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“We broke up.” Tears came to my eyes, and I ran up the stairs to my room and flopped on my bed. It wasn’t long before I heard Dad’s solid footsteps stomping up the stairs and stopping right outside of my room.
“What do you mean you broke up?” He threw the door open and stood staring at me.
“Just what I said, Daddy. We broke up. Didn’t Trent say anything?”
“No, Hope, he didn’t. You realize your engagement announcement is going out in a month, and it will be formally announced at our anniversary party a month after that. You’ve just got cold feet. So, whatever is going on between the two of you, it best be fixed in that time. Your mother and Mrs. King have all the formal invites announcing your engagement ready, and they have already ordered your wedding invitations. They’ve rented Wolfmarsh Country Club for the wedding, and the menu has been decided.”
When did they do all this, I asked myself. “I didn’t ask you to do that. Besides, how can everything be ordered already? There isn’t even a set date.”
“Yes there is. Together the Kings and your mother and I set the date for exactly six months after the engagement.”
My stomach rolled. I didn’t want to marry him. I looked around my room, pondering what to do. Did I tell him the truth? Would it even matter? I could feel him staring at me.
“Get your shit figured out, Hope. Life isn’t always about getting what you want. It wasn’t for me, and it’s not going to be for you. You have exactly four weeks.” The door slammed shut, and I lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, trying to calm the anger that was growing inside me by the second.
I heard a car door slam outside and got up to look out the window. I saw him across the street. Dark hair, broad shoulders, six feet of pure bulky muscle. The man who had broken my heart, Carter Malone, got into his car and drove away. I had watched him for years from this window, crushed on him, and dreamt of what it would be like in his arms, for most of my teen years. Finally, he asked me out, and we dated throughout the last summer he was home. It had been an amazing summer. We were in love, or maybe I was in love and had been fooled easily. He had to leave to go to King’s Cove Harbour to visit the university he would be attending, and that trip was the end of us. In one summer, I had fallen in love and had my heart broken, and that is how I found myself in this mess.
I had been out with my mother shopping, and when I came home, my father told me Carter had left a message for me—he no longer wanted to see me. I had cried for days. My father had deleted the message without letting me hear it. Thinking of that message that had been left three years ago, that I had so desperately wanted to hear, finally made me snap.
I jumped off my bed and pulled my bedroom door open in time to see my father walk into his bedroom. “I’m not marrying Trent, that is all there is to it. Honestly, I guess I should have just gone after Carter like I wanted to three years ago.” I slammed my bedroom door and flew to my bed, flopping face first onto the mattress. I expected my father to storm into my bedroom and argue with me more, but when I heard his bedroom door slam shut, I just cried into my pillow.
After the tears had stopped, I lay and look at the ceiling, fighting back more tears, while the anger building inside of me reached explosive levels. It was an anger unlike I had ever felt before. I couldn’t stay here anymore. I got up, went to my closet, pulled out the largest backpack I had, and started packing up the items that I would need. I pulled open my nightstand drawer and reached in the back. I pulled out a small pile of cash I had been saving. I quickly counted—I had about eight hundred dollars and whatever room was left on the Visa my father had gotten me. It wasn’t going to go far, but I shoved that money into my wallet, placing it in my purse.
After I was packed, I grabbed my laptop and went directly to the bus station, purchasing a one-way ticket to King’s Cove Harbour. I grabbed my bag and snuck down the stairs to wait for the cab. While I waited, I pulled out my phone and went straight to Facebook, right to Carter’s profile. The first picture that popped up caught my attention. There he stood in front of King’s Cove Harbour University, with three other guys—one I recognized as his brother Hunter. I typed out a quick message to him and had just hit send in time for the cab to pull up in front of me. I looked back at the house I had grown up in, then climbed into the back of the cab, praying that by the time I arrived in the city, Carter would respond back to me.
Chapter Seven
Carter
Present Day
Iplugged my phone intothe charger and reversed out of the driveway. She was still standing in the doorway, my princess gave me a small wave, and then shut the door, separating my eyes from the view of her.
I called the office to let them know I was on my way and asked them to hold any and all messages until I got there. Then I shut my phone off and turned up the radio. I needed to think about what had happened tonight.
I knew Hope had worked so hard to organize this weekend, with little help from me. I had been very busy and I felt terrible about that. Family time with her and the girls meant so much to me, but I had been so preoccupied with work. When the call came in tonight from my clients, they were desperately worried, and even though I should have told them I would have to see them on our scheduled date, Hope also knew it wasn’t like me to abandon my clients when they needed me. But somehow, I knew deep inside that me having to leave wasn’t the reason she was truly upset.
I played our conversation over in my mind from when we had first gotten back home. I felt so awful about having to leave that I had thought of the perfect solution on the drive home. She rarely turned down a trip with me to New York, but this time she wouldn’t hear of it. When she said, that she was the last thing I would need I felt my heart break a little. For some reason she didn’t realize that I needed her, that I always had. I hadn’t given her any reason for her to doubt that, but why she was thinking differently was beyond me.
Bothering me the most out of anything wasn’t the fact that I had to leave, or the fact that she thought she would be in the way, it was the way she clung to me when I was walking out the door. It was the same way she clung to me the night I finally won her back all those years ago. I knew that hug all to well—it wasn’t one of happiness, but one of fear. She was afraid she was losing me, and in her mind, I was already walking away. Whatever had caused this fear, I wished she had told me. And after all these years and all we had gone through, it broke my heart knowing she was afraid to bring up what was really bothering her.
Thinking of that brought tears to my eyes and I blinked hard and tried to focus on something else. I stopped at the light and looked out the window. I saw a couple of kids on the sidewalk. He was walking away from her and she was standing calling to him, begging him to stop. Watching this brought me back to the day that Hope had finally come back to me. I smiled to myself at the memory of that night and continued on my way to the office.
Chapter Eight
Carter
Thirteen Years Earlier
Ilay with my handsbehind my head, my eyes closed, my mind drifting, wondering what her mouth would feel like wrapped around my cock. I reached down and ran my hand through her silky blonde hair; she turned her head to face me, those beautiful blue eyes staring back at me as her head rested on my chest. She smiled that beautiful sleepy smile I remembered so well. I jumped, the sound of the door opening pulling me from my dream state. The girl I had picked up last night stood there looking at me with a smile, her dark curly hair framing her face.
“Hi.” She sauntered over to the edge of the bed and sat down beside me, running her hand down my chest.
“Hey.” She started rubbing her fingers in tiny circles over my chest just like the girl from my dreams used to; I grabbed her hand to stop her. After her, I stopped any woman from doing that to me. That was her thing, and her touching me that way brought back too many memories of Hope.
“Want to go for round three?” she asked, placing a few light kisses over my abs. I felt my half-stiff cock start to harden at the thought. She continued to kiss her way down my abs, her hands running back up and over my chest and back down again. She was just about to pull the covers down over my now painfully hard cock when I stopped her.
“Something wrong?” she asked, her devilish brown eyes looking up at me.
