“But this is ridiculous. We’re still working off a ten-year-old agreement that was made up of shattered hearts that have long since healed. And I can’t do it anymore.”
All the blood drained from his face. My name left him on a harsh breath.
“I want you,” I said as the tears I’d fought against spilled down my cheeks. “I know we want the same thing, but you won’t let us have that. You’ve spent so long thinking you can only have a life with someone else that you’ve forced yourself to believe you have to keep waiting for her.” I flung an arm out to the side. “She isn’t here, Hunter. Madison isn’t coming back. And you deserve a life, you deserve to let yourself be with someone.”
“I tried,” he said softly. “It wasn’t real. It wouldn’t be real if I tried again.”
“Piper?” I said with a scoffing laugh. “She was a horrible person who didn’t love you, Hunter. She loved the idea of you and how she could use your career. I’m not her.”
“I’ve never thought you were. But she and I weren’t real because I couldn’t love her either.” His fingers pressed to his chest before falling. “This hasn’t belonged to me for a long time. It isn’t mine to give. You deserve to be loved wholly. Completely. And I can’t love you that way. I can’t give you what you want.”
I steadied my jaw when it trembled and forced myself to stand tall. “You can. You just won’t.” I turned, my hands gripping the granite of the island as my stare darted blindly over the ingredients I’d pulled out. “You’re keeping yourself trapped in the past, Hunter. You’ve locked yourself to her and a relationship that ended over a dozen years ago. And I get it . . . Cayson came back, and it renewed this hope in you that Madison might too. But you’re depriving yourself of a life and a future when she’s probably off living hers.”
I grabbed one of the bags only to drop it and push away from the counter. Turning for the bedroom where my clothes were and sidestepping Hunter when he reached for me.
But I only got a few steps past him when my own words replayed in my mind and stopped me cold.
“. . . depriving yourself of a life and a future . . .”
“Or maybe I’m the one doing that,” I whispered, horror and pain coating the words. “If I didn’t work for you, would you have found someone else by now?”
Shock rippled from him and slammed into me. “What?”
“Would you have let yourself actually love them . . . be with them . . . plan a future? Even though they weren’t Madison?”
“Izzy, what the fuck?” he growled as he turned me around, his voice pure gravel.
“I know the future you want.” Tears built so fast that I had to drop my head when Hunter turned into a blur. “You’ve told me so many times.”
A&M.
Madison.
This ranch.
Kids . . .
I swallowed back the cry building in my throat and wiped away the tears before forcing myself to meet his worried and confused stare. “Do you keep telling me to find someone—are you trying to force us to remain in the past—because I can’t have children?”
Hunter’s chest pitched. He looked sick and infuriated and distressed all at once, the emotions flashing across his face too quickly for one to take hold.
He stepped forward, reaching for me.
I stepped back, my head shaking wildly as a sob burst from me.
Before I could take another, before I could beg him not to touch me or to just put me out of my misery with the truth, he grabbed me in another one of those too-fast moves.
His long fingers wrapped around my wrists. The hold somehow both firm and gentle as he pulled me closer until my arms were pinned between us.
His face creased with pain as his eyes searched mine. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” he breathed as his hands slid up my arms and over my shoulders. “If you honestly think for one damn minute that I wouldn’t be with you because you can’t have children, then you don’t know me at all. Isabel, there are other ways to have kids.”
By the time he finished, I was openly crying.
I didn’t realize until his thumb brushed at the tears falling down my cheeks that he was touching me.
Touching me.
Large hands cradling my face and holding me tenderly. Not trying to remove where I’d left my hands resting against his chest, his heart beating in the same wild rhythm as my own.
“If you weren’t in my life, there wouldn’t be anyone else,” he said softly, as if anything above a whisper would shatter the moment. “Because there’s no one else I trust. There’s no one else who understands me the way you do. Who pushes and infuriates the hell out of me. Who throws food at me when they’re mad and stays up all night talking to me.”
I wanted to revel in what he was saying. I wanted to soak it all up, memorize his words. But I could hear the way his voice drifted, preparing for that dreaded word . . . and it made me want to rip myself away from him before it could fall from his lips.
“But that doesn’t change anything. The last thing I ever want to do is hurt you, but I won’t lie to you either. I know Madison was it for me.”
“She isn’t—”
“I know,” he said earnestly. “Izzy, I know Madison isn’t coming back. But she was my future, she was my everything. Time doesn’t change that. It doesn’t take away this hole in my chest. And I can’t give you what isn’t there. That’s why I want you to find someone who looks at you and sees their everything.”
Hunter was right, but he was also so incredibly wrong.
Because I’d had that. Long ago . . .
Dean was a hole in my chest that never fully healed. But Hunter had formed himself in that hollow somewhere along the way, filling up more of it than I’d ever imagined a man would again.
But just because the hole would remain, it didn’t mean I couldn’t move on with my life. That Hunter couldn’t.
It didn’t mean that whoever we fell in love with next would be loved by us less.
“What do you see?” I challenged gently.
I’d never seen him look so terrified.
He looked afraid to say what I meant to him. Afraid to acknowledge that I’d filled up those hollow parts of his chest the same way he had mine.
Only, I couldn’t be sure if he was afraid of admitting it to himself, or of getting my hopes up and then letting me down when he couldn’t “love me the way I deserved.”
Because I’d never been more sure than I was at that moment that he loved me too.
“I am here. I am right here in front of you.”
“Izzy,” he whispered pleadingly as if begging me not to do this to him.
To us.
His thumbs made another pass across my tear-stained cheeks, and I slowly reached up to clasp my fingers around his wrists. Reversing a position we’d found ourselves in so many times. Tearing at my chest and destroying the parts of my soul that called out to him as I pulled his hands away.
“You’re the best boss and my favorite person, and you will continue to be both.”
Panic saturated his expression at the slight emphasis on the last word. Denial and fear ripped through his eyes and had his hands flexing beneath mine.