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Good lord. The dog was attempting to herd her back into the house.
She propped her hands on her hips and glared. “I know what you’re doing, and I don’t appreciate it any more than I appreciate what he’s doing.”
“Careful there—you’re going to hurt her feelings, and I’ve never seen a canine that can mope quite as effectively as Ollie.”
Deep down, she’d known that he’d follow her out here. She needed time to wind down, and Daniel wasn’t going to give it to her. He’d just keep pushing and prodding and steamrolling until she either caved or exploded. Right now, the latter was looking pretty damn attractive.
She spun to face him. The fact that he looked rumpled and sexy only made her crazier. It would be so incredibly easy to stop fighting and let him steamroll her. He wasn’t saying anything she didn’t want to hear. But that was the problem—she no longer trusted Daniel Rodriguez. A baby. A catastrophic leg injury. Both were world-altering events, and he’d dropped her like a hot potato after the first one. Who was to say he wouldn’t do the same thing after the other the second he stopped to think too hard about it? “You sicced your dog on me.”
“Sicced, huh?” He made a show of looking at the deliriously happy dog, which only made her want to stomp her foot like a toddler. Daniel raised his eyebrows. “Are you feeling threatened? Because Ollie here looks pretty fucking threatening right now.”
“Shut up.” He didn’t get to surprise her in the kitchen with mind-blowing sex, lay claim to her vagina, and then turn around and poke fun at her. “I need space.”
It was clearer than ever that this wasn’t working out. She’d shown up here expecting… She didn’t know what she’d been expecting. When she’d driven from Dallas, she’d been convinced he would say all the right things and then she could go back to her life, well assured that he’d be supportive in the way she envisioned. That they would be partners—long-distance partners.
Apparently that had been her delusions talking.
The truth was that Daniel wasn’t the only one to blame for things going south so quickly. She was too keyed up, and it was making her emotions flip-flop faster than even she could follow. If she’d told him to back off sexually, he would have. She was the one who’d made the first move. So the blame for that, at least, lay firmly in her court. Hope held up a hand. “Space, Daniel. Respect it or I’m getting in my car right now.”
He stopped in the middle of walking toward her. “You don’t get to throw that threat around whenever it pleases you.”
“Wrong. We aren’t dating, and we sure as hell aren’t married. I might be having your baby, but that doesn’t mean I’m yours.” She hated the way his mouth tightened with each word, but she needed to make this as cut-and-dried as she could. She’d been back in Devil’s Falls all of a weekend and it was more clear than ever why they wouldn’t work.
“That’s where you’re wrong, darling.” He leaned against the post of his front porch, looking for all the world like he wasn’t worried she’d leave. Like she was a sure thing. “You never stopped being mine.”
It was too much. She’d tried so incredibly hard to let go of the past and move on, but being back here and having him make claims on her he had no business making… She couldn’t do it anymore. “If I was really yours, you wouldn’t have left me in that hospital alone, Daniel. You would have been there when I woke up. You would have been at my side when we buried my brother. You wouldn’t have stared right through me as if I wasn’t there. You would have, I don’t know, returned a single phone call instead of letting me twist in the wind. I’d lost so much, and then you went and made sure that I lost everything.”
It hurt to say, like she was traveling back in time to that terrified eighteen-year-old girl who’d woken up an only child and watched her college track scholarship disappear before her eyes. She’d clung to the fact that at least she still had Daniel…except then she didn’t have him, either.
He flinched. “Darling—”
“Do not call me that.”
They stood there, staring at each other across a distance that should be easily crossable. If only he would take the first step, if only he’d been willing to bend just a little. He wouldn’t, though. Nothing had really changed.
Daniel straightened. “It was a mistake.”
“I know this was a mistake.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. Back then, I made a mistake. Fuck, I made more than one. We went out that night and I knew I was the designated driver, and I still had two beers.”
