Page 16 of Love Me Again

But wanted?

Boone let his head fall to his hands. He didn’t have fucking answers. He didn’t have anything. “I don’t know.”

“So take some time to figure it out,” Molly said, patting his back. “And give her some time to be here and figure it out too.”

He knew Molly meant well, and he knew she was probably right, but he didn’t know how to deal with any of that with all his siblings staring at him—even Lindsay from the phone.

Whether Shane sensed that or just had great timing, he started making noise about everyone heading back up to the house before the storm got worse.

So everyone started to file out, because everyone listened to Shane.

Shane turned before he left though. He studied Boone with those dark, serious eyes that had always seen too much, but never quite understood what it was he saw. “There’s just one question I really can’t figure out.”

“Just one?” Boone replied bitterly. He wasn’t drunk and somehow now he didn’t want to be. He shoved to his feet. Put the bottle away and locked it up while Shane was quiet as if pondering the question some more.

Heaven forbid he actually ask a question instead of think Boone had an answer when he decidedly didn’t.

When Boone turned to Shane, ready to walk back to the house with him, which, hell, was probably Shane’s aim all along, Shane finally asked it.

“How could you leave her and stay away if you still love her?”

Boone might have bristled if Shane had delivered that question in a different way—demanding or condescending. But he just sounded baffled. Because he was married and a lovesick bastard and couldn’t fathom it.

“I walked out of that hospital to save her,” Boone said through gritted teeth.

Shane let out the strangest stunned kind of laugh as they walked out of the barn and into the cold, howling night.

“You’re laughing?” Boone demanded. The house was just a few pinpoints of light in the dark snow-whirling world around them.

His leg was really going to be pissed at him tomorrow.

“Sorry. It’s just, never in my wildest dreams did I think we were anything alike, Boone. But Jesus, that sounds familiar.”

“Yeah, right.” They trudged through the wind, but Shane didn’t let him off the hook. He just kept yapping.

“You were there. I wanted to save Cora. She didn’t want or need a savior or a protector—and that was all I knew how to be. She wanted, she needed, a partner. And so did I, but it took us some time to figure that out. Maybe we’re still even figuring it out, all things considered.”

“I’m a shitty partner.” Maybe he’d done all right when things were going well. He liked to think there’d been a few months there where he’d been a pretty good husband. But when shit hit the fan?

Boone Tyler ran.

“So, fix that.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Much as I’d like to pretend that’s true, you were there. You know how hard it was for me to fix how I screwed up. So don’t use self-pity as some kind of excuse when you saw me get my ass handed to me.”

It was almost a funny memory, except it was mixed up with Micah breaking his arm. Still, Shane had gotten his ass a little handed to him, and that was not a regular occurrence for Shane the Great.

Boone knew hope was dangerous. It had always been a damn blow just waiting to happen. Maybe Shane was usually right about things, but only if you were Shane. Honorable and upstanding and good.

Boone was none of those things.

“She wants a divorce. She was very clear.”

“Which means you’re still married. Which means there’s time yet to fix it. Honestly, even after divorce, there’s time yet to fix it. Nothing is final unless you let it be.”

There it was. The hope he was so desperately trying to run from. And how could he run from it now? With Shane shoving it at him.