Chapter 31
THIRTY-ONE
FUCKING HELL
Gabe
What the fuck was she thinking?
For the first time in a long time, I want to rage. She can’t love me; there’s nothing to fucking love. What does she know of love anyway? Nothing. Not one fucking thing. All love does is build you up to send you crashing to the fucking ground.
I have to get out of here. I can’t look at her still in bed with the sheets rumpled from sex. I can smell her arousal in the air and taste it on my tongue. Even as shaken as she has me, my cock is still half hard. That’s what she does to me.
But love? Negative.
I’m not going to let someone make me feel like losing them would kill me without actually putting me in the ground. Not again, but thanks for asking. Been there, done that, burned the fucking t-shirt.
I quickly pull on my clothes, step into my boots, and head for the door. But she’s not ready to let me go. Adrienne is going for blood. She wants to cut me, to gut me, and watch me bleed for her, and I can’t let her do that.
“I love you,” she whispers again.
Fuck me, I wish she would stop fucking saying those words. It feels like a fist has my heart in its grip, and it won’t stop squeezing every time she utters them.
“I love you, and you’re never going to love me.”
“Are you happy now, fresa?” I snarl. I want her to know the way she’s making me feel. Erratic. Off balance. Crazy.
She clutches the covers to her breasts, hiding herself away from me. Too late now, little girl. You should have hidden yourself better a long time ago.
I say some more ugly shit to her, warning her that we’ll talk when I get back. Maybe after I’ve had a chance to drive around for a few hours, I won’t be seeing red. How dare she ruin what we had? We could have easily kept fucking for months—maybe even years. But now what am I supposed to do?
I’m not the monster she currently thinks I am. I just gave my heart away a long time ago, and my sweet Macy took it with her to the grave. I don’t have anything left to give Adrienne. Only a voice in my head whispers that maybe that’s not so true. If I could, I would, right?
When I walk through the hotel room door, Eli is in the hallway with a concerned expression on his face.
I hate that he thinks of me the same way Adrienne does.
We probably all knew it would end like this eventually.
I should have stayed away from her. I just…
couldn’t. She calls to me like a siren. There’s just something about her, and I can’t stay away.
Even now, I want to go to her, take her back to bed and pretend this implosion never happened.
“What?” I bark.
“Nothing,” he says. “Not one thing.”
“If you have something to say to me…” I leave the threat dangling.
I wouldn’t.
I owe this kid my life, but I hate the judgment I see in his eyes. If I looked in the mirror right now, I’d see the same judgment staring back at me, but I’m not ready for truths yet. I still need to come to terms with how royally I’ve fucked everything to hell and back again.
“Like I said, not one thing.”
“Good,” I reply coolly. “Let’s keep it that way.”
“Roger that, boss.”
I push past him, past the elevator, and into the stairwell.
Even though I just came like a freight train for her, my heart is pumping overtime and I need to get blood flowing normally before I get behind the wheel of a car.
I jog down the stairs and push open the door at the main parking garage level. Then I jump in my SUV, and head out.
As soon as I clear the garage, the sky opens up and it pours. In the fucking desert. If that isn’t a sign of how my life is going right now, I don’t know what is.
“I love you.”
Fucking hell, she loves me.
And she wants a baby.
Maybe not now, but she does.
She was pushing my buttons—that much I know for sure because I know her, but the way she closed down when I threw her birth control in her face told me everything I needed to know. She wants a baby eventually, and she wants it to be mine.
The one thing I could never give Macy.
I never expected to find my one true love in a sophomore biology class, but there she was. Blonde and beautiful and so fucking shy. I knew she’d make me work for it. I also knew she would be worth it.
Somehow, I got her to go out on a date with me, and then I got her to let me kiss her.
And then other things. I’ll never forget senior year.
Manny knocked up Marisol, and he was scared shitless but also happier than I had ever known him to be, because even though they were young, he was getting everything he ever wanted.
I was jealous. I wanted what he had. So when Macy told me she thought she was pregnant, I was convinced all my prayers had been answered. I’d already enlisted in the marines like Manny and the rest could just fall into place too.
After graduation, I’d marry her, tie her to me in every way, and then we could start our lives together. I knew it wouldn’t be easy—military life never is—and we were young, so fucking young, but I thought it would be a beautiful life.
Two weeks later, Macy called me crying and asked me to come over.
Her parents were with her. They had always liked me, and I knew I was going to do right by Macy and our baby, so I wasn’t worried her dad was going to shoot me on sight. But still, it was a little daunting to an eighteen-year-old kid.
Then they sat me down, and everything changed.
Macy wasn’t pregnant, and she likely never would be.
They prayed she wouldn’t ever be, because it would shorten her lifespan.
I didn’t understand until her dad calmly explained that when Macy was two, she was diagnosed with a rare form of Leukemia.
By all accounts, she had beaten it. That was, until right then.
Her cancer was back, and the doctors who’d promised her a long life couldn’t promise her anything at all now.
My beautiful, sweet, so fucking shy Macy was going to die young.
I told her I loved her and I always would. We were going to do exactly what we’d said we would. Nothing had to change.
After graduation, I married Macy in a small church in our hometown of Ransom Falls, and two months later, I left for bootcamp. She had a setback while I was away, but she was fine. We arranged for her to move to San Diego where I was stationed, and we rented a little apartment.
Every time I deployed, she went home to stay with her family so she wasn’t alone. They kept her busy and kept her mind off of me and what I was doing.
On the last deployment, Eli’s army unit was working with ours, and he saw a suicide bomber when I didn’t. He shot the woman where she stood before she had a chance to get close enough to me and Manny to take us out with her.
Eli had known that Macy had cancer. We talked at chow and when on patrol; there’s not much else to do in the desert. He said afterward that I needed to get home to her alive, not in a pine box. We were bonded from then on out.
When I got home from the next deployment, Macy had taken a turn for the worse. My enlistment contract was up, so I left the marines and we moved to a horse farm back in Ransom Falls, where Macy could spend the rest of her days in peace with our families nearby.
She spent the next two years slowly withering away until one day she was just gone.
By October, we’d buried her in the cemetery of the small church we were married in.
It seemed fitting. She said our wedding day was the happiest of her life, and I couldn’t have agreed more.
In fact, I couldn’t fathom ever being happy again when she no longer walked this earth.
Over that time, I had been taking security jobs here and there. I was good at it, and I knew it. The skills the marines taught me only made me better.
Stonegate Security was born, but I might as well have been laid in the grave next to Macy.
A decade later, Manny got a phone call from the one and only Adrian Malone.
Manny loves racing. It’s one of the few sports we watch all the time. Malone was a hero of his from when we were kids, and Manny jumped at the chance to work for him. The hope of pushing me out of my comfort zone so that I would come back to the land of the living was just an added bonus.
So against my will and Malone’s demands, I took my best guys back to California to work a job for him.
I was going to post Eli and Manny on his daughter until the criminal was caught.
I read the letters the creep had been sending and was pissed.
No woman deserves to feel that kind of shit from any man.
When Adrienne walked into the room, it was like I was struck by lightning.
My heart skipped a beat, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
And for the first time in ten years, my dick was getting hard.
To say I was unhappy would be putting it mildly.
I hated her. I didn’t want to want her. I didn’t want to be stuck protecting her—the spoiled brat who’d had everything she ever wanted handed to her on a silver platter.
Why should she get to have everything, when my Macy didn’t even get to live?
But that was all wrong.
Slowly, I saw glimpses of who Adrienne really was, and I liked it. I wanted it for myself, to own it and possess it, to just be with her in her light.
The first time I fucked her, I was pissed. It was phenomenal. How could she be the best I ever had, when I loved my wife more than anyone on Earth? The truth was, Macy and I were fumbling teenagers. Looking back, she was always a little fragile.
Adrienne has always been hale and hearty. She gave me the opportunity that I had never allowed myself to have, certain appetites and desires, and that only made me angrier, because she was here, and Macy was not.
And now I’ve come to care for her.
I wouldn’t say I love her, but I would happily carry on our affair for as long as it plays out. But when she let it slip that she loves me, I lost it.
How can she love me? I already told her that I died when my wife did.
No one gets to love like that twice in their lives, do they?
But now that I think about it, if I let myself really be honest, I fell in love with Adrienne months ago.
I have been hurting her for weeks, months even, by carrying on an affair that I kept throwing the finality of in her face.
And still, she loves me anyway.
“I’ve fucked it all up. What am I going to do, Macy?” I ask. I used to talk to her all the time. I used to feel her near me, but now, it’s rare. “I’ve really made a mess of things. Can I move on, or do I let her go?”
When I get no answer, I just keep driving for a while. Eventually, I ask, “Would you be okay if I loved her too? I’ll always love you, you know that, but you’re gone, and I’m here. Can I love her too?”
I don’t know why I expect an answer or a sign—something that’ll tell me it’s all right to move on. I feel silly for even asking, and then just as suddenly as it started, the rain stops.
“Thank you, honey,” I tell her with tears in my eyes. “I will always love you.”
I started my adult life with a brilliant love, and if I’m lucky, I’ll end my life with one too. It isn’t the same, and it never will be. The women are about as different as their hair color, but it will be no less beautiful.
I make a U-turn at the first available spot and head back to the hotel. I park and take the elevator, but it feels like it moves at a snail’s pace. I need to get to Adrienne and apologize.
I need to tell her that I know I was an ass, and if she’ll forgive me, I’ll love her until the day I die. And I’ll spend every day until then making it up to her.