Page 53 of Sincerely, Mr. Braden

Chapter Eighteen

Seth

Twenty-plus hours of travel, and I still can’t outrun the need to see Ell—Taylor. I don’t even remember the drive from JFK airport, just the thrum of adrenaline and the voice in my head that still won’t shut up, telling me I should’ve stayed in Australia. I should’ve called. I should’ve done anything but this.

Elbows resting on my knees, eyes trained on the concrete beneath my feet, I wring my hands, asking myself for the hundredth time what the hell I’m doing sitting on this cold porch step in the misting rain.

Headlights sweep across my legs. I look up as Ellie’s—Taylor’s—car pulls into the driveway. Her profile flashes through the window, and my chest damn near caves in. I push to my feet, drawn to her like fire chasing wind as she climbs out of her car.

She freezes, startled hazel eyes locked on mine, the worry in them sharp enough to cut through the dark. “Seth? What are you doing here?”

“I don’t fucking know” rips angrily out of me. “I couldn’t work. I could barely fucking think. Then I got your resignation letter, and damn it, Ellie—Taylor.” I grit out a curse. “For the first time in my life, I have no clue what I’m doing.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, blinking fast. “You have every reason to hate me.”

“I don’t fucking hate you.” My hands fist at my sides. “It’d be easier if I did, but I dwelled on that lie you told me. I thought about every time you let me call you Ellie and how the truth felt like a knife in my heart, and none of it made me want you any less. I hate that you lied to me, but I could never hate you.”

“I hate that I lied to you,” she shouts.

“Damn it, El,” I snarl. “I’m not fishing for an apology. I know you hate it, and I get why you lied. I want to find that asshole who scared you and beat him to a pulp. What’s the fucker’s name? Where is he now?”

“He moved away years ago and ended up in jail for assaulting someone.” She looks nervously at her neighbor’s houses. “Can we do this inside, please?” She blows past me without waiting for a response.

The second we’re through the door, I can’t stop moving. I pace the living room, taking in her world—soft blankets on the couch, sketchbooks on the coffee table, a dog bed by the fireplace, another dog bed by the tidy kitchen, and a third right inside the door of her office. My gaze sweeps over a clock, family photos, and other pictures on the walls as she peels off her coat and tosses it on a chair beside a reading lamp. The whole place feels warm, lived in. As real and enticing as she is. The ache digs in, and that pisses me off. I’m too angry. She doesn’t deserve this. “I shouldn’t’ve come,” I say more to myself than to her.

“You’re right,” she snaps. “You should’ve stayed in Australia and finished your work. Oh my God, Seth, you gave up Kubla Khan? Great. Now I’ve ruined that, too.”

The pain in her voice stops me in my tracks. “You didn’t ruin it.”

“I did,” she shouts.

“Damn it, Ellie—”

“No, please. You cut me off last week. Now I get to say my piece.” Her voice trembles, but she pushes through it, her voice escalating. “I shouldn’t have slept with you without telling you who I was. That was wrong, and I take full responsibility. I shouldn’t have let it get that far, but I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“I know,” I say too sharply.

“Good, but you don’t know that I was crushing on you for years, and maybe that was wrong, too, but it’s not like I could help it.”

I exhale roughly, half-disbelieving and hurting and wholly wanting her. “I had no idea.”

“You weren’t supposed to!” she fires back. “You were my client. It’s wrong of me to even think of you that way. But you were this incredible person, an untouchable version of everything I admire. Not your money or the things you have, but your love for your family and your willingness to drop everything for them. The way you catch a business idea out of midair and run with it at three in the morning. I loved getting those messages. Your excitement came through in every single one of them. And then suddenly you were standing there in front of me, and you were…you, and I made the biggest mistake of my life.”

Her words fly like accusations, but they’re confessional bullets cutting me to my core. My chest constricts, every heartbeat hitting harder, every word landing too damn close to the truth.

Her eyes well with tears. “I didn’t know how to tell you the truth without losing the connection to the one good thing in my life, the one person I looked forward to hearing from day or night.” She gasps a breath, then rolls her eyes. “God, I sound pathetic, looking forward to emails and texts from a man who thought I was someone else.”

My chest constricts. “You don’t sound pathetic.”

“Yes, I do. And that’s not all,” she says shakily. “Want to know why I left the island early? When you said you were starting to understand your brothers and sister falling for their significant others so fast, I got scared.” Her lower lip quivers, but she lifts her chin and holds my stare. “I promised myself I wouldn’t get close to anyone after Cody left me at the altar.”

“That asshole left you at the altar?” Now I have two people I want to knock the shit out of.

“Yes, only he wasn’t an asshole,” she fumes. “I was. He ran because I was too fucked up from my mother abandoning my family. I loved him too hard. I wanted to fill every gap in his life so he’d never have a reason to leave. I was too much. I would’ve been too much for anyone. I spent eight years building walls that I thought were strong enough to keep everyone out, but you blew right past them.”

She looks away, swiping at tears. “When you said what you did, I knew if I stayed, we’d get even closer, and it would hurt us both that much more when I came clean. And if by some miracle we made it through that, I was pretty sure I’d screw it up some other way. I wanted to spare you that nightmare.”

My heart cracks open, and I go to her, battling my own hurt and the bone-deep ache to take her pain away. “Why didn’t you tell me that instead of leaving?”