Page 177 of Pucked Around and Found Out

Tired, brave and impossible to walk away from.

“You have a lot to make up for,” she says finally. Her voice is steady again but underneath it is something fragile, real and entirely unguarded.

“I know.” I hold her gaze. “I'm not going anywhere.”

She looks at me for another long beat. Then she looks down at her cold coffee. Then out the window. Then back at me, and whatever she finds on my face in that moment tips the scale of something I can't see.

She doesn't smile. She doesn't throw herself at me or forgive me cleanly or make this easy on either of us.

She just picks up her coffee cup and wraps both hands around it and says quietly, without looking at me, “Sit down properly. You look like you're about to interrogate someone.”

I shift in my chair.

And say nothing.

And stay.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

TOREN

He sits down.

I don’t know why that shocks me the most but it does. The fact he actually listened to me is something he has never done before.

I wish I could fight against the pull I feel toward him, against the reaction my body has whenever he is near. The moment that door opened, I knew it was him. The way my heart skipped a beat, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and a flare of heat surged through me. He has a hold over me. I wish I could break it.

Three weeks and I’m still not strong enough to hold eye contact with him for longer than mere seconds. Him just being here in this place I have claimed as my own is fucking torturous. This was my new beginning! This was the place I was going to build a life for me and our baby, without the horrors of my past, without my last name meaning anything and without him.

“Do you hate me?” His quietly asked question pulls me from my thoughts.

I look up at him and take in the harsh lines of his face, the shadows he loves so much don’t seem as dark and all encompassing. He’s the utmost dangerous man in this coffee shop and none of these people have any idea how truly lethal he is. But I know. He’s devastating to look at, his gray eyes see through the walls I’ve been carefully building these past weeks. I hate that he can force me to feel when I don't want to.

“There is a fine line between love and hate, just like how salt and sugar look the same,” I say.

“That right?”

“You can’t have one without the other,” I fire back.

“So, do you hate me or love me, Tink?” I suck in a sharp breath. I force myself to cling to the memories of him hurting me and what he said about our baby. If I don’t, I’ll crumble and give in to him like I always did.

“Don’t,” I hiss. His eyes twitch and I know it’s hard for him not to bite my head off right now. “You don’t get to come here and blow this new life I am building apart because you think you’re ready⁠—“

“I’ll blow the fucking world apart if it means getting to you!” The conviction in his tone is clear, he means every word. “Do you really think there is anywhere you could go where I won’t find you?” I know it’s a rhetorical question but I answer anyway.

“I had hoped Colorado was that place but, I guess I was wrong,” I snap. His eyes narrow ever so slightly and his jaw locks. It’s taking everything in him to keep his anger at bay, but the darkness he brought to life inside me wants to taunt him, push him until he breaks. “If you expected me to fall to my knees and beg you to take me away from this place, then you’re wrong, I have nothing left back in Somerset.”

“What about Stormsend?” he hedges.

“There’s nothing there for me either.”

“Wrong.”

“I left for⁠—“

“Me.”

I jerk in my seat. “What?”