God bless her affection for dresses. I’d never been so grateful in my life for easy access. Palming her ass, I lifted her off her feet and pressed her back against the wall. In one fluid movement, I hooked my thumb in her panties, pulling them to the side, and drove my length inside her tight, wet heat.
“Bowen,” she cried, thrusting her fingers into the back of my hair.
I hadn’t left my property in days, but as she stretched around me, her legs linked behind my hips, urging me deeper, I finally felt like I was home.
“Fuck me harder, Bowen.”
Those words were kerosene. It was rough and frantic as I slammed myself into her. Every stroke was harder than the last. I silently lamented that I hadn’t taken the time to strip her bare so I could enjoy the mind-blowing view of her breasts.
“Like that?” I asked through clenched teeth, aware that with as good as it felt, I wouldn’t last long like that.
“Yes. Yes,” she chanted, dropping her head back against the wall, lost in the hunt for her release.
We’d always been good at this. Sex, fucking, making love—whatever you wanted to call it. Our bodies had been made for each other. We had been made for each other. I just needed her to remember that—even if she never remembered anything else.
With every thrust, she tightened around me, unintelligible pleas for more falling from her perfect lips, until finally an orgasm broke free inside her.
“Bowen,” she whispered with a reverence I felt in the core of my soul.
She sagged in my arms, riding out the waves of her release as mine tore through me, leaving my head spinning and my body weak in the knees.
Barely able to remain upright, I dropped both elbows to the wall and pinned her with my hips as I caught my breath.
My head was still trapped in a sexual fog when I felt a sob tear from her shoulders.
“Why can’t I stop wanting you? Why can’t I hate you like I should?” she asked through tears.
“Because you don’t hate me. That’s not who we are, baby. That’s not who we will ever be.”
She drew in a shaky breath. “See, I think that’s the problem. I don’t even know who I was, much less who I am or who I want to be.” She released her legs from around my hips and I had no choice but to lower her to the floor. “I have to go.”
My sex-induced high suddenly took a nosedive, crashing me back to reality. “Remi, stop. Let’s talk about this.”
“What else is there to say?” Ducking out from under my arm, she straightened her dress as she marched to the back door and pulled it open. She waited until the dogs had trotted inside and then bent at the knee to scoop Sugar into her arms.
“Remi,” I hissed as she hurried past me, straight out the front door.
I chased after her, still shirtless and tugging my pants up as I jogged down the driveway. “Please just…don’t go.”
She suddenly stilled and then spun on a toe to face me. “Funny, I imagine those would have been my exact words to you if someone—any-fucking-one—had thought to tell me the truth after the plane crash. But you weren’t up for talking then, were you? You walked away without ever giving me a chance.”
That should have been the moment I dropped to my knees and begged for forgiveness.
I should have apologized and groveled, filling her ears with how guilty I felt for lying to her.
I should have told her that, if time travel was an option, I would go back to the day when I was standing outside that hospital and change everything I’d done.
But all of it, every fucking word, would have been yet another lie.
I believed in fate.
I believed that we had been predestined to spend a lifetime together.
But until she faced the cold, hard reality and accepted that too, there was nothing I could do to make her stay.
Shaking my head, I stared down at her, my heart so filled with love and even more frustration. I couldn’t fucking believe that after everything we’d been through, we were right back at that crossroads.
I licked my lips and then dropped my voice. “You can run, Remi. You can move to Savannah, Egypt, or fucking Antarctica and it won’t matter. My love for you will never change and neither will my ability to sleep at night knowing wherever you are you have a heartbeat in your chest, a smile on your face, and a peace in your mind. I might have made your life a lie, but I will never as long as I live regret it.”
Her eyes flared wide, and pain crinkled her forehead. “That’s good to know. Because I’ll regret it every day for the rest of my life.”
My heart pounded against my ribs as she sprinted to her car with Sugar tight in her arms.
Everything inside me screamed for me to stop her, but my feet never moved as she backed out of my driveway.
And because I was so focused on her and my heart, which felt like it had been ripped from my chest, I never even noticed his truck parked across the street.
Remi
My hands shook as I drove home. Sugar pranced around the passenger seat, alternating between sniffing for potential crumbs in the cupholders and peering out of the window. Meanwhile, I was having a full-fledged panic attack.
What the fuck had I done? I’d told myself when I had gone over to Bowen’s house that it was for closure, that even the temporary kind was better than nothing.
Instead, I’d had sex with him.
Really fucking good sex. Hot, incredible, passion-fueled sex. The way it had always been with the two of us.
But it hadn’t changed anything. If possible, it’d made the whole shitty situation worse. There was something about hearing him say he had no regrets that felt like a bucket of acid to my fevered skin.
What was the old saying? The road to hell is often paved with good intentions. Well, if this wasn’t proof, I didn’t know what was.
I wasn’t so blinded by the deception to see what he’d tried to do. Mark, Aaron, even Dad too had only wanted to protect me. To give me back the life they’d thought I’d lost. Even if I didn’t like it, I knew somewhere deep inside they had all made that decision from a place of love. I wasn’t after profuse apologies or endless groveling. I just needed them to recognize that maybe there had been another way.
Hindsight was twenty-twenty, right?
For days, I had poured over every single detail of my past, reading everything multiple times, until I’d practically had it memorized—or technically re-memorized. I’d gotten to know, on the most intimate level, that broken woman who had been desperate for an escape from her own life. While it still didn’t feel real that she was me, I ached for the devastation she, we, I had endured.
As much as I had tried to force myself to remember her, to remember something of what I had been through, my mind was still as blank as a canvas when it came to that period of time in my life. Even knowing the heartbreaking truth of how broken I’d been hadn’t brought back a single memory. There was no spiral of anxiety or depression lurking in the shadows. I wasn’t suddenly drowning in the trauma of the past.
They had made a decision for me. One that had turned out not to even be necessary.
I might not have known who he was when I’d woken up after the plane crash, but for fuck’s sake, it had only taken me a matter of weeks to fall in love with not-so-stranger Bowen Michaels.