“I just... I’m not,” I retorted, wiping my face to eliminate the evidence. “I’m, uh...”
“You just had to do that,” he muttered, pacing a few steps away. A flash of scarcely contained frustration danced across his eyes, sparking hot against the hypnotic blue before he circled back. “I only came to make sure you’re all right, Abby. I had to know that I...that nothing drove you away. I needed to make sure you made this decision on your own, that running to another continent was your idea, what you wanted,” he said, his voice now sharp and defensive, heavy with accusation. When he stared into my eyes again, his tone softened. “Then you had to go and cry.”
Once again, Nick was a study in contradictions. How does he manage to be sweet while losing his temper at the same time? How does he always put my feelings first, even when we both know I messed things up in the first place?
“I didn’t mean to,” I mumbled. “You can go. I’m fine. Really.”
&
nbsp; “I can’t leave now,” he said quietly, with an as-if kind of smirk, “not till you tell me what’s wrong. I need to fix it, Abby, make it right.”
“Nick, please! I just—”
“Not us,” he clarified quickly. “I mean, I know there’s no fixing us. I understand why you left, and I don’t blame you in the slightest. It’s really completely my fault. I just meant, I wanna fix whatever’s, uh...making you cry. I mean... Fuck! I must sound ridiculous.”
He ran his hands through his hair, looking uncharacteristically uneasy in his own skin. The legendary cool had abandoned him, and the smooth-talking charmer was nowhere to be found. There was a strange flush to his face, and I heard an unfamiliar tremor in his voice. He even seemed to be having trouble figuring out where to put his hands. Still, none of that puzzled me as much as the words he said.
“You understand why I left?” I repeated in a daze.
For a moment, his manic fidgeting stopped, and his eyes cooled rather sarcastically. “The day of the merger, right? You took off just a few hours before we would be free to stay together of our own accord...or not.” A well-deserved note of bitterness leaked through at the end, but he managed to clear his face back to neutral. “It’s fine that you don’t love me, Abby. I shouldn’t have allowed myself to believe or expect that. Still, I don’t want to put you through anything more. You’ve gone through enough for me already. Just tell me what’s the matter, what drove you all the way here, so I can—”
“You think I don’t love you?” I cut in, now taking my turn to cast an as-if smirk.
He paused, suddenly coming up short. His lips parted for a second, and a fleeting look of hope flashed across his face, only to die in his eyes like an ember splashed with ice water.
“C’mon, Abby,” he muttered. “I’m not your client anymore. You don’t have to protect me, lie to spare my feelings, or butter me up. I’m a big boy, and I’ve been dumped before.”
I took a sudden step forward, shrinking the gap between us. “For one thing, I know for a fact that’s not true, and for another...” I trailed off, unable to even blurt the ridiculousness. Finally, I managed, “Do you really think I don’t love you?”
He hesitated again before letting out a humorless laugh. “Your three-month sentence is up, Abby. Consider it time served. You’re no longer required to love me.”
“But I do, Nick. I do love you.”
Even as the syllables tumbled out, I was shocked to hear them. It was the first time either one of us had dared to confess it, those little words that had been too big for two fearless people, so powerful that they now froze Nick where he stood, like a wide-eyed statue in the setting sun. A deafening quiet rang out between us, even louder than the splashing of the tide against the beach, but he didn’t seem capable of breaking it. The paralysis went on so long that I feared he would suffocate for lack of breath.
“Uh...Nick?”
His lips parted, and I braced for the quintessential Nicholas Hunter reply, but all that came out was a quiet, bewildered voice with a mousey-sounding question: “Why would you say that?”
A literal ache throbbed deep in my chest in the wake of his vulnerability, the almost childlike innocence he exhibited in response to such a basic fact. “Nick, how could I not love you?” I asked, and this time, I reached for him without restraint. Wrapping my fingers tentatively around his wrists, I pulled him a step closer.
“But you left,” he said softly, his mask cracking for a split second, just long enough for me to see the hurt I’d caused. “If you really love me, how could you—”
“I’m sorry,” I said flatly, not ready to offer him anything more. I certainly couldn’t explain my real reason, couldn’t possibly tell him that I panicked over my unspoken pregnanancy. At the very least, I could apologize, and I owed him that, because the last thing I ever meant to do was pour any hurt into those beautiful eyes of his. “I-I shouldn’t have done it, just run away,” I said, the words tumbling out of me faster than I anticipated. It was as if a dam had burst, releasing a flood of insecurity. “Nick, what we were doing was...crazy. Not only that, but the whole city was in on it. That hotel was full of all your father’s guests, and I just didn’t think I could take being paraded around in front of them again, another giant spectacle—”
He interrupted by closing the distance between us and pulling me into his arms. His entire body relaxed in utter relief as he held me against him, breathing lightly into my hair. “I know,” he said softly. “I know.”
It felt so good to let all that out, even if it wasn’t everything he was entitled to know. It was really only a half-truth; the other half was growing within my body and hiding deep in my mind. Still, there was truth there, to some degree, and I had to do something to remedy the pain I had caused.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, burying my face in his chest. “I couldn’t... I just couldn’t—”
A hand came up to stroke the back of my hair, soothing away the panic and lulling me into a reassuring calm as I breathed in silent gasps of his intoxicating scent. “Don’t be sorry,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For putting you through all that.” His arms tightened, crushing me even closer still. “Abby, you should’ve told me. If I knew, I would have found a way to get you out of it. I could’ve told them you had food poisoning or something.”
I pulled away and let out a sudden laugh, remembering my own evasive plan. “I taught you well, grasshopper.”