Something moved through his face. Relief, maybe, then…something else. Something more complicated I couldn’t quite place.
"Good," he said quietly.
"I know how this works, Wyatt. No one has to know. We agreed."
He looked closely at me. Swept his eyes over my face, down to my kiss-bruised lips, down my body.
I let him look.
“You’re so fuckin’ pretty,” he murmured. His brow furrowed. “So fuckin’ young.”
I wanted to tell him to stop doing that—to stop feeling guilty—but he pushed himself off the bed and walked toward the bathroom. I heard the water run…heard him splash some on his face. When he came back, the condom was gone, but he didn’t get dressed.
He pulled the blankets aside and got under them, then he held them open.
I snuggled underneath with him.
He didn’t say another word, and I was fading fast. We’d worked hard today…and even harder tonight. Sleep came over me quickly, undeniable, and my eyes fluttered shut as I rested my head on his shoulder, my hand on his chest.
He kept saying this was wrong, but I was in his bed. We were naked. He’d just spent well over an hour making me come…and he’d taken my virginity.
As long as I didn’t tell a soul, this was happening.
For how long? I had no idea.
SEVEN
Wyatt
I was up before five.
Old habit. The ranch didn't care what you'd been doing the night before and neither did my body, which had been waking at four forty-five since Iraq and showed no signs of stopping. I lay there for a minute in the dark listening to Haven breathe and thought about a lot of things I wasn't going to think about, and then I got up.
I made coffee. Scrambled eggs, thick-cut bacon from the pack in the fridge, toast from the bread my mother had left on the counter two days ago. Simple. Something to do with my hands.
February fourteenth was usually the worst day of the year and the day after wasn't much better. Eighteen years of it. I knew the shape of it by now—the weight that sat on my chest from the moment I woke up, the way Ethan's face showed up in the edges of things, the particular flavor of guilt that never quite went away no matter how many cigarettes I smoked for him or how many times I told myself I'd done everything I could.
This year had been different.
This year I'd spent most of it with my hands on Haven Sinclair—which was its own kind of problem—but it was a problem that had kept me so thoroughly out of my own head thatI hadn't come up for air until right now, standing at my stove in the gray February morning.
I didn't know what to do with that.
She stirred about fifteen minutes after I started cooking, and I caught it from the corner of my eye—the shift of blankets, her arm coming up over her face. I kept my back to her and kept moving the eggs around the pan and waited.
Heard her shift…heard her move the blankets.
“Mornin’,” I said, not looking at her.
I couldn’t.
She looked too good naked, and I wouldn’t be able to keep cooking. The eggs would catch fire.
“Morning,” she said.
I heard her move again and I cleared my throat. “You stay right there.”
She stopped moving. “What?”
