“You thought I’d cheated on you,” she said through her tears.

“No. No, I was being selfish, and jealous, and let my thoughts get away from me before asking you. But, Kamryn, I knew deep down that you wouldn’t cheat on me. I was just already stressing about telling you what happened with Liv the night before. I was afraid of losing you, and when I heard he’d been at your place . . . I snapped.”

Her eyes had hardened when she looked up at me. “And what exactly happened with you and Olivia that night?”

Letting my hand trail back up to her face, I rubbed my thumb back and forth over her cheek and looked directly into her blue eyes. “I texted you on my way home. I had decided I couldn’t wait anymore and I was going to tell her the next day. But she ended up being home, and was drunk, and when I turned her down—”

“Turned her down?”

I just raised an eyebrow at her and traced the line of her jaw when she clenched it shut. “I’ve been turning her down for years, it was nothing new. But when I turned her down, she started yelling at me. Saying I didn’t want her because she couldn’t have kids, and kept bringing Tate into it. She said I would still love her if that hadn’t happened. I told her that she knew we hadn’t loved each other before Tate ever came into the picture, and that I wanted a divorce. She flipped. Said I’d already taken everything from her, I couldn’t leave her too. She said she would kill herself if I left her, and then I’d have her death on my hands too.”

“What the fuck?” Kamryn whispered. Her expression had turned to one of complete shock.

“That’s just how she is. I kept telling her I’d tried getting her help, and I would still get her help if she would let me, but she just kept saying I would leave her so she was refusing to get help. And if I left her, she would be dead the next day. So I told her I wasn’t leaving her, because at that point I felt like I didn’t have a choice. The next day it was killing me that I didn’t know how I could leave her and I’d just told you I would, and then when I found out about Aiden . . . I just basically said, ‘Screw it.’ I knew I would do anything not to lose you, I didn’t even care if Olivia found out about us. But something happened on the drive over there, and I ended up getting more pissed off about the Aiden thing. Like I said, I let my mind get ahead of me . . . and then I fucked up everything.”

“Brody, I just don’t think I can keep doing this. You keep promising me our forever. But hasn’t enough happened that you’re starting to second-guess this ‘forever’ too? Too much happened with Olivia, and I can only imagine it’s about to get worse with you filing for divorce. Brody, what if all this is a sign? What if—what if we’re not supposed to be together?” she asked, her voice breaking. “So you filed for divorce. That means we should just go on with our relationship now? Brody, you promised me for months that you would divorce her, and you only did it after I left you.”

“No, no. Don’t start thinking about it like that. There’s so much that happened that you don’t know about. So much with Liv, her parents, and her father’s lawyer that I kept from you so you wouldn’t have the added stress. What we were already going through was stressful enough. I saw what it was doing to you—what it was doing to us. But if I had told you what was happening, Kamryn, you would have left me just so I wouldn’t have had to go through what I was going through with them. I know it. I wasn’t not leaving Olivia because I didn’t want to. Trust me, Kamryn, there was nothing I wanted more than to leave her and start my future with you.”

Her eyes had widened with dread. “What was happening?”

Shaking my head, I cupped her cheeks and leaned close. “I’ll tell you everything, just not right now. Right now I need you to know that I love you, and I need to know that I haven’t lost you.”

Kamryn’s jaw quivered, and she looked down to where our chests were pressed together.

Putting my fingers under her jaw, I lifted her face until I could look in her blue eyes and I whispered, “Please. You . . . you I can’t lose.”

A sob broke free from her chest, and she shook her head back and forth. “Brody, I love you. But if we do this, then I want all of you.”

“Done,” I vowed and pressed my lips to hers, only moving back far enough so I could speak. “Done, Kamryn. Completely, one hundred percent yours. No more calls in the middle of the night,” I swore against her lips. “No more leaving. No more hiding. I’m yours.”

“I’m done sharing you.”

I brushed a thumb against her trembling lips and looked back into her eyes. “I hate that you felt like you were. If only you knew that it’s always been only you. I was never hers; she’s never had a part of me. But God, Kamryn, I’m so damn sorry for making you wait so long.”

“Can we please have our forever?” she begged, her voice so soft and broken, I wanted to die for ever making her go through this pain and doubt in our relationship.

“Yeah, babe. We can have our forever.”

17

Kamryn

July 18, 2015

A PAIR OF arms slid around my waist, and I smiled when Brody’s lips pressed firmly against my neck.

“What are you making?”

“Breakfast.”

“Really now?” he asked as he grabbed a sausage patty from the plate and took a bite. “Is breakfast for dinner a normal occurrence for you?”

I took the rest of the sausage from his fingers and spoke around it. “No, but you made me miss it the last few mornings, and I’m a breakfast-food person.”

“Are you really mad at me for making you miss breakfast?” he asked softly. The combination of his soft lips and rough stubble against my neck caused my stomach to feel like it was melting.

“Hmm?”

He laughed huskily, and I leaned against the rumbling in his chest. “I’ll take that as a no. Can I help?”

“You touching me and kissing me like that is the exact opposite of helping.”

Running his hands over my stomach, he played with the top of my pajama shorts and hipbones before bringing his hands back up to pass over the swell of my breasts. “Touching you how?”

“Uh.” I licked my lips and tried to control my breathing. “T-touching me like that.”

“So you want me to stop?”

“Hmm?” I didn’t even know where we were anymore. All I could focus on were his hands moving slowly back down my stomach and his lips on the dip between my neck and shoulder.

Suddenly his body was gone from mine, and I stumbled back a step before he caught me.

“What the hell?”

He laughed loudly and leaned around my body to kiss me chastely. “I’ll finish the sausage,” he said as he moved in front of me to check the cooking sausage.

“But—you—what—not fair!”

“Sausage, sweetheart. Breakfast for dinner. You have a ton of fruit and a waffle iron out. Any of this ringing a bell?”

I just stood there staring at him like he’d stolen an ice cream cone from a child. “That was so hateful!”

Brody barked out a laugh and wrapped an arm around my waist to pull me in for another kiss. “God, I love that accent of yours.”

“I don’t have one,” I grumbled and moved away from his hold to begin cutting up fruit.

It had been three days since we talked out everything in the entryway of Kinlee and Jace’s house, and in that time . . . there had been nothing but us. No Olivia, no Reynoldses, no J. Shepherd . . . just us. It had been beyond amazing and felt like a dream that I wasn’t ready to wake up from. While we’d spent most of the time in the bedroom, we had done a lot of talking. He’d told me everything that was happening with Olivia’s psychotic family that he’d kept hidden from me. He told me about J. Shepherd’s threats, and his worries about what they might come back with now that he had filed for divorce, even though he had a lot of evidence on Olivia. But mostly he told me about everything he wanted to do now that we were about to start our forever. Including being reintroduced to his parents as his girlfriend. I’m not going to lie—that one was scaring me.

Jace and Kinlee had taken the news well—too well—but that was because they hated Olivia and wanted Brody back. Well, and probably because they both knew me and liked me. But while I’d met Brody and Jace’s parents, I don’t think they’d ever given me a second thought. So even though I knew they would be happy Brody had left Olivia, I had no idea how they would react to me. My bet was that it wouldn’t be good. In my mind I was still a home-wrecker. I was still “the other woman.” And I still didn’t understand how anyone could see me as anything but those things.

“What are you thinking so hard about?”

My body tightened as Brody’s voice broke through my inner freak-out, and I focused on loosening it as I continued cutting fruit. “Your parents. I’m still scared about that conversation . . . about how it’s going to go, and how it might be for a long time after that.”

Brody was about to pour batter on the waffle maker, but stopped and frowned at me. “It’s going to be okay, Kamryn.”

“Just because Kinlee and Jace were okay with it doesn’t mean your parents will be.”

“I’m not expecting them to be okay with it. I was never expecting anyone to be okay with it. Hell, my two closest friends more or less said they were glad I was happy but didn’t approve of what I was doing.”

My eyebrows rose, and my eyelids blinked slowly. “Um . . . who?”

“When Hudson and Steele came down for Tate’s—”

“Oh, my God, they know?!” I didn’t even know these men, and they’d known that Brody and I had been having an affair? My cheeks heated in embarrassment. Whenever Brody mentioned them, he always told me they were guys he wanted me to meet someday . . . but I doubted, because of what they knew about me, that this meeting would ever happen.

“They’re not really the kind of guys I can keep things from. Steele figured it out on his own, Kam.” He stepped closer to me and cupped my cheeks in his large hands. “Don’t be embarrassed. They don’t think any less of you, and they weren’t judging you, I swear. They were mad at me for making you wait for me to leave Olivia.”

I breathed out heavily and dropped my head. “This is a disaster. Your best friends and family are always going to think of me as the woman you had an affair with,” I grumbled. “Even if you think they won’t judge me,” I said before he could say anything.

“I’m sorry, Kamryn,” he said simply. “I’m just sorry.”

Looking up into his gray eyes, I placed my hands over his and sighed. “We went in this thing together. Please stop saying you’re sorry.” Leaning up to kiss him softly, I smiled against his lips and said, “We just have a few more things to get through, including telling your family, and then one day this will all just be a memory.”

“You know what I’m scared about?” he asked seriously, and my eyebrows bunched together. “When you tell Barb. From what you’ve said, I’m afraid she’ll come after me with a wooden spoon or something.”

I laughed, and he kissed me hard before releasing me.

“We’ll get through it, Kamryn. But until I go to work tomorrow, let’s just keep pretending like we have nothing to deal with and nothing waiting for us out there. All right?”

I studied his worried eyes and nodded. “All right, Brody.”

After our breakfast-for-dinner, we cleaned up the kitchen, but that took a little longer than expected when flirtatious touches and quick kisses started lingering and growing hotter. Soon the dishes and leftover food were forgotten as we got lost in each other on the cool hardwood of the kitchen. Once everything was finally cleaned and put away, we moved into the living room, turned on the TV, and lay down on the couch together as the shows played in the background. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we kissed, but we were always holding on to each other like we couldn’t get close enough—and I loved every second.

It was all so stress-free, so normal, and so perfect.

Later, my eyelids cracked open when Brody removed my glasses and put them on my nightstand. Running my hand over the fabric, I realized we were on my—our—bed, and I watched groggily as Brody removed his shirt and crawled onto the bed.

“I fell asleep?” I guessed.

“Little bit,” he said, his voice warm and rough with exhaustion. “Snoring and drooling all over the place.”

“Shut up.” I pushed at his bare chest, and he caught my hand in his, his laugh filling the otherwise quiet room.