Chapter 28
Twenty-Eight
Leo
She shivers, and I know we can’t keep having this conversation out here.
“Come on,” I say, wrapping my arm around her shoulders and drawing her to my car.
She doesn’t fight me, and it takes only a couple of minutes to get her out of the cool morning air and buckled into the passenger’s seat.
I round the hood, drop down into the driver’s side, and make short work of pulling out of the stall.
Maybe I should take her home.
Instead, my need to care for her has me driving to the bakery near her shop.
She doesn’t speak as I drive, just stares out the window, as though lost deep in her thoughts.
I can’t lie.
I’m heavy in my own.
Because what she shared broke my heart.
And gave me so much fucking clarity.
Which is why I need to level with her.
“Come on, baby,” I murmur after I’ve parked, gone around and opened her door.
She shakes herself, reaches down and unbuckles her belt. “What are we doing here?”
“Breakfast,” I say. “Then I’m going to help you with whatever work you need to do. Then I’m going to put you to bed.”
Her eyes flash to mine, pink on her cheeks.
And Christ, my dick is a needy fuck—needy for her anyway.
“I don’t have any prep to do,” she says. “Just ordering and some contracts to send out.”
“Okay so breakfast then to bed with you.” I tuck an unruly strand of hair behind her ear. “After we talk about what you said in the hospital parking lot.”
Her gaze slides away but only for a moment. Then her chin lifts and her eyes fix on mine and she nods. “Yes,” she agrees. “It’s about time we do exactly that.”
God, she’s so damned strong.
I love that about her.
Then again, there are a lot of things to love about Harper—her work ethic, her talent in the kitchen, her kind heart, her perseverance.
She’s a good woman.
A good person.
And I’m going to protect that.
We walk inside, pick a few things from the thankfully still full case. I commit her choices to memory then rebuff her offer to pay. “You want to find a table?” I ask, handing her the placard with a number printed on it.
Her eyes flick down to it.
Then back up, something drifting through the golden-green depths that has me following the path of her gaze.
Number ninety.
My lips curve, and she exhales. “Hockey players and their numbers.”
I grin. “We’re all egotistical bastards.”
She laughs, takes the number. “Thanks for breakfast.”
I pay, snag our plates, nod when the woman behind the counter tells us it’ll be just a couple of minutes for our coffees, then head over to the corner table Harper selected.
It’s tucked away, and I’m glad.
Because I need to level with her, to explain.
Only, as I sit down next to her, I find that words are extremely hard to come by.
Mostly because they seem…inadequate.
I open my mouth, close it. Pick up my muffin. Put it down. Then open my mouth again. Then close it.
Harper settles her hand on mine before I can reach for my muffin again.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”
My shoulders go tight. “It’s not that. Or not exactly that,” I add then sigh. “It’s mostly that I just don’t know where to start.”
She’s quiet for a moment.
“How about why you left that morning?”
“Because I felt what you described. Because it was like the moment I laid eyes on you, my soul relaxed. I had to talk to you, had to get to know you, had to touch you.”
Her lips part on a surprised breath.
“That whole night was magic…” I scrub my hands over my face. “Then I woke up and my phone was a shitshow.”
She tilts her head to the side. “I remember you kept silencing it during the night.”
Yeah, I had.
“My parents seem to exist to make themselves and everyone around them miserable.”
Her fingers tighten on mine. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that your dad was an absentee asshole and I’m so sorry for that. But”—I turn my hand over, lace our fingers together, needing the contact to admit to something that I’ve never told anyone else—“I used to wish they would leave.”
“Your dad?”
I nod. “Or my mom. Or maybe both. I just—”
“Excuse me,” the woman from the coffee counter says, carefully setting our mugs on the table.
“You just…what?” Harper asks gently when we’re alone again.
“This is going to sound like some pathetic sob story,” I preface. “I know I’m lucky to have two parents, especially two parents who stayed together until I was settled in my life.”
“They’re divorced now?” she asks.
I nod. “And both are remarried…and I think that’s part of why I left too. Because they have new partners and yet it’s the same old messy shit.”
“What do you mean?”
“At first I thought the universe threw them together to make each other—and me by proxy—miserable.” My temple throbs. “But they’re the same way with their new partners, so I started thinking—believing—that they’re just miserable people.”
“They fought a lot?”
“Constantly,” I say. “They’d fight and then come to me—my dad bitching to me about my mom, my mom crying to me about how mean my dad was to her. It was a constant cycle and I was in the middle of it, trying to play peacemaker.”
“I’m sorry, Leo. That sounds awful.”
I shrug. “It’s just…what it was. And”—this is the hard part—“what I thought it was, was love.”
Her brows drag together.
“Every argument with them would end with them saying how much they loved each other—Dad couldn’t leave because he loved my mom too much, Mom couldn’t leave because she couldn’t bear to be apart from the love of her life.
” I take a breath. “So, when I felt what I did with you, how big it was, how much I wanted it…”
“You couldn’t chance it.”
“I meant what I said when I told you I couldn’t wait to see you again.
I meant it with every cell in my body.” I sigh.
“Then I woke up and my phone was filled with missed calls and text messages from my parents with the same old shit. And I started thinking what if I become that, what if I do that to you, what if this one night turns into a thousand nights of fighting and hating each other and…I couldn’t do that to you. ”
I grind my teeth together.
“I just—” My voice breaks. “I just couldn’t do that to you.”