Candy pulled Ren against her at the edge of the bed, drawing him into a kiss with a piercing sense of relief. She hadn’t screwed it up. She hadn’t lost him after all. This. This was what she needed. He was what she needed. And she was going to hold on tight and never let him go.
If there was something more desperate about her touch tonight, he didn’t seem to notice. If anything, he matched it. Just as ravenous. Just as frantic as he lowered her to the bed and followed her down, his weight pressing her into the softness of the comforter.
His fingertips trailed fire everywhere he touched and Candy sighed against his lips. He knew her body—the experience of a man who’d been her lover for years—but every touch was heightened tonight.
She gasped his name as her body arched on a jolt of sensation and he was there, drugging her with kisses even as his hands drove her wild. She was barely coherent, gasping words that had no meaning when he finally slid inside her. Her first orgasm rocked her, the second following so closely on the first she didn’t have time to come down. Then he was coming too, whispering words in her ear that sliced right through her—threatening to diffuse her pleasure with a bolt of terror.
“I love you, Candy.”
Then a third orgasm ripped through her scattering her thoughts, and her fears, and sending her flying.
* * * * *
“Why did you write those emails?”
Candy stiffened in Ren’s arms. She’d been trying to cling to her afterglow, bracing herself and hoping maybe they wouldn’t have to talk about the L word he’d dropped mid-coitus—then he’d sprung that question on her out of left field. “What?”
“The emails to your father that I supposedly wrote, why write them at all? I mean, I understand the first few—putting his mind at ease about our supposed marriage and keeping him from coming out to LA to meet me—but why keep it up for so many years?”
“I don’t know.” She squirmed out of his arms and dropped her feet over the side of the bed, going to the bathroom to clean herself up. She enjoyed the freedom of a partner—and a birth control—that she trusted so they didn’t have to keep diving for condoms, but the aftermath certainly was stickier.
She took longer than necessary in the bathroom, hoping he would get the hint. He usually did. Ren knew her. And he knew when not to push. Knew when she was at her limit.
Except tonight when she stepped out of the bathroom wrapped in a robe, he was sitting on the edge of the bed in a pair of boxer shorts, watching her. Music filtered to them from the reception still in progress on the other side of the house. Some sweet slow song—about love, no doubt. As if love were a cure-all pill and not the excuse people used as a get out of jail free card.
“Do you love me?”
She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry as the desert. “What?”
“It’s a simple question.”
The patience in his voice aggravated her more than anything. So calm. So understanding, but he didn’t understand at all. “It’s not simple for me,” she snapped, wrapping her arms tight around her waist. “I know your parents and grandparents had this perfect, iconic love, but I wasn’t raised that way. I still hear that voice whispering to me in my dreams about how they don’t love me and they aren’t coming for me, but when they do love you, it’s almost worse. My mother used love like a weapon, manipulating my father into abandoning Laura by threatening to take us away if he didn’t. I have never wanted to bring anyone else into the insanity of my family. I don’t ever want children—but I know you do. To me, family is a negative, but it’s everything you want. I don’t trust people—”
“You trust me.”
“I know! And it scares the shit out of me! You have to understand, Ren. That is never going to change. No matter how much I might want it to—”
“But if you want it to—”
“I can’t, Ren! I’m not like you, okay? I can’t love you like you want me to!”
The words seemed to echo in the sudden silence in the room. Even the band from the reception had stopped playing.
Ren stood, his movements wooden. “I should go.”
“What?” The exclamation escaped on a yelp.
“I need to think.” He shoved his feet into his pants and fastened them with brisk efficiency, reaching next for the shirt they’d thrown aside.
“Ren…”
She wanted to say she hadn’t meant it. Or that she had, but that it was the fear talking. The fear that she would screw things up between them. What if she didn’t know how to be in a normal, functional relationship? She’d been broken for so long, and Ren seemed to think all he had to do was wave the magic love wand and all her fears and insecurities would just float away. That fear had catapulted the words out of her mouth before she even knew what she was saying, but now she couldn’t seem to figure out how to take them back. A thousand pleas dried up in her mouth, choking her as he got dressed in silence.
His bag was already packed. He’d done it this morning when they thought the wedding might be called off. When he had his jacket on and his tie dangling loose around his neck—looking like some kind of sexy, rumpled high-end cologne ad—he dipped into the closet and collected his suitcase.
And still she couldn’t seem to speak.
He paused at the door, looking back at her with hurt in his eyes. “Would it have killed you to say it?”
The words burned on her tongue. I’m sorry. I love you. Please don’t go. But her throat was closed off and all she could do was stare, her arms still wrapped tight around her waist, trying to hold herself together as resignation entered his eyes.
He nodded once. “Goodbye, Candy.” And he was gone. Digging a hole into her chest where her heart was supposed to be.
* * * * *
Ren stood in the giant circular driveway, waiting for his Uber. He’d left Candy the rental car, which had seemed chivalrous at the time, but that was before he had to stand beneath her window for fifteen minutes waiting for the damn car and listening to the sounds of a wedding reception behind him.
He could have given her room. He could have backed down. God knew he’d been doing that for years.
Maybe he’d finally reached his limit. Or maybe it was coming to terms with the fact that Javi was never going to change and neither was Candy. Though if she wanted to…
His gaze was drawn helplessly back toward the carriage house. If she would just come outside… Or even look out the window… He just needed something from her. Some kind of sign that there was hope. That he wasn’t wasting his heart on her.
The sex had been amazing and he’d thought something was different, that something had finally broken through her walls—but then as soon as he’d opened his mouth, asking her about those damn emails where she’d outlined the life they could have together—she’d retreated at full speed.
He’d been clinging to that last shred of hope—even when he thought it was dead it would spring back to life like Lazarus refusing to die—but she was clinging to her fear just as hard. She might need him as much as he needed her, but neither of them could seem to accept what the other was offering. And if she couldn’t give him something—anything—then he needed to walk away. To give himself the space to find the strength to be done with her, because he couldn’t think for shit when she was with him.
He loved her, but she was the one who’d told him over and over again that love wasn’t a free pass.
The Uber pulled into the driveway, the lights panning over Candy’s gorgeous ancestral home. Ren spared one last look toward the carriage house, pausing, half of him hoping that she would come running out in some dramatic movie ending, begging him to stay.
And he would have stayed. He would have clung to that little shred of hope a little longer.
But the carriage house stayed dark and silent. And Ren got into the car. Driving away without a backward glance.