CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Whitney
F ear owns me.
As I board the plane.
As I sit in the taxi cab, and am being driven through the city streets.
As I walk through the hotel lobby and receive greetings I don’t deserve.
And it’s not until my fist is raised and knocking on his hotel room door—the one that I had to beg Ari to give me—that I am in complete agreement with what I have to do.
But I know I have to do it.
“Yeah?” Hardy asks when he pulls the door open to his hotel suite, but it’s his quick gasp that tells me he’s just as shocked that I’m standing here as I am. “Whitney?” He looks down the hallway and then back at me. “What are you doing here?”
“May I come in?”
He takes a step back so that I can enter before shutting the door at my back. The suite is spacious and Hardy’s things are organized neatly about. His healthy snacks are stacked on the counters and a massage table has been set up in the far corner.
This is a life so very separate from the one that I lived while with him. I want to know more about it. I want to be a part of it.
He lets me walk about the room in silence, but the weight of his stare is heavy on my back as I do so.
“Did you need something, Barnes?” he asks.
“Don’t do that,” I counter and turn on him.
“Don’t do what? Be me? Love you? You’re the one who came all this way, and I sure as shit know it’s not for my game, so you tell me. Whitney, don’t do what ?” Bitterness coats his words, and I stare at him with so much emotion my chest burns.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I throw my hands up. “I fought all my fears, every urge to not get on that plane and keep going, but I didn’t. I’m here. And just like you kept showing up for me to prove a point, I’m showing up for you. I’m here.” My voice is a shaky vibrato, and my heart is a deafening staccato.
“I deserve more than you just showing up.” He sits his ass on the back of the couch. “So do you, and you know it.”
This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. He was supposed to see me and be so overwhelmed that I made the trek here to let him know I care. It was supposed to be enough.
But it’s not enough. I know it, and he just said it. He does deserve better .
“What do you want from me? To pour my heart out to you? Tell you yes, I love you too?”
“Only if that’s how you feel.” His stoicism is maddening. I want him to fight me. To argue. To give me something to rally against.
But he’s staring at me with a face of patience and eyes filled with resignation.
“So I tell you I love you, I open myself up to you, all so you can pick up and go back to England in a few weeks?”
“Ah. And there it finally is. Said and put out in the open.”
“Do you have an answer?” My throat burns and eyes well. “Put yourself in my shoes.”
“I have. Believe me I have, more times than I care to count.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“How about this? How about it’s hard to talk about my next steps when we can’t even agree on which step we’re currently standing on? You think I’m going to talk about what happens a month, two months, six months from now when you’re too fucking scared I’m going to leave as it is?” He runs a hand through his hair and paces about the room. “It’s not enough to love a woman who you’re afraid can’t love you in return. I’ve been patient. I’ve done what I could to make your life easier. I’ve put things in order to—”
“Now I’m a fucking charity case? Of course. I’m sorry that I came here.”
“No.” His voice thunders, and his hand slams down on the table. “You don’t get to use that excuse anymore. I’ve never treated you like one so stop using it when it’s convenient for you.” He laces his fingers at the back of his neck and pulls down as his groan of frustration fills the room.
I’m frustrated too. At myself. At this situation. At every single goddamn thing in my life that led me to this point, but that paralyzes me from believing this could be true.
“You’re stubborn and defiant, Whitney, and you love those fucking kids with all your heart unconditionally, so why is it that you can’t bring yourself to love me?”
The crack in his voice kills me. Absolutely guts me. A little boy asking why in a grown man’s body.
Gut check time, Whit. Isn’t this what you came here for?
I move toward him until I’m standing right in front of him. “Everything I’ve ever loved has left me,” I whisper. My words are raw and unfiltered but honest and true. “If I love you, you’re going to leave too.”
He drops his hands and looks at me with a clarity I don’t think I’ve felt before and a poignancy that makes it hard to breathe.
“There are no guarantees in anything, Whitney. None. But part of life is putting yourself out there and trying. It’s laying your heart on the line and trusting.” He reaches out and cups the side of my face. “If you don’t think that what I feel for you scares the shit out of me then you’re just as crazy as you make me feel.”
I reach out and rest my hand on his heart. Its beat is steady beneath my palm. I look up and meet his eyes.
“I ... I love you, Alexander Hardy. So much so that it’s hard to breathe.”
He brings his lips to mine. It’s a tender brush of lips, a soft mingle of sighs, and an uncontested joining of souls. “I’ll take you any way I can have you.” Another kiss where his tongue dances against mine. “Let us just have tonight. Just us. Just this.” The warmth of his breath flutters over my lips. “We’ll start trying to figure out the rest in the morning.”
“Hardy—”
But any protest I might have is met with the determination of his touch and the surrender of my heart.
He kisses me like it’s a goodbye. He worships me like there is no tomorrow.
Our clothes come off with sunlight all around us. There is no dark to hide beneath. No shadows to use as a shield.
It’s just him. It’s just me.
It’s a love we can no longer ignore and a choice that’s already been made.
He slips into me with the ease of a lover who knows me and the reverence of a man who knows just how good we are together.
“Eyes on me,” he murmurs as his elbows frame my head, and our bodies move as one.
His lips tease as steadily as his cock does. But they touch so much more than just nerve endings this time around. They mend and heal. They taunt and seduce. They make me whole when I only ever thought I’d be broken.
And when I come, when he gently coaxes my body into that tidal wave of pleasure, he’s the only thing I see—steady eyes watching what he does to me. He’s all I feel—his tense muscles and tender kisses. He’s all I hear. “Come for me. Just like that. Show me what I do to you. Show me who we are together.”