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“Don’t be,” he said evenly as he laced his fingers through mine. “I know you want to blame yourself, but you had nothing to do with my decision.” My expression must have said that I didn’t believe him because he was quick to elaborate. “Things were bad between us. She knew that I didn’t love her. That I couldn’t love her. That my heart would always belong to someone else.” The fingers of his other hand softly stroked my cheek as he spoke.
“If you didn’t love her, then why did you propose?”
“Because I thought I’d lost you, Ariel,” he said with a shaky breath. “I searched for you for so long, even when I told myself that it was impossible. I kept telling myself that eventually I’d find you, but I never did. Losing you changed me. I became a shell of myself and everyone started to worry. Even though I tried to remain hopeful, despair and depression lurked just behind it. Things got so bad with me that Ryan finally had enough and confronted me on it. He said a lot of things that didn’t set well with me, things that were true, and I stormed out.”
Lucas had to pause to catch his breath. I felt his heart racing under my fingertips. Concerned, I laid my hand upon his chest, directly over his heart in a silent plea for him to calm down. Almost immediately, the tattoo of his pulse slowed and began to even out.
“I walked home that night. Along that walk, I came to see that everyone was right. I was drowning and if I didn’t come up for air, I’d die. That night during my walk, I made a vow that I’d search for you one last time, but that if I didn’t find you, I’d let you go.” He choked out the last of his words. My eyes blurred again, understanding just how he felt because it had been the same for me. The longing and the desperation to find him was slowly eating me alive. Like him, I knew that if I didn’t do something, there’d be nothing left of me for him to find.
“Please don’t cry, baby,” Lucas whispered as his lips brushed over mine. “I can’t stand to see you upset.” His thumbs wiped away the fresh fall of tears that soaked my cheeks. “I’m sure that you can guess that I had no luck in finding you. Deciding to say goodbye to what we shared and admitting that I’d lost you were the hardest things that I’ve ever had to do. Even though everything inside me screamed that it was wrong, I had to let you go. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t survive.” His voice wobbled as he pulled me tighter against him. “A month later, I asked Vanessa to go out with me. She’d recently come to work for our family’s company and hadn’t been shy about showing her interest in me. It’s funny, though. Ryan is the one that suggested I give her a shot, even though they ended up despising one another.” His laugh filled the space and left me wanting to hear it over and over again.
“When I first asked her out, I only intended for it to be a fling. A band-aid to help me get back on my feet. She helped me start to live again by encouraging me to take her out to dinner. To attend fancy parties where we hobnobbed with men and women of wealth and influence. I didn’t realize it at the time, but her energy was what I needed to step out of the shell that I’d hidden myself in. We dated for just over six months when I suddenly found myself standing in front of our family and friends as they congratulated me on our engagement. I don’t even remember asking her. She told me that I was really drunk the night that I popped the question. I didn’t even have a ring, but she told me that she didn’t mind and that she preferred to pick it out anyway.”
“That sounds like Vanessa,” I spat bitterly. “She’s always been a control freak.”
“No kidding,” Lucas agreed before continuing on with what he needed to say. “As our engagement progressed and the wedding drew closer and closer, the more I began to regret agreeing to marry her. I’m sure you know that she’s not an easy person to live with, and being engaged made it a thousand times worse. As she planned everything down to the minutest detail, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. With each day that passed, I kept having doubts. My gut told me that marrying her was wrong. That I couldn’t marry her while you were still out there somewhere.”
Lucas sucked in a deep, unsteady breath and slowly exhaled through his nose before continuing on.
“I started to fall back into the rut. Everyone started to worry and once again, Ryan was the one to confront me. By then, he’d developed a pretty healthy hate for Vanessa and encouraged me to call off the wedding. He admitted that he was wrong in pushing me towards her, and swore that if he’d known what she was really like, he’d have told me to run the other way. Ryan swore to me that if I wanted to call the whole thing off, even if it was just seconds away from walking down that aisle, he’d have my back. That he’d rush me the hell out of there, even if he had to carry me out over his shoulder.”
“Isn’t it funny that that is exactly what happened?” I tried to find a shred of humor in the day’s events because I knew that if I didn’t, I’d end up bawling again.
“It is,” he sighed softly as he pressed his forehead to mine. “But now that I’m standing here with you, I don’t regret a single minute of it.”
“You don’t?”
Lucas shook his head and brushed a loose strand of my hair back from my face before tucking it behind my ear.
“I don’t. I’d go through it all again if it meant that I’d end up here, holding you in my arms. Going through all that brought you back to me, Ariel. I could never regret that, even if I lived a thousand lifetimes.”
My eyes flooded again before I could get a grip on myself.
“Ariel, please,” Lucas whispered softly. “It kills me to see you cry.”
“I’m not upset,” I said back, knowing what he was thinking. “I’m just... so fucking happy.” I offered him a big, tear-soaked smile.
“There are no words to express how happy I am at this moment.” His arms tightened around my waist as we gazed at each other. Lost in the closeness of him, I ran my hands through his silken blond hair.
“You cut your hair,” I said, surprised at just how soft his thick, lustrous locks were.
“I cut it after that last failed attempt to find you,” he confessed. “I decided that if I was going to become a new man, I needed a new haircut.”
“It looks good on you.” I swept his top locks back to keep them from falling in his eyes.
“I’m so glad that your hair is the same,” he said back as one hand came up and buried itself in the cascade of red waves that nearly reached my waist. “I love your hair so fucking much. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t dream of it nightly.”
“You dream of me?”
“Every single night.” Lucas nodded softly.
“Me too,” I confessed. “Sometimes I wake up sobbing because I miss you so much that it hurts.” I watched Lucas’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed several times in an attempt to keep hold of his composure. “I’m just so glad that we found each other. I don’t know what I’d do if I hadn’t gotten there until after the wedding was over.”
“I would have never married her, Ariel.” Lucas stepped back just enough so that he could take my hands in his. “Just before I saw you, I’d decided that I couldn’t marry her and was about to tell Ryan.”
“You were?” His eyes flared at seeing the surprise that must have been written across my face.
“I was,” he whispered again, his grip on my hands tightening. “Ariel, I don’t want you to think that I—”
