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“Worth it,” he growled as he captured my lips again.
Kissing me like he’d been holding himself back from this very moment. Kissing me in a way that was as unfamiliar as it was familiar.
Because this was Chase. The love of my life. The man I was supposed to marry.
But this kiss? This was all new. This was that overwhelming, first kiss kind of high.
I never wanted it to end...
“I don’t want to know you and I don’t want to love you,” he confessed against my lips before brushing a faint kiss across them as if he hadn’t just destroyed the moment and buried my heart a little deeper. “But you’re all I think about.”
My stare flashed to his when he moved back enough to look at me.
“My memories feel real to me,” he said as if he hadn’t told me that very thing dozens of times. “And I’m afraid of what happens when I find out there’s truth to them. I’m afraid of being blindsided the way I have been every fucking day. Of being blindsided byyou. Of finding out none of what you’ve been saying is real.”
“It was. Itis,” I said pleadingly. “Chase, we—” I pressed my lips tightly together and shook my head.
“Tell me,” he begged, sliding his hand around my hip and gripping tight. “You keep telling me whatwasn’t. Tell me whatwas.”
“I don’t want you to fall in love with our past,” I reminded him. “I don’t want you to feel obligated to it. Either we are strong enough to make it through this, or we aren’t. It’s that simple.”
His eyes searched mine for long moments before he realized, “You don’t think we are.”
A strained sound rose in my throat when his arm fell away as he stepped back. “Before your accident, I would’ve sworn we were,” I said confidently. “After? With the way you look at me and blame me for keeping you from a life you never had? With the way I can’t sleep because of your desperate need to convince Harper you didn’t cheat on her?”
I pressed a hand to my twisting stomach and studied the way his expression fell into that cold mask he’d worn so often lately.
“It’s the one thing I can’t piece together with your real life, and it terrifies me,” I admitted. “If anyone is at risk of being blindsided when your memories return, it’s me. It’sthat.”
His head bobbed quickly before shaking. “You just tried assuring me that my heart and life were with you, not someone else.”
A confirming hum built in my chest at his unspoken question. “Before you woke up from the coma and started saying everything you did, I would’ve bet my life that you would’ve never looked at another woman, let alone touched one. But everything you were saying was from our lives in one way or another.”
“Like the lilies,” he murmured as he began nodding again, but his movements stopped and his head listed. “Everything?”
“In one way or another,” I repeated in confirmation.
The muscle in his jaw twitched. When he spoke, his words were laced with warning. “Explain the triangle.”
My mouth slowly fell open as those months burst through my mind.
“I don’t see how being caught up in a love triangle is going to make me feelobligatedto our past,” he ground out. “Explain.”
I watched him for a while longer before nodding. “Your family and friends didn’t know,” I began, then hurried to amend, “Brian did, and you’ll understand why. But I just recently told Bree because of everything you were saying when you woke up.”
He didn’t respond in any way, just took another step back to take up his earlier position against the counter. Waiting for me to continue.
But I wasshaking.
Absolutely trembling as I struggled with how to tell Chase something he’d already gone through. But this wasn’t the same guy.
This wasn’t the guy who was willing to fight for me.
This was the guy who was already suspicious of everything I said and judged nearly everything I did.
“I was dating someone when I met you,” I finally began, words coming out weak and unsteady. “I’d been dating him for years.”
Chase didn’t say anything. Just watched me, waiting for what would come next. Waiting for the rest of the story. But it was there in his eyes...the frustration. The assumptions. The betrayal.
