He shook his head. “I should have stayed away. I should have listened to your dad and your friends and this whole town when they told me I’d bring nothing but destruction into your life.”
In the background, the music got louder. Laughter and celebration was echoing from one end of the estate to the other. The Abbott family was having the time of their lives while mine felt like it was ending. Again. Some stories just kept repeating themselves.
“You brought more of the good stuff to my life than anyone else ever has,” I said, looking at him so he could see how serious I was. When he wouldn’t turn his head, I knew I had two options: I could leave and try to put all of this into a sealed folder marked The Past, or I could stay and ask all my questions until I didn’t have any more. I went with the latter option before realizing I’d made my decision. “Why did you come back?”
Boone rolled his head to one side, then the other. “I decided I didn’t care about the Ford thing. Or which of us was the father.” He wasn’t looking at me, but when my eyebrows lifted as high as they’d go, he added, “Okay, so I might have cared, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from being with you and being a father to that baby.”
“And what was your plan? To marry me and move me into a two-bedroom house in the country?” I asked, scooting just a bit closer.
“Actually, yeah, it pretty much was.”
My face ironed out. “Oh, Boone, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that . . .” I hadn’t meant to tease him, but he’d clearly taken it like I had. “But were you really?”
“I still have the microscopic-sized-diamond ring to prove it.”
Good-bye, beating heart. It was nice knowing you. Hopefully the vultures enjoy the taste of bitterness. “I guess you didn’t make it to the house part then.”
“Actually . . .”
“Oh, God, Boone. Tell me you didn’t . . .”
“It’s okay. It all worked out.” He shrugged like none of this was any big deal. Like him buying an engagement ring and a house to marry his teenage girlfriend who may have been knocked up with his childhood nemesis’s baby was what anyone else would have done. “It was actually my uncle’s place, but he’d been trying to sell it for years, and it was such a project. No one wanted to put the time and effort into it. He worked out a rent-to-own thing with me and handed over the keys.”
That was when Clara Belle Abbott started to cry. Again. Round 2. It didn’t quite hit the body-rocking-sob territory, but it came close. Finally, I had Boone’s attention.
“This is all so damn unfair,” I cried, wiping at my face with the back of my arm, but it was no use. The tears were on full-bore. “I think I might want to go back to the way I believed things were before. I think I’d rather have my opinion of you being an asshole back, rather than this new one of you being prepared to spend your life with the person you thought cheated on you, raising a child that may or may not have been yours.”
He nodded, looking like he was wrestling with the choice to wrap his arms around me or keep his distance. God, I knew that feeling too well. I’d been steeped in it this whole week.
“I think it might be easier for me too,” he said, going with the wrapping-his-arm-around-me option. “If I still thought you were that other person.”
“I’m sorry about the house, Boone.” I was still crying, so I didn’t know how he was able to understand what I was saying, but he did.
“It turned out okay. Really.” He nudged me gently, rubbing circles on my back. “It’s the one you were in a few days ago. It took me five years to turn it into something decent, but it worked out. The ring though?” I felt his shoulders rise. “Maybe I should have tried to return it or pawn it or hell, throw it into the river, but I couldn’t.”
“Why?” I sniffed.
“I guess I wanted to hold on to some part of you. You were right about that the other night, about me holding on to a piece of you. I’ve tried letting it go. God, I’ve tried, but I just can’t.”
“I’ve tried too. Same result.” The tears were slowing, though they hadn’t stopped. “So where does that leave us?”
Beside me, Boone took a deep breath. I never heard him let it out. “In the exact same fucking spot.”
My body froze, but that beating thing inside me froze faster. “Which is?”
That was when Boone let out the breath he’d been holding. “Nowhere. It leaves us nowhere.” He pressed a quick kiss to my temple before standing and moving for my open bedroom window.
“So that’s it?” I popped up in place too, feeling like I was playing a game of tug-of-war I could never win. “You’re leaving and all of this is just going to haunt us for the rest of our lives?”
Boone paused with his hand on the window frame. “Where should it leave us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe with a second chance?”