Page 79 of Only Mine
Choices that were supposed to protect us both.
My phone vibrates again.
Rome:Ivy left her riding gloves here. Want me to drop them by?
I stare at the text, remembering yesterday. How Wrenley looked on that horse, tentative at first, then confident. How she laughed when Penny tried to eat her hair. How she fit against me when I helped her down, like she was meant to be there.
Through the hallway’s window, I catch movement below. Wrenley’s car pulls away from the guesthouse, heading toward town. Not headed toward the highway.
Okay, so she’s not leaving permanently. Not yet. Just ... leaving.
That fact sparks a tiny light in the dark concave of my chest.
“Papa?” Ivy’s voice comes through the door, smaller now. “Is Miss Wrenley really not coming back?”
I close my eyes. “Miss Erin starts tomorrow.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
My too smart daughter. Always seeing through the bullshit, just like her mother would have.
“I don’t know, baby.”
The crying starts again, quieter this time. Defeated. It’s so much worse than the anger.
I head back downstairs, needing to move, to cook, to do something with my hands before I do something I can’t take back, like drive to town and tell Wrenley that last night meant everything. That I’ve been slowly falling for her since she walked into my life. That Ivy isn’t the only one who needs her.
Instead, I take Ivy to a playdate to cheer her up and start prep for dinner service at my restaurant. Three hours early, but who’s counting? I dice onions with unnecessary force. The knife’s rhythm is usually meditative, but now it’s just marking time.
How long before Wrenley finds somewhere else to go or leaves town entirely? A week? Two? How long before I run into her at the Merc or Libby Jude’s and we have to pretend we’re strangers who never shared a bed, who never?—
The knife slips. Not enough to cut, but enough to remind me why I don’t cook angry. Why I built walls in the first place.
And why I never should have let Wrenley Morgan through them.
EIGHTEEN
WRENLEY
My hands won’t stop shaking on the steering wheel.
I make it three blocks from Saint’s house before I have to pull over, my breathing too threadbare to drive safely. The morning sun streams through the windshield, cheerful and bright, mocking the disaster I’ve made of everything.
You knew this would happen,I tell myself.You knew better than to get involved.
But knowing and doing are two different things, and last night I did everything I’d sworn I wouldn’t. Let him touch me. Let him inside me. Not just my body, but through all the caution I’d built, all the better sense I’d acquired, since the incident six months ago. Since everything fell apart in front of twenty million people.
I rest my forehead against the wheel, trying to steady my box breathing.In through the nose, out through the mouth.The technique my therapist taught me feels useless now, when Ican still smell him on my skin. Still feel his hands on my waist, his mouth on my?—
Stop.
As soon as I find somewhere to settle down, I’ll call my therapist. Talk this out.Figurethis out.
I force myself to drive, to focus on the road leading into downtown Falcon Haven. The town is just waking up. Shop owners are flipping signs from Closed to Open as the morning light paints everything golden. A week ago, this place saved me. The quiet. The anonymity. The blessed absence of cameras and recognition and people who think they know me because they watched me shatter on their phones.
My stomach growls, reminding me I fled before breakfast. Before Saint’s French toast and his questions and that look in his eyes that made me want a life I can’t have.
Libby Jude’s comes into view, and I find available street parking right in front of it.
