“A clean break. For both of us. Nothing has changed, Dylan. We still need to end this. And I think it’s better to end it now. Like we’d planned before I told you about Hoyt.”
“Everything is different now, Annie. Everything.”
“No. Nothing is different. Not one thing. You just know who I really am. This is how we end, Dylan. The only way for us to end.” He looked like he was going to argue. “Are you forgetting that Ben is down there?”
“I don’t give a shit about Ben,” he snapped.
I lifted my eyes to his and told him what I didn’t fully understand yet, that despite Ben’s crimes, the ones I knew about and the ones I didn’t, I still cared. “I do.”
And I care about you, too much to drag you off this beautiful mountain into my swamp. Even for a minute.
He stepped back, rubbing his hands through his hair. “This is what you want?”
“This is what I want.”
“Fine,” he said, stepping back again. “I’ll get Margaret. But you’re keeping that damn phone. And when I call you’re going to answer. It’s nonnegotiable.”
“Thank you,” I said.
For one long moment the attraction between us, the connection, the desire and all that lust, tied us together in a bond so strong I had no idea how we were going to break it. Maybe it couldn’t be broken. Perhaps for the rest of my life I would feel this way for this man I could not have.
Or maybe, in time, things could be different between us. I could stand up on my own two feet. Divorce Hoyt, see him punished for what he’d done, and then come back here to this mountain. To Dylan. I could pay him back the money I owed him.
I smiled through my tears, pierced by a bittersweet ache.
“There are things you still don’t know,” he said, as if he could read my thoughts. “About me. I’m still not a man to be building fantasies around.”
I shook my head, because there was nothing I could find out about him that would change how I felt. “It wouldn’t matter.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know you,” I breathed, putting my hand out to touch him, but he shrugged away. Flinched. My heart squeezed at his rejection. My eyes burned.
“No, baby. No. If I touch you,” he said in a voice like a gravel road, “you won’t leave, not for a while. So I’m not going to hug you. Or kiss you. But I want to. Leave here knowing that. I want you.”
I’d never been wanted. Maybe somewhere deep in the recesses of my mother’s heart she’d wanted me, but Hoyt certainly never had. But I believed Dylan when he said that and I held onto his want as hard as I could.
“I want you too,” I said. He nodded once, giving a heavy jerk, and then he headed for the front door. “I’ll get Margaret.”
I knew when he walked out that door he wasn’t going to be back. And that was good. Better. Easier.
My stomach churned. Feeling like I might throw up, I ran into the bathroom. But there was nothing in my body but nerves and regret and half a bottle of champagne. I splashed water on my face and washed my hands. My body smelled like sex and Dylan and I wasn’t ready to wash that away, so I resisted the siren song of the shower.
When I came back out of the bathroom, Margaret was there. Putting all the food in big Ziploc bags. And then putting the Ziploc bags in another bag.
“You all right?” she asked, watching me with narrowed, knowing eyes.
I nodded; words were really beyond me.
“Ready?”
“Yes,” I breathed. She stuck two of the bottles of wine from the fridge into the bag and some other things. Strawberries. Melon. More cheese. “Here you go,” she said, holding the bag out to me. “You got some cookies and cinnamon rolls. Some of the wine. The good prosciutto. I gave you all the fruit—you’re going to want to eat that soon, before it goes bad. Some of that cheese and a bunch of crackers.”
“I don’t…That’s…”
“Oh, it will only go to waste here, honey. You just take it.”