Chapter Twenty-two
Abby woke just as dawn was breaking. The air was cool on her nose and outside the wind howled, but here, under the covers with Tucker, she was warm.
She was warm and content and so in love that there was no turning back now. If that had even been a consideration before, it was long gone. Especially after the night they’d just shared. She and Tucker had connected on a level she’d never thought possible.
She knew he loved her. He might not have said the words, but she knew. It was in the way he touched her—as if she was a breakable. In the way his eyes watched her while his mouth was on her. The way he held her face and kissed her with a tenderness that had brought tears to her eyes. It was in the way he held her and caressed her temple.
They’d talked with their hands, their bodies and with their eyes. The words weren’t said, but they were there. Just beneath the surface. Waiting for the right moment.
And Abby was willing to wait. For Tucker, she would do that.
Gingerly turning over so that she faced him, her heart swelled watching him sleep. God, he looked so young. So incredibly young and alive. She grinned. And sexy.
He’d let his hair grow out over the last month so it curled over his ears, teased his neck, and long waves swept over his forehead. Gently she pushed them back, her fingers tracing his sculpted cheeks, strong jaw, until they rested on his lips.
Man she loved his lips.
Reaching forward she swept a kiss across them and then held her breath when she felt him move.
His hands snaked around her waist, and he snuggled into her neck. “Hey,” Tucker murmured, his whiskers making her shiver as they scraped across her skin.
“Good morning,” she managed to say. His hands moved downward and cupped her butt intimately against him.
“This is nice,” he said, mouth against her neck.
“Really nice,” she answered, squirming a bit because the desire, it was already burning hot.
But Tucker didn’t. He stayed there, nose buried in her neck, hands holding her close to him. They laid together like that for a long time, each breathing the other in until dawn became full blown morning.
Eventually, Tucker moved a bit and rested his elbow on the pillow so he could prop his head, his eyes unreadable, but intense.
“Are you all right?” Abby asked, carefully, her body suddenly tense. It never ceased to amaze her how emotions ebbed and flowed, rushing and then disappearing. What was going on behind those eyes?
“I’m better than all right,” he answered, a slow grin creeping over his face, making her insides melt all over again.
“You’re amazing. Do you know that?” Tucker said softly.
Abby shrugged. “I’ve been told once or twice.”
He laughed—outright chuckled—and the sound made her feel as if she could fly. When it fell away to nothing, she couldn’t take her eyes off of him.
“Last night was…” he said. There was that wicked grin again.
“Yeah.” She blushed at the thought of some of the things she’d done to him. With him. For him.
“So this is really happening. Us,” Tucker said quietly.
For a second Abby couldn’t speak. So she nodded and closed her eyes, hoping the tears that pricked the corner of her eyes weren’t visible. But one slipped down, and she felt his touch as he slowly wiped it away.
“Abby.”
“I’m fine,” she managed. She was more than fine. She was more than everything that she thought being with Tucker would be.
“Tell me about Marley.”
Oh. God.
Abby’s eyes flew open and Tucker’s hand froze. Where the hell had that come from?
It was surprise that sat in Tucker’s eyes, that much was clear, and Abby cleared her throat, reaching for his hand.
“Tucker, I don’t….I’m sorry, I…”
But what to say? She knew about the nightmares and insomnia that had haunted him for months after Marley disappeared. She knew that he’d taken a vacation from life. She knew that for a while, he’d drank himself to sleep every single night. She also knew they weren’t the picture-perfect couple that the press had touted them to be, but then who was? She knew those kinds of things.
But she knew nothing about Marley. Not really. Not the stuff that mattered.
Tucker exhaled and drew her into his arms so that her back was to his chest, her head once more tucked under his chin. Her eyes moved to the window, to the snowflakes slowly making their way down from the sky. So white. So Fluffy. So perfect.
“I met Marley in college and uh, I think it’s pretty safe to say that she didn’t like me at first. Mainly because I was an arrogant shit, but mostly because I put the moves on her while being involved with someone else. I was young and stupid and kind of wild, but I saw something in Marley. Some intense and focused part of her that somehow fit.”
For a few moments, there was only the wind outside. Only Tucker’s long, steady breaths.
“Our families didn’t want us to get married. Especially my mother. They thought we were too young. And when I think back now, I can see why. We were too young. Just out of college. But Marley always had this way of talking people into accepting her point of view. She was relentless. It’s why I could never win an argument with her. I would give up, and she’d spend the next hour talking. God, that girl…she liked to argue.”
He kissed the top of Abby’s head. “I guess that’s something you have in common.”
Abby didn’t say anything, she just settled in to listen. She knew in her heart that Tucker sharing all of this meant something. It meant that he was finally letting her inside the one part of him that he’d closed off. And she couldn’t lie to herself. It hurt to hear him talk about a woman he’d loved. A woman who had been his first love.
It hurt to think that if Marley was still here…that if her young life hadn’t met a tragic end, the two of them would still be together.
“It’s been over three years, and I’ve had time to think Abby. Time to remember things. And one of the things I loved most about Marley was that she lived life like there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow. Everything that she did, she did full tilt. One hundred percent all in. It’s as if she knew that she wasn’t going to be around for long, and I’d be a liar if I didn’t say that it could be exhausting at times..”
His hand tightened, just underneath her breast and his breathing changed. “She wanted a kid. As young as she was, she wanted a kid real bad.”
Abby bit her lip. She heard the pain in his voice and it seeped into her.
“That was one argument I didn’t let her win. Hell, we’d only been married a few months when she first brought it up. I wanted to live without the responsibility of a kid. I wanted us to do things. Travel. Go to Europe. Snorkel off the coast of Australia. Spend some of that damn Simon money sitting in the bank, but…”
“Tucker we don’t have to…you don’t have to tell me this stuff.”
“No,” he said, voice rough. “It feels good to get it out. There are things I haven’t told anybody. Not even Teague and he pretty much knows everything.”
He paused.
“She lied to me. She stopped taking the pill, and she didn’t tell me, and she got pregnant.”
Abby stilled. This was big. It was big and heavy, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“No one in the family knew, because I was so f*cking angry that I didn’t tell anyone. We fought about it, a lot, and at first she denied everything. Said it was an accident. That we were that one percent it happened to. But Christ, I knew. Looking into her eyes, I knew and that was the one time I wasn’t giving in. No way was I letting her win that one. After a while, she realized the lie was useless and she finally came clean. But the damage was done, you know? How could I trust her after that?”
He sighed. “In the end, it didn’t really matter. She lost the baby at fourteen weeks. It was a little boy.” He was quiet for a second. “Shit, I didn’t know I wanted him until he was gone.”
“Oh, Tucker,” Abby whispered, burrowing into him. Wrapping her arms around his and holding him.
“Things weren’t exactly settled afterward. I was still trying to figure her out. Figure out how she could lie like that. About a month after she lost the baby, she got that call to head out with a team to investigate a bunch of beached whales. It was early. A Sunday morning. I remember she tugged on my arm. Wanted me awake. She asked me to give her a lift to the airport. But I’d been out with a couple of the guys the night before, something I’d been doing a lot of that last month or so. My head was pounding, and I was pissed off that she’d woke me up.”
His hand was in Abby’s hair.
“That’s all I remember. I didn’t look at her. I didn’t kiss her goodbye. She mumbled something like, ‘we need to talk when I get back’. And that was it. That’s the last time I heard her voice, other than in my nightmares.”
Abby slowly turned around, her heart aching with the pain that she saw on his face.
“It’s not your fault, you know,” Abby said softly.
“No,” Tucker replied. “But sometimes it feels like it.”
“Do you…” God, was Abby really going to go there right now? “Do you still love her?”
Breath held, Abby stared up into the eyes of the man who owned her heart, waiting for him to say something. But moments ticked by, long moments filled with a heavy silence.
“I…” He blew out a hot breath.
Say something.
Tucker looked tortured. There was no other word for it.
She whispered, “it’s okay.”
He made a sound that came from deep inside his soul.
“Abby.”
And then his mouth was on hers and she wrapped her hands in that long hair of his and gave him what he needed. Love.
She kissed him, pouring every ounce of feeling that she had into that kiss. When his tongue plunged inside her mouth, she answered in kind. It quickly became an aggressive, almost frantic joining.
Their lips. Their bodies. Their minds and their souls.
Tucker whipped the covers off of them and the cool air hit her hot, sweaty skin, but it didn’t matter. It was brighter outside, and she feasted on the sight of him. How his muscles strained as his arms cradled her, how the tendons in his neck corded when he raised himself over her.
When he slid inside Abby, when she felt that hot, throbbing length of him buried inside her body, she pulled him close. If she could have crawled inside him she would have. She would have done anything for him. She bucked her hips and met his thrusts, their mouths once more entwined.
There were no words. No soft moments, no slow sensual caresses. There was only need and want and a connection that she didn’t want to ever break.
As Tucker’s thrusts became harder, faster. As her insides began to pull and her orgasm pressed hard. As their sweat soaked bodies slid against each other—their rhythm perfect, the friction erotic—Abby strained against his mouth, her heart full and near to bursting.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Over and over she heard those words inside her head.
Only afterward as she laid in his arms, both of them trying to catch their breath did she think that maybe one of them had said those words out loud.