Sinful Love (Sinful Nights #4)

“You’ve got it wrong, Michael. Because you understand love on this powerful, intense level. That’s your strength, but it’s also your weakness. To you, love is an all-or-nothing proposition.” She moved her hand back and forth like a pendulum. “You love Dad; you don’t love Mom.”

He scoffed. “Of course I don’t love her. How could I?”

She sighed and squeezed his arm. “All I’m saying is you feel everything in your bones, in your marrow. And it’s not conceivable to you that love can be more than one person, more than one thing. Like how you felt about Brent and how angry you were with him.”

Michael flashed back to his reaction when Shannon told him she was together again with Brent. He hadn’t been happy, and he’d told Brent as much. But he’d softened eventually. He’d welcomed Brent into the family because of the man’s deep love for his sister. “But we’re good now. Brent and I get along.”

“And I am so, so glad. But my point is this—right now with Annalise, you’re stuck in All-or-Nothing Michael Land. You’re the Michael who hated Brent and only saw him one way.”

“And what way am I seeing things?”

“You think it’s either you or Julien. But the fact that Annalise loved her husband is actually a damn fine thing,” Shannon said, staring pointedly at him. “It says something about her character that she never strayed from him, and had the strength to turn away from you and give him all she had during their marriage. But you’ve somehow twisted that positive into proof that her heart is finished, and she can’t possibly care for you.”

“Fine,” he grumbled, flashing back to what she’d told him about the photos of him. The album of their days together long ago, and the new pictures too. And while Annalise had shared so many moments with her husband, she’d shared so much with him too. Michael had been her first love, her first kiss, the first person to make her soar in pleasure. “Maybe I have. But still…”

She raised a finger, stopping him. “You have, and what I hope you can start to see is that it’s possible to love two people deeply, madly, and truly.”

He narrowed his eyes. “How? How can you say that?”

Her next words came out in a soft breath. “I love two people deeply.”

He arched an eyebrow in question. As far as he knew, Brent was it for her—her one and only. Her first love and her last love, and she hadn’t fallen for anyone in between. “Who?”

“Brent,” she said, raising her chin, saying his name matter-of-factly. “I loved Brent in college for who he was then—a goofball, a funny guy, my sunshine hero. He’s the same man, and yet he’s also completely different. And I fell in love with the man he is now. A strong man, the guy who makes me laugh, a soon-to-be great father, my biggest supporter. The one.”

“But he’s the same man,” Michael said, trying to make sense of his sister’s strange theory.

She nodded. “I know. Of course he’s still the same person, and yet…he’s also not. He’s different now than he was the first time we were together, and I loved him then, and I also fell in love with him again. With the man he is today,” she said, stopping for a beat.

In her silence, a bird chirped in a tree, and somewhere on the other side of the cemetery, footsteps crunched on stone, and he spotted others visiting headstones, too. These moments surrounding him—of life and death and love and memory—tugged at everything inside him, yanking on all his heartstrings. “Okay, so maybe that’s similar to how I feel for her.”

“And how she feels for you,” Shannon added. “But you have to rethink your all-or-nothing view of her. Because she’s falling in love with you now, too.” She poked him in the chest for emphasis. “She loved you then, and she loves you now, and you’re fixated on what came in between. You need to let it go, because it’s foolish to think there’s only one great love.”

“There is for me,” he protested, but it was fainter this time, and his words seemed to hold less weight than they had before. Was she right? Was he proving his own theory wrong by falling in love with her all over again, but with the woman she was today?

“The girl she was at sixteen and the woman she is today are the same, but they’re different.” She ran a hand across her round belly. “And look at me. I love both of my babies. I love the baby I lost and the baby inside me,” she said in a broken whisper. Then she held his gaze. “We have so much more capacity for love than we let ourselves feel when we’re grieving.”

He exhaled, then inhaled, letting her words expand and dig roots inside him. He knew she was right. He knew she was onto something. And he knew he needed to get out of his own way and let this love take shape.

*

Later, he met Sophie and Ryan for a drink at the Chandelier Bar after a fundraiser for a children’s charity.

“Did you ask Annalise to come to the wedding?” Sophie asked once they ordered.

Michael shook his head.

Sophie pouted. “You’re going to ask her, though?”

He shrugged but chased it with a probably. He needed to figure out what to say to her about so many things.

“Well, when are you seeing her again?”

“I honestly don’t know. She doesn’t get away much, since she helps take care of her mother. Unless it’s for work.”