knees and leaned forward, taking my face in her hands.
This was it. This was going to be our last kiss.
She silently pressed her lips against mine and time stopped, just like it did every single time she kissed me.
“Have you ever felt anything like that before?” she whispered, pulling back just enough to look at me.
I shook my head. “No. Never.” Her kisses tore me apart in the best way possible. “I know you have a lot of questions, and I probably don’t know most of the answers,” I said. “But I can tell you that no one has ever kissed me the way you kiss me. And no one has ever made me feel the way you make me feel.”
Marie nodded her head quickly, my face still between her palms, her body close, but not touching mine. “I don’t understand it either, but I think I know what you mean.”
I smiled. “Damn fucking straight no one kisses you like I do.” And that was the other thing I could never figure out: the possessive primal urge to possess Marie each and every time the idea of another man entered my mind.
Just like when I saw her with Kevin Rogers at the restaurant that first weekend, I wanted to kill any man that came near her. Marie was mine.
Her fingers curled into the back of my hair and she moved into my lap. “Damn fucking straight.” And then she kissed me so hard that I forgot my own damn name.
Chapter Twenty
I grabbed a very surprised Grace by the wrist and dragged her into the back office of her coffee shop. “What the hell?” she shrieked as I slammed the door.
The world was spinning a little. I was having a panic attack.
“Marie? You look like shit. What’s happened? Is Natalie okay?”
I pressed my back into the door for support and slid to the ground. “His fiancée died.” I pushed my fingers into my hair. “He’s been in love before. And she died.”
The room was freakishly silent for a few moments and I felt the weight of it all crashing in on me. The man I was falling hopelessly in love with had already loved another woman.
Grace sat beside me on the floor and pressed her shoulder against mine—giving me room, but also being close. “Greg?”
I nodded.
“How long ago?”
Did he tell me that? Did I ask? I was too in shock to ask for details. Details I didn’t want to know. I shrugged my shoulders.
“So that explains the mystery of Mr. Greg Hamilton. I always figured it was something big to make a man like that so miserable. Fuck. That’s major.”
I nodded some more and tears started leaking out of my eyes.
“He’s one of them.” Grace said. She sounded happy. Why did she sound happy?
I looked up and wiped the tears away. “What?”
Grace cocked her head to the side and smiled at me. “He’s one of the good guys. The big manly men who have great big giant hearts hidden inside. When they break, they break. But when they love, oh man do they love.”
That was Greg to a tee. I’d known it from the beginning, but I had no idea this was why he protected himself so fiercely. I nodded some more as tears kept leaking out of my eyes. I felt like I was being stripped apart, like a car in a chop shop.
Grace slid her arm around my shoulders and let me cry on her for a few minutes. I couldn’t have stopped if I wanted to. Once I let go I had to get it all out of my system. After a while Grace got up and found a box of tissues, shoving them at me by the fistful.
“You’re so lucky,” she joked. “You look kind of pretty when you cry. I look like James Van der Beek.”
The image of Dawson crying immediately made me smile and knocked me out of my downward freak-out spiral. “That’s pretty bad.”
Grace nodded. “It is. I try never to cry in front of anyone. It’s for the good of all.”
I shook my head and took a few calming breaths. I felt a thousand times better now that I’d freaked the fuck out.
Fuck.
I was even thinking in Greg’s swear words now. He had seeped into every part of my life, even my word choices.
God damn I liked that guy.
“So Greg’s been in love before, and lost her. Why are you crying?”
“He’s mine!” I wailed as the tears started streaming out of my eyes all over again. The ferocity with which the words erupted scared the crap out of me.
Grace’s eyes went wide. “Oh. Wow.”
I nodded and cried some more. Seriously, how did I s
till have water in my body?
“Oh sweetie…” She sat back down on the ground and wrapped me in another big hug until I got a grip.
I shook my head and forced myself to talk between really over-the-top sobs. “I don’t understand it. I don’t. I just know when he told me, I felt like I’d been stabbed with a knife. I felt like I was dying. He’s not allowed to love anyone but me.”
She shook her head and pushed my head back down on her shoulder. “You and Natalie are so much alike. You act like the mature, stoic, overly practical one and let Natalie look young and idealistic, but she gets it straight from you.”
I sat up and scowled at Grace. “What?”
“You have a very simplistic, fairytale, young and idealistic view of love, my dear. You are looking for your one true love.”
“I am not.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “You may not think you are, but you are. Love isn’t that simple. There is great love, there is true love, there are soul mates, but you are limiting yourself into a box you will never be happy inside if you think we are all destined to find only one true epic love.”
“Excuse me?” When did Grace become the love guru? She was a heartbroken single woman who was scarred from her last relationship. She had one-night stands and avoided relationships like the plague. She was not the soothsayer of love.
“What are you and me? Are we soul mates? No. Maybe not. But you’re my sister and I love you more than life itself.”
Okay, so I was a bitch. “I love you, too.”
“And Natalie? You love her, too. There isn’t a more perfect pair.”
I frowned. “A mother’s love isn’t the same thing as romantic love.”
“Isn’t it? They’re different and the same. You would lay down your life for her. She gets things about you that the rest of us never will. Is Greg your soul mate? I don’t know, but I do know he gets you in a way none of the rest of us do. You two share something unique and special. I’ll be the first to say I was a skeptic when you started dating him, but then I saw you two together…”
“What are you saying?”
Images of Greg kissing me, holding me, whispering sweet words into my ear flashed through my mind. He was special. So very special to me.
And if I let myself stop freaking out for long enough I knew I did the same thing to him. I was special to him. But what the heck did it mean?
“When you love someone with everything you have. When you care more about them than you do yourself. When being without them is the worst form of loneliness you’ve ever felt. They become part of you, and you become part of them, so that you don’t really make sense without them anymore. That’s love. And all I’m saying is that you can love many people in your life, in different ways at different times, and loving someone else can’t ever take that away.”
For the first time since the bath, I felt like there was some solid ground under my feet. I didn’t totally understand everything Grace was saying, but it was making some sense.
“You think I’m overreacting?”
She chuckled and patted me on the back. “I think you’re getting ready for Edward.”
“What does Edward have to do with Greg’s fiancée?”
Now that I wasn’t dying inside I realized my ass was asleep. I worked my way back up onto my feet and into a chair. I cleaned up my face again and Grace got us some water.
“Sweetie, I love you to death, but you’re like a pregnant woman nesting before she gives birth. When Edward comes to town you work your ass off trying to get everything in order. You put us all in neat little boxes—it’s how you make sense of the world. I get it, Nat gets it. We let you do your thing because this is how you cope. But you’ve never had a Greg around before and he does not fit inside a box. Not any box, ever.”
Wasn’t that the truth? It was also a huge part of why he made such a huge impact on me from the moment I met him. I loved his uniqueness. I adored the way he tore into my life and left everything I’d so carefully arranged a mess in his wake.
He shook me up in all the very best ways.
“So what you’re saying is that I’m getting ready for Edward—and Greg wasn’t going to work with my plans anyway—but then he dropped that bomb and blew everything to high hell?”
“Yeah,” Grace smiled. “Just like he usually does. You can put us all in order and plan every minute of Edward’s stay when it’s just you, but now you’ve got that big dumb oaf in your life. I think if he’d told you about his past any other time it would have been big, but because he told you now, you made it huge. Much bigger than you would have otherwise.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, I was pretty sure Greg having been in love before was going to tear me in two no matter when he told me, but I could see where Grace was coming from. I knew she was right about a lot of things. I did like to get things in order to cope with how Edward made me feel. And little things do tend to become big things when I’m this worked up.
“Thanks for loving me.” I looked up at Grace who shook her head and rolled her eyes.
“Your house at five?”
I was on my way to pick up Natalie from her sleepover and then everyone was meeting at our house for dinner. It was the first time we were hosting both of our friends at the same time and I was really, really looking forward to the distraction.
“Yep. Do I look like I just cried my eyes out?”
“Yep.” Grace laughed at me. “Give yourself a little time and maybe wear your sunglasses when you get Natalie.”
*****
“The fastest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” Grace declared as she set a steaming hot cup of café con leche in front of Greg on my kitchen counter.
He grinned like a kid and hugged Grace. “I knew you liked me.”
She rolled her eyes at me over his shoulder. “Don’t get a big head, dumbass. You’re dating my best friend. I’m just trying to ensure my place in her heart…and yours.”
He kissed the top of her head. “Done.” Then he grabbed the cup and came over to me, sliding his hand around my waist and kissing up my neck. “You okay?”
He’d asked me that about ten times since I got home with Natalie. I knew my eyes were still a little red and swollen, so I didn’t lie. I told him I was processing everything and that it was a little overwhelming. I think it scared him. He was acting sexy and brash, but his eyes were telling a different story. They were sad.
“I’m okay.”
Eve pushed a tall glass of her famous mojitos in front of me. “So Edward is coming?”
I took a big gulp of the drink. “Three whole days.”
“Your assistant called for special box seats. I gave him mine. I figured we’d wine and dine him. Might help keep him distracted for you.”
I wanted to hug Eve but didn’t know if she was the kind who appreciated things like that. I held up my glass and clinked it against hers, instead. “Cheers to that. Thank you.”
“No problem. I know a thing or two about difficult fathers.”
I glanced at Jake across the counter. He held up his glass. “Just remember you’ve got back up. We’re all here if you need us.”
Dammit, I wanted to cry again. “Thanks. To both of you. I really appreciate this.”
Greg tightened his grip on my waist and pulled me against him. “Anything for you. Anything.”
“Uh, guys?” Grace called from across the kitchen. She was standing by the table where Natalie had fallen asleep beside her Shirley Temple. “I think someone partied too hard at her slumber party last night.”
“I got this,” Greg whispered in my ear and squeezed my hip. He set down his drink and then scooped my sleeping daughter up in his arms like she weighed nothing at all. “C’mon sleepyhead. It’s bed time.”
She groaned, but then threw her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder. It was damn near the sweetest sight I’d ever seen: the man I loved taking care of the most important thing in my world as if she were just as import
ant to him.
He glanced at me as he squeezed through the doorway and gave me a look that burned through me and straight to my soul. In a single glance Greg told me everything he needed to say, and what I was waiting to hear: this was what mattered.
Right now was everything.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I settled Natalie into her bed and took a moment to pull myself back together. I wanted this. All of this. I wanted to love Marie and help take care of Natalie. I wanted to love someone. I wanted to matter.
Right now my life didn’t matter.
But it could.
I always wanted a daughter. I knew I’d be a great dad. Kids were magical little creatures. They saw the world in black and white, said what they thought, and didn’t understand the complications adults put in their lives.
I was a giant child, so it wasn’t a big stretch to think I’d be good with some of my own. Maybe my time had passed, but I loved Natalie and if I could be part of her life, even for a little while, I wanted that.
“Everything okay?” Eve asked from the doorway.
We walked out into the hallway and shut the door so Natalie could sleep while we all partied downstairs. “Yeah, everything’s good.”
Eve raised an eyebrow. “You looked wistful.”
I was busted and there was no point in hiding it. “I love her.”
“Both of them?”
I looked down at my feet. “Yeah. I do.”
“I’m happy for you. They’re good people.”
They were good people, they were my people. “I told her. About Jenn.”
Eve slid her hand into mine and squeezed. “How did she take it?”
I still wasn’t sure myself. I loved that everyone came over to distract Marie ahead of Edward’s visit, but I wish they would all leave so I could give Marie the third degree. “Have you seen her eyes?” When I came home with the food and saw that she’d been crying, I wanted to punch a wall.
“I did. I had hoped it was all because of Edward.”
I shook my head. “Nope, that was all me. I’m an asshole.”