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“Did you sleep last night?” Gabriel asked.
“Not really.”
“Me either.”
“Really?” That surprised her. When they were together, he’d slept like a log.
“Yes.” He glanced out the window and back at her. “I’ve missed you, Dani.”
“We just saw each other last night.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Lara walked up to the table and set their drinks down. “Dani, you want your soup and wrap together?”
“Yes, that’s fine.”
Lara nodded and left. Dani waited for Gabriel to continue.
“I’ve missed being with you,” he said.
His admission took her back. “You seemed okay when we broke up.”
“I wasn’t okay.” He drummed his fingers on the table. A nervous habit he had. She hid a smile. “I realized the day after graduation that I wanted to make things work between us, but you’d already left for San Francisco.”
Shock ran through her veins. “You wanted to make it work?” Did he even realize what he was saying? “It wasn’t going to work. We wanted different things.”
“Did we?” He reached across the table and placed his hand over hers.
The warmth of his skin seeped into hers. “We did.” She didn’t pull away. “I wanted commitment, and you didn’t.”
“That didn’t mean we couldn’t stay together. You could have gone to work with your grandfather.”
“And where would that have led us?” She’d thought about it before she accepted the offer with the company in San Francisco. But, at the time, it was better for her to get away from Pleasant Valley and Gabriel.
“We would have made it work.”
“Oh, Gabriel,” she whispered. “We were young, maybe too young. Both of us had just graduated with our degrees.”
“It was only four years ago.”
“A lifetime.” From the way he looked at her, he didn’t fully understand. “We needed time away from each other. We dated exclusively the last two years in college.”
“Are you saying you wanted to date other men?” He pulled his hand back.
“No. What I’m saying is, we needed time apart to grow into the people we were meant to be.” It seemed like she’d lived a lifetime in the past four years. San Francisco, learning about kink, her grandfather’s heart attack, coming home, seeing Gabriel again.
“I…” He broke off as Lara arrived at their table with the food. She set it down and left. “Eat and then we’ll talk.”
Dani looked down at her food, her appetite gone. “I want to get this out. Why do you think things would have been different if we’d stayed together?” She really wanted to know what he was thinking.
“Because we were good together. I sprang kink on you, and that’s my bad. But we could have made a go of things.”
“If you felt that way, why didn’t you contact me in San Francisco? My grandparents knew where I was.”
Gabriel stiffened. “I was angry you left.”
“Right. Can’t you see, Gabriel, if we’d stayed together, it would have reinforced your opinion about marriage.”
