Chapter Thirty-Nine
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Nick
CHARLIE GLARES UP AT me from the door of her bedroom. It had taken five minutes just trying to convince her to open the damn thing. She’s hurt. I think she’s more upset about this than what transpired the other night.
And me? I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.
The biggest part of me was fucking elated to see my wife standing there. After all this time, to finally remember something…someone. Her name was the first thing on my mind and then my own. No one and nothing else mattered when I saw her. But then, the smallest bits of concern and regret pushed their way through the elation. What changed back home in the year I’ve been gone? Did Nina move on? Does Elena even remember me? Did Alex get married? What about Joseph and the ranch? What about Charlie? Will Nina be mad when I tell her about Charlie? Does it matter what happened with Charlie?
“I’m sorry you feel like I was leading you on, that was never my intention, Charlie.” I sigh, leaning back against the banister. “I told you I wasn’t ready for something like this. I didn’t even know who I was. I didn’t—”
“Whatever you say, Nick .” Charlie practically spits my name, and I won’t lie, it hurts a little. “Why don’t you run back to your perfect life with your perfect wife? I’m sure you even have a kid waiting for you in your mansion back home.”
“Enough, Charlie.” She can say what she wants about me, but I won’t let her bring Elena or Nina into this. This is not their fault. “I can’t help it if you choose not to listen to me. I made it very clear I wasn’t looking for anything.”
“Didn’t seem that way the other night.”
My gaze narrows.
Charlie smirks. She knows she has me backed into a corner. “That was nothing, too?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose and pray Nina doesn’t walk inside. The thought of her hearing any part of this right now…I don’t want her to find out like this. I need to break it to her at the right time. I don’t know how she’ll feel about what happened here.
“You can’t tell me it meant—”
“Charlie, it didn’t mean anything,” I say and meet her eyes again. “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea, but—”
“You didn’t even think they were looking for you!”
There’s a creak at the bottom of the stairs and I don’t have to look to know who it is. Charlie doesn’t, either. Her heated gaze doesn’t flinch, remaining on me. “ She wasn’t looking for you,” Charlie says, loud enough for Nina to hear.
She’s angry, and I suppose part of her anger is valid, and if she could, I’m sure she’d set me ablaze right here and now. It would be easier than facing the heartbreak she brought upon herself. I can’t give her what she wants. I can’t. I don’t love her. I care for her, but the woman standing at the bottom of the stairs will always be the one who owns my heart.
“You’re right, Charlie, I didn’t think anyone was looking for me. But obviously, I was wrong.” I motion toward the window at the end of the hallway overlooking the front of the house. “She’s here. And she is the one thing I had to hold on to this entire time. Almost every memory I’ve had since I woke up in the hospital, she was there…I may not have known who she was, but I knew she was the answer to finding myself again.”
I can see the tears blurring her vision, and when I step toward her, Charlie takes two steps back.
“I wish I could be who you want me to be, but…I’m not.”
“You could.”
“No, I can’t, because my heart belongs to someone else.”
“You don’t belong there, Nick,” Charlie pleads. “You aren’t like them . They’re what’s wrong with everything in the world, the kind of people who step on people like me and my dad to get what they want. They don’t care—”
“Stop talking,” I hiss, taking another step closer to her. “You will not speak about my wife or my family that way. You don’t know them. You don’t know what they’ve been through.”
Her tongue pokes out to wet her dry lips before her throat bobs with a deep swallow.
“You don’t know me , Charlie. You only know the shell of a man who didn’t know where he belonged.”
Her eyes leave me, glaring to my right, where I know Nina stands at the top of the stairs. My wife looks between us, only allowing her gaze to remain on Charlie for less than half a second. Then she walks between us toward my room without a word. Charlie scoffs. “Well, then, you better go. Wouldn’t want to keep the princess waiting.”
There is so much more I want to say, but I know nothing will change her mind or the way she feels about what has happened. I have to be okay walking away from the ranch knowing it means leaving Charlie heartbroken. It’s not my job to fix her. It never was.
“Nina,” I say when I walk into my bedroom, but she’s busy pulling together the contents of my desk, shuffling them into a neat pile one thing at a time. Taking her left hand in mine, I stop her movements and tug her to me. My thumb swipes across the stone on her ring finger before I bring the back of her hand to my lips. “Dee, it’s not what you think.”
“I don’t care, Nick.” She shrugs and tries to move past me to finish collecting my things, but I stop her.
“I know you, Davina. I know what’s going through your head right now, and what happened here is not what you’re thinking.”
“Even if it did, it’s not my business.”
“It is your business, and I was going to tell you later, not right now. Not when I just got you back. Charlie, she…she’s not you, Nina.” I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and lift her chin to bring her mouth to mine. Being with her, feeling her body against mine, her heartbeat against mine…is the best feeling in the entire fucking universe. “I’ve missed that,” I whisper when we part, finally earning a smile from her.
Nina buries her face in the crook of my neck, and I wrap my arms firmly around her. Taking a deep breath, I inhale the familiar scents of magnolia and sandalwood, mixed with her vanilla-coconut shampoo.
“Let’s go home,” I say, and kiss the top of her head.
My arm extends over the center console, hand resting on her right thigh as Nina drives home. She asked me if I wanted to drive, but I said no, I’d ride passenger this time. Besides, did she really trust me to remember the way home? It was meant to be a joke, but I don’t think she found it as humorous as I did. Not right now, anyway. Maybe in a few days once the dust settles. While the joke may have had some truth, I didn’t want to drive because I wanted to take the opportunity to be present. I wanted to take my time, re-memorizing her features and learning the new ones she’s acquired. I wanted to listen without distraction as she told me everything that happened the last year. To soak in every moment of the little alone time we had remaining. Nina warned me everyone was at the house…literally everyone. And I’m not sure whether the thought should excite or scare me.
“I was supposed to be on a plane right now,” Nina says, glancing over at me. “The board wanted to talk to me tomorrow. I haven’t been very…present lately.”
“You’re still running things?”
She shrugs. “Yes and no. I’ve been working, but mostly from here. They want me back in New York, and before today, I’d been considering it.”
That’s…disappointing to hear, though not surprising. My wife is nothing if not a workaholic and a bit of a control freak. She gets it honestly. Her dad, Ric, was the same way. Her constant need to go behind her brother and fix things is one of the reasons we ended up in this situation.
“I thought about selling the house and moving to New York. Elena has enjoyed it when we’re there off and on, and work would have given me something to take my mind off things.”
“Nina—”
“Nick, I don’t want to fight about this. Not right now. Please.”
I squeeze her thigh before moving my hand to caress the side of her cheek. “I’m not fighting, Dee. I just want to know what’s going on in your life.”
Her phone buzzes in the cup holder between us like it has been every few minutes since she turned it on about twenty minutes ago, but she left it disconnected from the car so it wouldn’t continue interrupting us. Nina ignores it, but it’s getting harder for me to do so. Who in the hell is blowing up her phone? Didn’t she tell the others where she was going?
“You want to get that?” I ask, looking down at it.
Nina sighs. She doesn’t look, but finally answers the call, reconnecting the phone to the car. “Yes?”
“Where are you?”
I do a double-take when I see the name on the screen.
“I’m”—she glances over at me and chews on her bottom lip, her gaze returning to the road—“driving home.”
Holy shit. She didn’t tell them. They have no idea she left to find me.
“How far out are you?”
“About an hour away.” Her answers remain short and sweet, to the point. She’s trying not to give anything away to either one of us—me or him.
“Anything I need to know?”
“Nope. I’ll fill you in when I get there.”
He sighs. “Okay. Be careful, Sweetheart.”
She hums in response, hanging up the call.
I count to five, waiting for her to say something, anything, but she doesn’t. Her eyes are glued to the road ahead. Her thumb fiddles with her wedding ring, her left hand resting in her lap. When I get to five, I take a deep breath and ask, “Why the fuck is Beau Turner calling you Sweetheart ?”