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Okay, that wasn’t what he’d expected her next words to be. He reached up and cupped her face. “You like it in Baton Rouge. And that's okay. Above everything else, Becca, I want you to be happy. You need to stay in Baton Rouge.” He swallowed. “And I have to stay here.”
She turned her face pressing a kiss to the center of his palm. “I know that. I want you to be happy, too. But I want you to be safe. I can't stand the idea of you in a ditch, bleeding, needing an ambulance —” Her body shuddered.
He pulled her against his chest. “I'm okay.” He wrapped his arms around her and felt hers wrap around him clutching at his back. “I'm okay, Becca.”
“I love you, Beau.”
“I love you, too.”
He lifted a hand and ran it down over the top of her head and down her hair. He was going to miss her so fucking much.
They just held each other for several long seconds, their hearts beating.
But finally, she said softly against his chest, “I don’t think this is good for you.” She paused. “I don’t think we should keep doing this.”
There they were. The words he’d been expecting, really from the very beginning.
They were still like a knife to the heart.
But he nodded against the top of her head. “You’re right.”
seven
A year and a half later…
“Becca needs you.”
Those three words would never fail to stop Beau Hebert in his tracks.
He turned away from his mother’s stove where he’d just swiped a cookie from the cooling rack. “What?”
“I sent her up to the attic to grab a tablecloth for me, but she’s been up there longer than I expected,” Heather told him. She didn’t look at him. She just kept stirring whatever dough she had in the bowl in front of her.
So she probably missed the panicked look on Beau’s face.
“Why did you send her up there?” He was already moving toward the stairs and abandoning the still-warm-from-the-oven double chocolate chunk cookies. Which probably would have told his mother how serious this situation was without his sharp tone of voice.
“Why not?” Heather asked.
His boot hit the first step that led up the backway to the second floor. “She doesn’t work for you.”
“She’s sweet and offered to help me get ready for the big dinner tonight.”
His mother’s bed and breakfast was sold out for the next three nights. That wasn’t uncommon, but it always meant things were extra busy.
“And she’s deathly afraid of spiders,” Beau said, starting up the stairs.
He didn’t really need to explain any further. The attic was…an attic. It was clean, and Heather used it to store any number of supplies in plastic storage containers and on metal shelves that lined the old wooden walls. But it had spiders. As any attic would.
Jesus. Becca would be freaking out by now. He took the stairs two at a time all the way to the third level, stomping across the floor and yanking open the door that led up the final set of ten steps that would take him to the attic.
“Bec?” he called. “You up here?”
“Uh…yeah.”
Her voice was shaky. Fuck.
He bounded up the stairs. “You okay?” he asked before he even hit the top.
