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“She can. She only farmed for about six years after you left then she just decided enough was enough. She quit. Said she had enough to keep her the rest of her life.”
“I’m glad,” he replied to Skylar. His mother had worked hard her whole life. It made him happy to see her enjoying herself for a change.
She tilted her head up and looked at him. Her eyes were still glistening with tears. “Did you ever think of me?”
“Every single day,” he assured her. Luka cupped her face in his hands. “I told you I came home for you Sky. Once I made a plan to come home, I counted the days until I could see you again. Hold you just like this. Don’t you know Sky? You will never belong to anyone but me. You have to know that by now?” His voice was husky and his words emotional. He wanted her to believe in him again like she did when she was sixteen.
They were quiet for a moment.
“I called about six, seven months after I left,” he told her.
“And,” she replied.
“I gave Mom my number and I asked about you. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to know how you were.”
He stopped talking for a moment. He was thinking about that time. Where he was in his plans for his future. His goals. What he was doing to get there. “I knew they were keeping something from me. I could feel it. I worried for days about you. I almost came home then but I knew I still had a long way to get what I wanted and if I came home I’d never do that so I stayed where I was.”
“I already had Ava. That is what they were hiding from you Luka.”
He nodded. “They hadn’t heard from me in months so Mom was a little pissed at me. I hadn’t really settled anywhere so I didn’t have a phone until then. Mom told me, I could have called her collect to let her know I was alive.
“Then I talked to Brett. I knew if anyone really knew how you were, he did. He didn’t sugarcoat anything for me. He said the first week you didn’t get out of bed.” Skylar’s hand stopped moving across his chest. He laid his hand on hers. “That was hard to hear,” he admitted.
“Still you didn’t come home.”
“By then, you were doing better. I had just found the MMA world and was getting a few fights. Not much. Working a couple jobs in between. My intention was to come back and get you when you turned eighteen. I didn’t want to live my life without you, Sky.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No,” he replied. “I didn’t.”
Too much time had gone by. He knew that he had hurt her. Brett had told him that Skylar was closed off, but better. She was training horses and doing a damn good job of it.
“Brett told me you had taken over your dad’s horse training business by the time you turned eighteen and a half. You were good too. I thought you had found yourself so I let you be. I still asked about you every time that I called, every month of every year that I was gone. I just needed to know that you were all right. Skylar, did you think of me?”
She was so still he wondered if she had fallen asleep. “I used to dream of you Luka,” she finally told him. “I would wake in the ni
ght and realize that you were just in my dreams. You were still gone. In the daylight, I was able to bury you so the pain didn’t hurt quite so bad but at night…I just couldn’t seem to do that.”
“You have to know how sorry I am Sky.”
“You know after all these years Luka I still can’t believe that you just left me.” The catch in her voice wasn’t missed by him.
His fingers were brushing lazily over her shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant? You had to be pretty far along.” He was still confused about that.
She sighed. Her breath was warm against his skin. “I ignored it for the first month when I didn’t get my period. I didn’t want to believe that I could possibly be pregnant. We always used condoms.”
He nodded. Luka could understand her overwhelming feelings. She was only sixteen at the time. A junior in high school.
“By the second month, I had to face reality. I was most likely pregnant. I didn’t want to tell anyone. Not Mom and Dad and not you. I knew how you would react.”
“How did you think I would react?” He asked.
“Luka, we had talked a lot. I knew how you felt about working the farm with your dad. A nowhere job. You felt you had no future in Haley Cove. I honestly wasn’t surprised that you left town. I was just surprised that you left me behind. I thought our love was stronger than that. I thought you couldn’t live without me. I thought we would be together forever.”
He had missed her so much that first year. So many times he almost went home to see her. She was still only seventeen. He would have just had to leave her again and he couldn’t do that. He wasn’t strong enough. “I did miss you. I laid in bed every night and thought about nothing but you. I ached for you, Sky.”
“Not so much Luka or you would have come back for me,” she declared. She sat up wrapped her arms around her knees.
