Chapter 53 Maya #2
I searched his face for the lie, the goodbye, the careful mask he wore when he was about to shut me out. It wasn’t there.
I got in the truck.
* * *
Nate pulled out of the driveway and turned left, away from town. I sat with my hands pressed between my knees, my pulse hammering.
We’d gone a few miles when I started paying attention. “Why are we heading toward the park?”
He reached for my hand, laced his fingers through mine, and rested our joined hands on his thigh. “You’ll see.”
“Nate.”
“Trust me.”
I bit my lip, staring blankly out the windshield. When he took the fork toward the northern track I frowned. “You’re taking me to Fogarty’s?”
He kept his eyes on the road, his thumb tracing slow circles across my knuckles in silent reassurance.
The tires crunched over the familiar rutted dirt of the access track. Trees whipped past the windows, the dense canopy blocking out the afternoon sun. Until the woods finally parted revealing the tin roof of the old cabin.
Nate parked behind the hut where the access track ended, cut the engine and climbed out. Before I could gather my scrambled thoughts, he was around my side, pulling open my door.
I got out, holding tight to his hand as he led me around the front. The sagging porch and peeling paint were exactly the same as always. Except for the tape across the door. Bold black letters on yellow plastic, stretched from one side of the frame to the other.
PRIVATE PROPERTY.
“What is this?” I stepped past him and stopped at the bottom of the steps. The tape was new. Recently placed, clean edges, no weathering. “Who put this here? Sure, this isn’t park land, but Brody would have told me if there was a transfer on the boundary. I would have seen the paperwork.”
Nate stood with his hands in his pockets, trying to look relaxed. He wasn’t pulling it off.
My gaze darted from the tape to him, then back again.
“You… you bought Fogarty’s?”
The words came out slow, like I was testing each one for weight before I let it go.
“It’s the Brookes-O’Hare hut now.” His voice was steady but his hands were still in his pockets. I knew him well enough to know they were fists. “If you want it to be.”
The ground tilted under my feet.
“I don’t understand.” I pressed my fingers to my temples. “How? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Because I needed you to know I was serious. I spent months telling you I wasn’t staying. You had every reason to believe it. So I needed something real, something I could put in front of you that you could have faith in.”
My vision blurred. I blinked as tears slid down my cheeks, warm and fast. I didn’t bother wiping them away.
“The library,” I whispered. “The phone calls. The trip to New Bern.”
He nodded.
A sound escaped me that was half laugh, half sob. “I thought you were leaving me.”
Emotion swirled in his eyes. A muscle feathered along his jaw as he looked at me.
“I know.” His voice was rough. “I hate that I made you feel that way. I should have told you what I was doing, Maya. I’m so sorry.”
He was at my side in three strides. He cupped my face, thumbs catching the tears, and he held me there, his forehead dropping to rest against mine.
He let out a long, shaky exhale, his chest rising and falling. His voice was soft when he said, “You slay me, Maya.”
I let out a sob.
“I love you.” Quiet. Certain. A fact he’d been carrying for a long time and was finally setting down. “I love you. I love you so much, and I’m sorry it took me so long to say it.”
My breath shuddered out. My hands twisted into his shirt, holding on because my legs had stopped doing their job.
I pulled back. His eyes were bright and raw and completely unguarded, every wall he’d ever built lying in rubble at our feet.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I tried again, and my voice cracked on the first word. “I love you too.” The tears were still coming and I couldn’t see him clearly. It didn’t matter because his face was the only thing I’d ever memorized by heart. “I love you so much.”
A tremor ran through him as he wrapped me in his arms. He squeezed me so tight my feet nearly left the ground. I held on to him like the hut and the clearing and the whole forest might disappear if I let go.
When we finally eased apart, I reached up and pressed my palm against his cheek. He turned his face into it, his lips brushing my wrist.
I turned in his arms and looked at the hut. Really looked at it. The tin roof, the sagging porch, the peeling green paint. A small, weathered building on the edge of a national park that most people would walk past without a second glance.
It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
Nate pressed a kiss into my neck. “So, I really hope you want to live in a hut on a hill, or this could get awkward.”
I laughed. “I couldn’t imagine anything better.” Pushing my hand into his hair, I tilted my head back, giving him a featherlight kiss. “But you’re gonna have to tell me how you convinced Mr. Fogarty to sell.”
“Uh, yeah, it’s quite a story.”
“Maybe you could tell it to me inside.”
He smiled. “Good idea.”
He took my hand and led me up the porch steps, peeled the tape off the door, pushed it open, and guided me inside.
We settled on the sofa, our knees touching, his hand still holding mine.
“Okay, begin. I need to know every little detail. For starters, Old man Fogarty would sooner burn this place down than sell it to anyone outside the family. How did you get past that?”
“Well, as it turns out, there are Fogartys on Mom’s side,” he said. “Way back, like four generations. My grandmother used to talk about it. I half-remembered, so I went to the library to see if I could trace the connection.”
I gaped at him, trying to reconcile the gorgeous, broad-shouldered man beside me with the notoriously cranky old man who owned this land.
“Wait. You’re telling me you’re a secret Fogarty?”
He gave a modest little shrug, but the corner of his mouth twitched.
I let out a gasp of pure disbelief. “Holy shit. Okay, catch me up. Annie said you were at the library for hours.”
He nodded. “Census records, land grants. It took a while, but it was all there. I just needed Mom’s documents to prove the lineage.” He reached out, tucking a stray curl behind my ear, his knuckles lingering against my cheek and completely scrambling my brain all over again.
“That’s why you went to New Bern.”
“Yeah.”
I traced a pattern on the back of his hand with my fingertip. “How was that? Seeing them?”
Tension swirled in his eyes. “I said what I needed to say. Got the documents. Told them they wouldn’t be seeing me again.”
The casual way he dropped that bomb wrecked me. He’d spent years outrunning his parents, only to march right back into the thick of it for me. My throat closed up, a heavy, aching knot tangling behind my ribs.
I lifted his hand and brushed a kiss across his knuckles. “Are you okay with that?”
“Yeah.” He let out a rough sigh. “Look, I’m not gonna lie and say it was easy, but I’m in therapy. We’re working through it.”
God, this man. “You’re in therapy?”
That earned me a half smile. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you, Maya.”
I swallowed hard, the magnitude of his words settling deep in my heart. He was fighting for himself. He was fighting for us. My own lips curved upward, trembling just a little. “I love you.”
His smile widened. “I love you, too.” He leaned in and kissed me again. “Now, do you want to hear the rest of this story?”
“I definitely do, but I need to do something first.”
He quirked a brow. I lifted his arm and slid under it, so I was snuggled against his side. “Okay, I’m good. What happened next?”
He shifted his weight, pulling me a little closer. “I went to see Mr. Fogarty.”
I tilted my head. “And?”
Nate’s mouth curved. “I told him I could guarantee a Fogarty would live in his hut again.”
My heart squeezed. “You didn’t.”
“I did.”
My gaze swept the small room, seeing it in a new light. The stove where he’d lit a fire while I shivered in a blanket. The floor where he’d laid out the mattress and arranged my injured leg over his so the swelling would go down. All of it.
Every corner of this place held something that belonged to us.
I curled into his side and rested my head against his shoulder, sighing when he wrapped his arm around me. Love flooded through me, so fierce and so bright it filled all the places where the ache had been.
I tipped my face up to meet his eyes. “I love you.”
He pressed a kiss to my forehead. “I love you too, Slayer.”
He shifted, his arms tightening around my waist to pull me flush against him. The old sofa groaned in protest, but I didn’t care. I was exactly where I belonged. Wrapped up in the man who had bought me a piece of the forest, right here at the edge of forever.