AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His words tickle my ear and set the hairs of my neck on edge. A tingle radiates down my spine.
“You can’t say that to me, Luke.”
“I know I shouldn’t. I’ve wanted to say this. For five years, I’ve thought about your smile, your laugh. I always knew I’d fucked up, and I vowed to stay away, yet there you were one night, wearing that robe and holding that ridiculous ice bucket. I thought I was hallucinating. You were like a damn siren. I let you walk away that night, but I went back because I had to make sure you were safe. I let you walk away the next night because I knew you were better off without me. I know I should stay away now, and yet I can’t.”
“The only reason you’re here now is because of Ainsley.”
“She’s not the only reason.” His words cause me to turn my face to the side in despair. He places a knuckle under my chin and forces me to look up at him again. “I’m grateful not only for her existence, but also because she gives me an excuse to be in your life. I was getting so tired of staying away.”
I sigh at his words. My chin rises, and his lowers, drinking in my breath, and I fall hopelessly into his hands that are wrapped around me.
Luke Incendio is fire in the flesh, and if I’m not careful, I’ll burn badly. If I fall into his arms—really fall into them—and do something foolish, like kiss him, and if he pushes me away again, it will be my undoing.
“I have to tell you something.” I put distance between us. “I asked Eric to attend Melissa and Will’s engagement party with me. I know Ainsley will be there, but I’ll just tell her I’m bringing him as a friend. Not a date.”
“You asked Eric?”
“Technically, Tara did. She has a way of speaking for me when it comes to him. I wasn’t going to ask. She ambushed the situation.”
“Did you tell him you changed your mind?”
“No.”
He repeats my words in silence, slowly letting it in. “You said you’d keep him away from Ainsley.”
“He will be one of many people at the event. You act like I’m going to be fawning all over the man and kissing him on the dance floor. What kind of woman do you think I am? I raised Ainsley on my own for nearly five years. I haven’t dated a man since before she was born. I’m a successful thirty-two-year-old career woman and a mother. I know how to handle my business.”
“Except when it comes to me,” he declares.
I hold his steely gaze. “Especially when it comes to you.”
“If it wasn’t for Ainsley, would you have ever let me back into your life?”
I place a hand over my forever-shattered heart and answer honestly, “No.”
His brows draw together in an agonized expression. I counter it with one of defiance. I might fall putty to Luke at a whim, but my head is stronger than my heart.
“Dancing!” Ainsley comes running back into the ballroom and jumps into Luke’s arms.
He lifts her and sways her comically from side to side. From the looks of the two, you wouldn’t imagine things between him and me were tense a moment ago.
Luke laughs as Ainsley throws her hands up. He spins her around, and her giggle is wild.
“I have to get upstairs,” I say to the two of them.
Luke stops spinning and looks back at me with harsh breaths. “We should go.”
“Hey, Ainsley. Guess what,” I say to my girl.
“We love you, Mommy!” Ainsley declares. “Don’t we, Luke?”
He leans forward and lets Ainsley give me a kiss. When he straightens, he looks at me reluctantly and then adds, “Yeah. We do.”
A piece of my chipped heart falls to the ground because in another time, I would have believed that.
seventeen
IT IS NO SURPRISEone of Connecticut’s most-in-demand wedding designers would have an engagement party so stylish and dreamy that it should be featured in a magazine. Melissa’s intentions to keep the event simple are met with sophisticated flair. Her backyard, which is coincidentally Melissa’s childhood home in the woods of Newbury, has been completely transformed.
