Eight hours later I’m paying for the photos when my phone rings.
“Dean?”
“I’m going to fly to Miami and kick your ass, Moreno.”
“What? Why?”
“You’re just going to let her leave?”
“Leave? What the hell are you talking about?”
“She’s packing. Says she’s moving to L.A. She’s welcome, of course, but this isn’t a good idea.”
“Of course not. She’s running away again. Fuck that. I’ll call you later.”
“Wait! I’m not done telling you all the ways I’m going to kill you.”
“Stall. Don’t let her leave. I’ll be at her apartment in an hour.”
“An hour?!” I don’t wait for him to continue as I get on my bike and haul my ass home and get everything ready.
—
It’s late when I get to her apartment. My legs hurt from being on my bike for that many hours, but I ignore it because I know what I want. I know how I feel. The fresh air and the talk with my dad have clarified a lot for me. And I’m ready to move on. It may not be easy, but it’s worth it. She’s worth it.
“Matt?” she says as she opens the door. “What are you doing here?”
I step inside, toss my helmet down, and close the door behind me. “You’re running away.”
“I’m not. I’m fixing things. I’m finally doing the right thing.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m saving you from more heartache.”
“Bullshit.” I stalk to her, backing her into a corner. “Don’t make any more fucking decisions about our life without me.”
“Our life?”
“Yeah, our life. You and me.” I take her hand and pull her out the door.
“What are you doing?”
“Just trust me,” I say. I lead her to my bike and help her get on it.
“Matt?” I can hear her voice full of anguish but I ignore it as I head home.
Ten minutes later we’re walking into my apartment building. “Matt? What are you doing? I’m leaving tomorrow. There’s too much hurt feelings….”
I pull out my keys. “No. I don’t want you to go.”
“How many times have you looked at me as if you hate me?”
“God, April. I don’t hate you. I hate that I want you so bad and I hate that I still love you. But mostly I hate that I love you even more now than I did before.”
“You do?” she asks, and I finally open the door and lead her inside.
“Fuck yeah, I do. I feel like I should be mad, but I can’t be. Not anymore. Not now that I’ve gotten to know you. The real you. You’re not leaving, sweetheart. I told you I’d come chasing if you ran, remember? So don’t fucking run away anymore. I’ll just bring you right back. Yes, I was hurt, and yes, things haven’t been easy. But you and me—that’s not something I want to give up.”
“How can you just forgive me so easily?”
“Easily? No, sweetheart, not easily. It’s hard sometimes. But I need you in my life and I don’t want to keep hurting you or myself. So I’m going to move on, and I want you to move on as well. Let’s start fresh. For real this time.” I look around and direct her attention to the walls that are covered in photos.
She moves toward the nearest wall. “Oh my God, what is this?”
“It’s you. Or rather, it’s us.” I pull the tape off one particularly happy moment I spent with June at the beach and there is no way that woman, with the different hair and different name, didn’t love me just as much as I loved her. “Remember this?”
She sniffles. “I was trying to get you to go for a swim but you kept complaining about sharks,” she says with a watery laugh. Then she touches another photo, a recent one. “This was when I was being difficult about going out of the house with my bruised face.”
“I made you look at yourself. You’re beautiful. You’ve always been beautiful.”
She glances around in amazement at all the photos I’ve taped to the walls. “God, there’s so many.”
“Because we’ve had a lot of memories together. And I don’t want you to ever forget them again. And I don’t want to pretend the things that happened with June, didn’t happen. Those times, they were good times and I don’t want to pretend they didn’t happen.”
She looks at me somberly. “Before we move on, I want to tell you everything.”
I’m ready to hear it all now. I lead her to the couch and we sit.
“My assignment was to get intel on your dad, not on you. We’d heard he had a thing for younger women with black hair. But then you hit on me, and Dean thought it would be easier to try to get the evidence we needed through you. Yes, I pretended to not know anything about you, and I asked questions to get you to talk….” Her eyes watered.
Really, I don’t want to hear any more. It’s all in the past, and rehashing it isn’t going to do us any good. “Let’s not do this, April.”
She shakes her head and wipes her eyes. “No. I have to get it all out. You can’t decide if we’re going to be together, if you can really move past it, unless you know it all. And I don’t want to start over with you if there are still any secrets.” When I say nothing, she continues. “The day I jogged to Panic in the middle of the day, that’s because Dean knew your dad was there and he wanted me to plant a bug in his office. That’s why I showed up with no warning, and that was the first time I met your father in person.” She clears her throat and continues. “By the third week of getting to know you, I was sure you were innocent, and not because of the conversations we overheard but because you, Matt, are sweet and forthcoming—at least to me you were. You were just trying to do your job, and you didn’t know about your dad’s side dealing. I didn’t sleep with you—hell, I didn’t kiss you—until I was certain you were no longer my mark. But I still knew, without a doubt, your dad was guilty.”
That hurt, but I understood. He was guilty, and there was no way to sugarcoat that.
“So my task became getting as much evidence as I could to prove your innocence. And I did. But then my captain started suspecting that maybe I had developed feelings for you, so I had to take the other job so that your innocence wouldn’t be questioned. June may have been fake, but not all of June’s feelings were fake. When we were together, that was me. Those were my true feelings, Matt. I really did love you. I still do.”
I pull her back to me and cup her face. “I understand. It’s not easy to hear, but I understand. Is there anything else? Because I don’t want this to keep weighing on us. I want this to be the last of it.”
“That’s it. That’s everything.”
“Good. Can I kiss you now? Because fuck…I want to kiss you now that you remember everything. I want to kiss you, April—all of you—and I want you to never forget anything about our time together from here on out. And I want you to move in with me.”
“You asked me that once before….”
“Glad you remember.”
“And I wanted to say yes, then.”
“And how about now?” I ask.
She shakes her head, and I swallow to get the lump out of my throat.
“Of course! Good thing I’m already all packed up.”
The feelings I have for her are overwhelming. I thought I’d lost her. I thought I’d fucked it all up. But here she is, leaning into my touch and accepting my shortcomings, just like I have to accept the job she had to do.
She smiles slyly. “Are you trying to make me stay?”
“Sweetheart, you’re damn right I am.”
Epilogue
Matt
“So how does it feel to be the owner of a second club?” April asks. I’ve just finished sending an email with all the signed paperwork to the opposing counsel for Duality, the new club David, Nick, and I just purchased.
“Weird but good. It needs a total overhaul, but I love that we get to put our own touch on it.”
“No more gold filigree, I take it?”
“Oh God, no,” I say,
making a disgusted face.
There are days that are hard and days, like today, that are easy. It hasn’t been all roses for us; she still has moments when she’s mad at herself for deceiving me, even though we both know she didn’t have much of a choice. And there are days she will say something that will trigger a memory and I start to get upset, but she makes us talk about it. She won’t put up with a fake smile and a nod. And to be honest, it feels good not to have to pretend that everything is perfect. We talk things out and move forward. And the walls lined with photos in our apartment always help. We’ve never taken them down, instead, we’ve added to them. Our friends think we’re crazy and that the photos are “esthetically unappealing,” as Geo has said on various occasions. They’re taped to the walls without any rhyme or reason, but it works for us. It reminds us how happy we are when we’re not dwelling on the past.
But, all in all, we’re good. Great, actually. I still worry when I see her drink or eat something that may exacerbate her Crohn’s disease. I’ve become obsessed with learning everything I can about it in order to make her life easier. I drive her crazy sometimes, but I can’t help it. Seeing her sick makes me feel sick. I just want her to be happy and healthy. And luckily, with all the stress of the last two years mostly gone, she has been feeling well and her disease seems to be completely under control, at least for now.
I thought she’d be bored from having a desk job with MDPD, but she says she’s not. Still, it’s only been six months, so we’ll see how long she can handle the monotony—I expect not much longer. She’s taking cooking classes in her spare time and is determined to make at least one edible meal this year.
“I’m excited to get to know Geo better,” she says, and I am too. Now that two of my closest friends are moving to Miami, things will surely get interesting, and I’m glad my girl has a group of friends she can be herself with.
“Uh-oh!” she says from behind me as she looks out the window down to the club. “I thought you talked to Fox.”
I shut down my computer and turn around. “I did. Is he flirting with that poor girl again?”
“Lola? Yeah, I think so.” I squint to try to get a better look. The club is pretty full, and Fox should be standing outside not sitting inside. “There’s something about that girl…I can’t put my finger on it. Something’s off about her.”
“I think she’s just shy. Fox is an intimidating guy, I can see why she’s quiet around him. Actually, she’s quiet with everyone. She comes in, does her job, and leaves.” Aside from all the tattoos and piercings, the guy is jacked. He’s easily 250 pounds of pure muscle, and he’s at least six foot five. That’s why we hired him. He makes the perfect bouncer.
“He’s kind of arrogant, though,” she says.
His nickname is Fox because of his silver-fox hair, and the guy plays it up. His job is essentially to pick out the people to let into the club. There’ve been times I’ve had to tell him to cool it, because he is a hothead, and at times the power to decide who gets inside Panic has gone to his head. “Yep. He can be a cocky son of a bitch. I’m kinda surprised he’s that into Lola, honestly. He usually goes after the half-naked confident club chicks who are ready to go home with him. Lola’s cute but I wouldn’t exactly call her hot, and she’s definitely reserved. Not his usual type.”
“We can’t always help who we’re attracted to. I just hope he’s not going after her just because of the challenge. She looks like the kind of girl who’d get hurt if he played her.”
I wrap my arms around April, my chin to her shoulder. “Enough about my staff. Let’s talk about how I’m going to fuck you in about…uh…thirty seconds.”
She turns into my arms. “Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.” I cup the back of her neck. Just as I’m about to plant a kiss on her I see a commotion downstairs.
“Oh, shit. Stay here.” She turns and looks through the window, and of course she doesn’t stay put. She follows right behind me, down the flight of stairs, and into the mayhem at the bar.
When we get there, Fox has two guys by the collar and is escorting them out of the club. Lola’s eyes are wide, and she’s standing there frozen, with a bottle of vodka in her hands. “You okay? What happened?” I ask her, but she’s watching Fox stomp away.
“Lola?” April asks, but there’s no answer. Not a single movement. When Lola loses sight of Fox and turns her head, she finally notices we are right in front of her, and she startles.
“Oh!”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. One minute I was making drinks and the next Fox starts yelling at them, and then one threw a punch but missed, and now he’s taking them outside. Do you think he’s okay?”
Customers are crowding around the bar, no one caring about what just transpired. “Okay, get back to work,” I say, and then turn to find Fox stomping back in. His face is red with fury and the two men are out of sight.
“She okay?” he asks with genuine concern. Again, not something I’ve seen from Fox before.
“She’s fine. What the hell happened?”
“Those two assholes disrespected Lola. Ask her—she’ll tell you.”
“We did. She had no idea what happened.”
“Shut the fuck up. They were crude and loud. Everyone heard. They called her…” He looks livid and struggles to get the words out. “A fatass. And then they mooed at her. She’s not fat, man. She’s fucking gorgeous and curvy, and…” He bites his bottom lip.
“I don’t think she heard them. She seems very surprised,” April says.
“You probably overreacted,” I tell Fox. “You need to stop flirting with her. She’s not interested and it’s causing issues at the bar. We catch you again and I’m going to have to let you go, man.” He looks over my shoulder, and when I turn Lola’s looking at him through her lashes with the same concerned face I’ve seen lesser men crumble over. When he catches her staring she turns away. Fox’s not even paying attention to me. The arrogant playboy is lost.
Fuck me.
Fox is totally screwed.
To all my Sidney Halston reader groupies. This one’s for you. Matt’s a special one—I think you’ll love him.
Acknowledgments
This book was hard to write, y’all!
The great response from Pull Me Close made it all the more difficult because I didn’t want to let anyone down. Also, there’s an underlying theme in the entire Panic series about disabilities of sorts. In Pull Me Close, Katherine has debilitating anxiety, and in book 3, the heroine, Lola, has something equally as bad (I won’t tell you what it is yet—you’ll have to read and find out). But in Make Me Stay, the fact that she had temporary amnesia just wasn’t enough. Like Katherine and Lola, April needed to have something long-term. Something chronic. So that’s where Crohn’s came in. It’s an ugly, unsexy, terrible illness, something I am personally familiar with. I didn’t want to get into too much detail, but I still wanted you to get a sense of how stress can trigger this autoimmune disease, like most autoimmune diseases. Anyway, it was a tough road, but I’m so happy with Matt and April’s story and I hope you love it too.
None of it could have been possible without Sarah, my agent, and Junessa, my editor, who have the patience and ability to see the big picture when I’m stuck in a scene or a plot hole. Thank you both. You are the reason my stories end up making sense; otherwise, they’d just be incoherent words without rhyme or reason.
To my kids…I’m sorry that these last few months have been so hectic, but I promise, even if I’m typing, I’m listening and I’m trying to be present. So just know that I love you, even if my head is down and my computer is in front of me. And to my husband…I don’t even know what to say. You’ve held down the fort for months now and I can’t even begin to tell you how appreciative I am. I love you with all my heart.
And to all the readers and bloggers…thank you, thank you, thank you. You are the reason I get to do what I love.
And, of course, a special thanks to my tw
o lovely betas, Heather and Leisha. Love you gals.
BY SIDNEY HALSTON
Worth the Fight Series
Against the Cage
Full Contact
Below the Belt
Laid Out
Fighting Dirty
Stacked Up
Panic Series
Pull Me Close
Make Me Stay
Kiss Me Back (coming soon)
PHOTO: © GABRIEL ESCUDERO
SIDNEY HALSTON lives her life by one simple rule: “Just do it.” And that’s exactly what she did. At the age of thirty, having never written anything other than a legal brief, she picked up a pen for the first time to pursue her dream of becoming an author. That first stroke sealed the deal, and she fell in love with writing. Halston lives in South Florida with her husband and children.
Want to connect with Sidney Halston?
sidneyhalston.com
Facebook.com/Sidneyhalston
Twitter: @SidneyHalston
Read on for an exciting sneak peek of the next book in Sidney Halston’s Panic series:
Kiss Me Back
Available from Loveswept
Prologue
I can’t stop sweating.
With the little bit of energy I can muster, I kick off the tattered covers. It’s hot. So damn hot. Yet my teeth won’t stop chattering. I squeeze my little brown teddy bear against my chest, because it’s the only thing that’s ever given me comfort. In my mind, it still smells like the fabric softener my mother used to use. Logically, I know this isn’t possible since she died over seven years ago and my bear has mostly been washed in laundromats using generic soap, but still, I inhale deeply.
Make Me Stay: The Panic Series Page 22