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She shakes her head so fast her cheeks wobble. “No, I’m not. I have nothing to hide.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not!” She’s almost hysterical as she paces around in front of me, trying to get to the bathroom door. “Now, can you move? I have to go.”
“Hold on.” I step forward and hook a finger under Rayne’s chin. She stills, her body going rigid as she looks into my eyes. “I know what you’re hiding.”
Her mouth falls open. “You—No, you don’t.”
I smirk. “I thought you weren’t hiding anything.”
“I’m not,” she hurries to correct her mistake. “I meant, you don’t know anything because there is nothing to know. I don’t have a secret. But I have to go so—”
“You love me.”
Her words trail off, and her brows pinch together. “What?”
“It’s why you showed up on the beach the first night I moved back in. You’d clearly been watching the house to see when I’d come back.”
“I take walks here! It’s for the ocean, not you,” she snaps.
I ignore her and continue. “Then you danced with that loser in the bar that night. You were clearly trying to make me jealous.”
“I can’t dance now without it having something to do with you? We were at the bar first, by the way!”
“Then you sent Natalia to my house to spy on me.”
“I did not!” she argues. “I didn’t even want her to come work for you because I didn’t want her to—”
I lean closer, eyebrow arched. “Didn’t want her to what? Maybe you didn’t want her to tell me you still love me after all these years.”
The color is coming back to her cheeks now. Her eyes are bright and shining, brimming with life. It’s nothing like the dead-eyed woman I loaded into my car after we left the Linleys’ house. I’m quietly relieved to see her bouncing back so quickly.
“You’re delusional! I celebrated the day you left,” she hisses. “I was fucking ecstatic you were gone. It was peaceful.”
“You know, Sonya told me you visited the house a few weeks after I left.”
The tension between us crackles as the silence stretches.
“She said you looked like shit,” I continue after a pause. “Bloodshot eyes, dark circles, sunken-in cheeks. She was worried you were sick.”
Rayne tries to look down, but I grab her chin again and force her eyes to mine.
“Let go,” she says weakly.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I brush my thumb over the small scar on her cheek. “Because I don’t want to. Because you made it clear you think all I do is run and retreat. So, this time, you’ll have to be the one that pulls away.”
Her eyes go wide. Rayne has no clue how much of herself she reveals that way. Those ocean blues are a window to her very soul. I see every girlish hope, every fantastical dream.
Whatever Rayne may say when she has better control of her features, she wants this.
She wants me.
She wantsus.
