Breathing just as ragged as my own as he watched the car drive off before looking at me. Jaw hard and face unreadable as he stepped toward me.
“Maybe you should take me back,” I said before he could make it any closer, the words soft and all kinds of uncertain.
He didn’t respond or stop moving, just went straight past me, heading for the passenger door.
“I guess you agree then,” I whispered as I followed. Feeling more torn, more confused, than ever.
Once we were both in the truck, our soaked-through clothes getting the leather of his seats wet, I hurried to explain before he could start driving again.
Voice twisted.
Broken.
“I don’t know how to do this, Hunter. With everything going on in my life—all the baggage I’m carrying. Everything between us. You couldn’t even look at me before we got out of the truck. And then—”
“Because you lied.”
Anything else I might’ve been about to say gathered in my throat. Choking me.
He slowly looked over at me, studying me in the darkened cab as rain pounded down around us, filling the uneasy silence.
“Only give what we can,” he went on. “I got it. I understood it. But you lied then, you’re keeping it from me now, and it’s the only fucking thing I’ve wanted to know.”
My head shook as I struggled for something to say, anything. But there was nothing that would make this better.
Then he was leaning across the center console and driving his hands into my damp hair. Pulling me closer as my startled inhale filled the truck and fueled the electricity between us.
His hold was a brand and a plea as he watched me, silently begging me in those few moments before he spoke. “I know what you sound like when you’re lying, Madison. It’s damn close to what you sound like when you’re trying to make yourself believe something because they’re the same thing.”
His hands tightened for a moment, a crease forming between his brows as he seemed to war with himself.
Or maybe he could just see the fear I was desperately trying to conceal.
Because we couldn’t go there. We couldn’t go where he was trying to take us . . . and I didn’t know how to stop him.
“You did it tonight,” he said slowly, words nothing more than a rumble. “You did it the day you left.”
I tried to steel my jaw when it began trembling, but Hunter’s eyes immediately fell there. Seeing or feeling it, it didn’t matter. He caught it all the same.
After a few moments, his eyes slowly lifted to meet mine. “When someone wanted you, you came back. For me. So, Madison, please . . .” His fingers curled against my neck, pleading with that touch alone. “Tell me why you left.”
For you.
For you . . . I left for you.
My head moved in fast, tight jerks as I forced back the building tears. “I told you, I had to go.”
“Madison.” My name was a pained dejection. “There’s something you’re not telling me. There’s something that made you leave.”
“Me,” I said quickly, gripping his arms the way he was gripping me. Trying to make him understand with my touch alone that this was all I could offer him. “I left. I chose to go. I don’t know what else you want from me.”
“The truth.”
“That is the truth, Hunter,” I choked out as tears pushed through my defenses. “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell. That I wasn’t scared. That I didn’t make a mistake.”
His face creased with pain before he dropped his head. “When he asked you to marry him . . .” Hunter’s head slanted just enough so I could see his eyes. “Is that when you realized you had?”
I sucked in a staggered breath, my hands slipping farther down his forearms. The corded muscle thick and tense beneath my fingers from his pain and his barely-there restraint.
I swallowed past the jumble of answers in my throat and whispered, “I can’t give you that answer.”
“I want it.”
“You don’t,” I maintained.
“Bet,” he said firmly, a muscle feathering in his jaw as he studied my eyes. “Tell me right now you realized when your marriage fell apart, or at the fucking alter, or when he asked you to marry him. Or tell me you realized when you drove away from me—I want it, Mads, as long as it’s true.”
My head moved in faint shakes as the past screamed to be revealed, and I fought to bury it deep. “You don’t understand—”
“Madison,” Hunter groaned.
“It isn’t black and white,” I said over him. “I knew before I ever spoke to you that leaving you would be the biggest mistake of my life, but it was still my decision to go.”
Everything about him stilled.
His chest’s sharp movements. His ticking jaw. His searching gaze.
“Seattle was where I needed to be,” I continued, voice shaking. “Needed to stay. And I have Avalee because of it.” My chest lurched at the thought of not having that little girl in my life, my tears slipping faster and faster. “And in all those certainties, in the greatest joy of my life, I always knew I’d made a mistake.”
I released my hold on him to wipe hastily at my cheeks, though I wasn’t sure what was rain and what were tears at that point.
“You want a simple answer, Hunter, but there isn’t one. I made all the right choices while knowing I’d made the worst one. I never wanted to leave you, and that was evident in every thought and every part of my life.”
His shock swirled in the space between us, breathing new life to the current that had been pulling us closer and closer all night.
One of my hands fell to the console with a dull thud and a lifeless laugh left me. “You’re in my daughter’s name. You’re in the words we say to each other every night. You’re every—”
A surprised sound caught in my throat and got lost in a rumble of thunder when Hunter captured my mouth with his.
The move so sudden that it stunned me. The kiss something I’d longed for so desperately that it took a second before I realized it was truly happening. And then I was reaching for him again and falling into that kiss.
Firm and desperate. Aching and pleading. Wholly different, yet still like coming home.
Hunter’s tongue swept across the seam of my lips, seeking entrance and then taking and taking when I opened to him.
Thumbs under my jaw and tilting my head back as he kissed me with a fierceness I’d never known him to have. Tongue teasing and torturing mine until I was aching for him. One of his hands slipping down my neck and cradling me possessively as need pooled low in my belly.
I knocked off his hat and ran my fingers through his hair. Gripping tight as I playfully nipped at his lip.
A groan raked up his throat in response, raising chills along my skin and sending a shot of white-hot need through me.
He tried to pull me closer, a curse slipping free when he glanced down at the console between us and digging into my ribs. In that second before his mouth slanted over mine again, his eyes were fire and need and a love that could survive anything. All mixed with the deepest pain.
My startled gasp faded into a giggle when he pulled me over the console as if I weighed nothing at all. My grunt and muted curses when I bumped my head and kicked his steering wheel were covered by his rumbling laugh and apologies. But then I was straddling his lap, and his mouth was on mine, and everything else was forgotten.