Page 36 of Waiting for You

The door swung open.

I hadn't gotten the room number wrong.

The woman in the doorway was tall, a few inches over me. Slim, with a waterfall of ink-black hair spilling over her bare shoulders and flawless tan skin. Breathtakingly gorgeous. She wore a crimson lace nightgown, a red chosen on purpose, and she looked me over, her chin tilting up as her dark brows pinched together in a flash of irritation before smoothing into polite boredom.

My mouth opened to stammer out an apology.

Before a word escaped, heavy footsteps echoed from deep inside the suite.

Xavier appeared behind her shoulder. He wore low-slung pajama pants and no shirt, a white toothbrush sticking out of his mouth, his jaw working the bristles as he drifted into the entryway without a hint of hurry. The second his eyes flicked over her bare shoulder and landed on my face, his hand stilled around the toothbrush.

The gorgeous woman glanced back at his bare chest, her shoulder dropping against his torso as an intimate smile lit up her face.

"Baby," she purred, her eyes tracking his shock. "Do you know her?"

Xavier pulled the foaming toothbrush from his mouth, his fingers crushing the handle. He stared straight at me. His jaw went level, his dark eyes raking over my face before locking onto mine. A muscle in his brow twitched once before settling into indifference.

"Yeah," he said, his voice empty. "This is Sloane. Violet's friend."

He hadn't called me our friend. He hadn't called me his. I belonged to Violet.

"Sloane," he prompted, his tone conversational. "What are you doing down here?"

He delivered it like a logistical question.

We were two people who had loved each other, who had screamed that love out loud across years and sacred rooms, and he was asking why I was standing there with nothing but cold air in his voice.

"I got the room number wrong," I lied, forcing a brittle smile across my face. "I'm so sorry to bother you. I've been drinking champagne all night and lost track of my floor. I was looking for—I thought this suite belonged to—" I cut off the rambling and locked it in place. "My apologies. Congratulations on the relationship, I guess. Enjoy the rest of your evening."

I spun on my heel.

I walked.

I kept my spine straight, pacing down the endless corridor at a mechanical gait. Behind me, the suite door clicked shut with a final snap. The second I rounded the far corner, I started sprinting blind down the hall. I didn't stop until I slammed into my own room, twisted the deadbolt, and pinned my back flat against the wood.

My strength drained out of me, and I slid down the door until I collapsed into a heap on the floorboards.

The tears erupted before I could dam them.

I didn't let a single sob out. I rammed my palm against my mouth, strangling the sound, while burning tracks of grief spilled over my cheeks. I let them fall, because there was nothing else to do with the wreckage. For eight years I'd been building a romantic delusion, a fairy tale assembled out of the details I needed to be true. And then Xavier Paige had wrecked the fantasy by standing in a doorway in his pajamas, wearing an unrecognizable face, reducing my whole existence to Violet's friend.

I hadn't invented the charge of the sapphire ring, the heavy flirting in the cellar, his lips close to my ear, the closeness on the steps. None of it had been a hallucination. But I'd weaponized those desperate scraps and turned them into a romantic answer when they were never a solution. They were the hollow actions of a broken man who still carried the shrapnel of an old war and hadn't figured out how to set it down. Carrying the grief of a ghost wasn't the same as wanting to resurrect the relationship. I'd mistaken his mourning for intention. I'd misread his unfinished trauma as a desire to begin again.

The man had moved on. He was locked in that suite with a stunning woman in crimson lace who called him baby in the threshold, and he'd looked straight through me and labeled me a stranger's friend.

He hadn't been keeping obsessive tabs on my life. He wasn't tracking my social media, auditing my tattoo business, carrying a hollow ache in his chest that echoed my name. He'd cleanly moved past the trauma, built a spectacular life, and found a breathtaking partner.

He'd looked at me, the woman he'd once loved so hard he dropped to both knees in a field of a hundred candles, and filed me under background noise.

He owed me nothing, not a trace of his old devotion, not a residue of our sacred years. I'd packed up all of that love myself, loaded it with toxic lies, and fired it straight at him in a handwritten letter. He'd survived the impact, processed the grief, and done what resilient people do. I was the lone idiot left holding the baggage of a contract I'd torn up a lifetime ago.

I'd never moved on.

I hadn't even tried.

A parade of men had drifted in and out of my life, and I'd withheld every real piece of my heart because not one of them was Xavier. I'd never given them a fighting chance to compete with his memory. I'd kept my whole soul hollow for eight years on the certainty of our connection, and that certainty had just opened a door in red lace and smiled at my stupidity.

I pressed my palm harder to my lips, crushing the cry in my throat.