“You’re not making any sense.”
“Have you been having second thoughts about us since I left?”
Second, third, and fourth, but she didn’t want to hurt him by admitting as much. “We both needed time to think, right? Isn’t that what your trip back to L.A. was all about?”
“So you need more time to decide whether I’m right for you?” He sounded incredulous when he asked, “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I’m telling you we can’t rush into anything.” Though she had rushed back into bed with him, which she now acknowledged may have been a mistake. “We did that once before, remember? Within a week of meeting each other, we were inseparable. Within a few months I was pregnant.”
She must have winced when she said it because he asked, “You think I regret that? Getting you pregnant?”
She’d always wondered if they would have stayed together as long as they had if it hadn’t been for their children. “I don’t know how you feel, Gunnar. You always kept your feelings pretty close to the vest.”
“I am not having this conversation over the phone,” he said, looking irritated. “Just know that I don’t have a single regret about being a dad. And I wouldn’t want anyone else as the mother of my children.”
“Good to know.”
“What the hell?” he asked, his features softening. “How did we get back here? Suspicious. Questioning everything.”
“I don’t know.” But she did know. She’d always questioned her relationship with Gunnar when they were apart. She wasn’t proud of her insecurities, but this man always seemed to bring them out. “Maybe I wasn’t cut out for a relationship like this.” Which was the reason she’d moved to Vista Falls in the first place…. intent on finding someonenormal.
“No. You don’t get to check out on me now. Not after all we’ve been through. Damn it, Gi. We made progress while I was there. I opened up to you in a way I never have before. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”
She heard the desperation in his voice and it cut her to the quick. She didn’t want to hurt him, but she couldn’t risk getting hurt again either. “It does. But—”
“No, no buts. You can’t feed me some bullshit line about how we’re not right for each other. ’Cause you’re the only thing in my life, aside from our kids, that does feel right to me.”
That was the difference between them. She’d finally managed to fit the pieces of her life together. She had a home she loved in a town she loved with a few new friends and a job she enjoyed. The only thing missing in her life was a man to love her and Gunnar taught her a long time ago how to live without that.
“You’re trying desperately to hold on to your past,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “Because you’re afraid of what the future holds. For the first time ever, you’re dissatisfied professionally and because your whole identity is wrapped up in what you do—”
“What the hell are you, a shrink now? You’re really going to sit there and try to psychoanalyze me?”
She knew he was angry. That was always his response when someone told him he couldn’t have something he wanted… not that it happened often. “No, I’m just a woman who knows you and is trying to help.”
“You want to help me? Tell me you’ll still be there, loving me, waiting for me, when I sort this shit out.”
Waiting for Gunnar was the story of her life. “I can’t make any promises and neither can you. How about we both just agree to do what we have to do to make ourselves happy? Maybe then we can figure out whether we’ll finally be able to make each other happy.”
