Chapter 28 Too Much
Too Much
WINONA
Mitchell cancelled the meal he’d planned, and we foraged out of the fridge before fucking right there on the kitchen island, then again in his bed.
In the morning I stumbled to work bleary-eyed while Mitchell spent the day texting me things like I can still smell you on my sheets. And I need to be inside of you, Winona.
He was waiting on the porch at my house when I came home the next day.
I should have been alarmed, maybe, to see him passed out on one of my porch chairs.
But I wasn’t. Not even a little. I’d barely made it out the door that morning.
My work day had been debilitated by flashbacks of everything we’d done.
And I honestly missed his company. I pulled him inside and he’d bent me over right there on the stairs, shoes on and all.
“There’s my good girl,” he’d said as he’d wrapped his hand in my hair. “Missed this cock all day, didn’t you, little bunny? Was it hard to work with my cum dripping down your leg?”
I was insatiable. He made me come twice before leaving the stairs.
Mitchell ordered pizza after, from a place in Birmingham, which was two hours away from Quince Valley.
It still arrived hot in under an hour. I didn’t ask what sorcery he’d used.
We were too exhausted from the night before to do much after eating, so instead we cozied up in my bed while he read to me.
The book I chose was a contemporary romcom from the box he’d sent over.
Much softer than the Wyn and Vyke books.
And surprisingly touching. By the time he finished the first chapter, we were both in tears.
“I snuck one of my mom’s books when I was thirteen,” he said, setting the book down on my side-table. “There was a half-dressed woman on the cover, so I was prepared for some extremely hot second-base action.”
“The extent of your knowledge?” I laughed.
“Exactly. But she found me sobbing my face off under the covers a week later. The hero’s brother had died. It was traumatic as fuck.”
I laughed, but my heart ached for this man and the boy he’d been. I felt, in that moment, perilously close to tumbling into a place I couldn’t get it back from.
“Tell me about your mom,” I whispered.
He did. He told me all about what she was like growing up, and where she was now.
How when she finally left the boys’ father a month after Mitchell moved away, his Mom had told him first. “She drove all the way across the country, showing up at my dorm room crying, apologizing that she hadn’t left him sooner.
” Mitchell stroked my arm, then raised a hand to his lip.
His beard was growing back, so I couldn’t see the scar he ran his finger along, but I knew that’s what he was touching.
“She apologized to me personally because of this fight they’d gotten into. Dad had gotten pissed at me for something and called me a freak. He pushed his lip up to make fun of my cleft lip scar.”
I gasped audibly.
Mitchell dropped his hand, taking mine against his chest.
“I didn’t remember he’d done that. I was only five. But I did remember coming back. I guess she packed us all up in the car and we went to her parents, but they talked her into going back. Dad made good money, they said. He took care of us.”
Mitchell laughed ruefully. “That’s all I remembered: the car ending up back in the driveway a week later and Dad being nice to me for the first time ever. It lasted maybe a week, but it was a happy memory for me. Isn’t that fucking sad? I guess it’s good now that she doesn’t remember it either.”
I rose up on my elbow, my heart breaking for this family; for both versions of this woman who’d given Mitchell the softest heart I’d ever known a man to carry. For the little boy he was.
Mitchell stayed at my place all week, doing work from his laptop while I was out, and doing things like washing dishes and then reading nearby when I needed to work at home.
He let me ask him endless business-related questions, and never made me feel stupid, even when they were very basic questions I should know as a business owner.
But his knowledge from running a foundation made him an amazing resource.
A huge perk besides him fucking me silly.
I don’t know what it was about being at my place, but it felt safer there. Like having Mitchell fit into my life felt more natural than me into his, even though this was the opposite of a reality we’d still never know.
I’d come home to him making dinner, and curl up with him reading to me in a voice low and melodious enough that I swore he’d missed his calling as a book narrator.
But there were functional things happening that had to do with our lives being separate again.
Mitchell having heated business calls in my back room.
Me booking flights to meet a school for women in trades in California, then calling my brothers to arrange the trip, only a week from now, to coincide with Thanksgiving.
But somehow, I could compartmentalize them.
I could pretend this domestic life we’d created here was the way our lives could be now.
And then one night, it rained again, and Mitchell told me he needed to be back at his place to take care of some things before he left.
“Right,” I said, swallowing, my throat suddenly lined with thorns.
“I’m going to figure this out,” he promised. But then his phone rang and once again, he was gone. It had been happening more and more the past few days. The calls were getting more insistent, the line between Mitchell’s brows was just a little deeper each time he came back to me.
That night, as we fell asleep in the bedroom upstairs, Mitchell kissed the back of my shoulder. I turned around, feeling heavy with the knowledge that we had only days left.
When Mitchell met my eyes in the dark, I knew he felt it too. “I love you, Winona. I know I’m not supposed to say it, and it’s too soon, or too late. But I need you to know. I love you so fucking much. I want to make babies with you. I want to be with you when we’re old. I want… everything.”
My heart shattered and healed and shattered again.
I climbed onto him. He was hard. Endlessly, relentlessly hard. And I was wet yet again. I slid down on him, shuddering with pleasure at the sensation of him filling me. I breathed out his name, my fingers curled on his warm chest, thumb in the notch of his sternum.
When I was fully seated, though, our gazes locked, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
“Winona.” Mitchell’s hands gripped my hips, holding me in place. He looked as if he couldn’t speak.
So he felt it too.
I didn’t move. Neither of us did. We simply stared at each other, the intensity of our connection more than just the pleasure of our bodies fitting so well. It felt like some kind of system collapse.
“I love you too, Mitchell.” I whispered. For a moment, I had a dream of us living a happily ever after, with little babies in our laps and children spilling cereal on the breakfast table. Ryan and Calvin would be the best uncles in the known universe.
It was too much. Before I knew what was happening, tears spilled down my cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, half laughing, half crying. “I’m okay.”
But I wasn’t sure I was. I was splitting open. And the fear of what came after—the one I’d tried to push off before—was crashing in.
“Come here,” he whispered, his arms wide. I leaned forward onto Mitchell’s body, my ear against his chest, his arms encircling me in a world of protection.
The soft thud of his heart felt so reassuring, and yet so infinitely fragile, too.
“It’s too late to turn it all back, Firecracker,” Mitchell husked. “But if we could, I wouldn’t change a thing. All the mistakes and all the idiot things I said. If they brought me here, they were worth it.”
I let out a shuddering gasp, and Mitchell gently rolled us over so I was on my back, his bulk hovering over me. It was so different than the last time he’d been inside of me. So soft and tender.
The tears spilled over.
Mitchell leaned down on one forearm, stroking my cheek with his knuckles. “I made you cry the first time we met,” he said, a rueful smile on his face, which was starkly angled in the shadows of night. “My biggest shame.”
I hooked my ankles around his legs, shaking my head on the pillow. “It’s not you,” I said. “It’s this life. Gifting me a man who makes me feel this way. Who I can’t keep.”
Mitchell was still inside of me, and when he shifted, I hummed momentarily with pleasure even as the tears continued.
“You can keep me, Winona,” he husked. “This doesn’t have to be a passing thing.”
The words made my breath hitch, and for a moment I believed them.
But he wasn’t considering what they meant.
He’d told me back at the beginning he needed to go back for something vital with his business.
Now I knew it was a major acquisition that could have a direct impact on his mom’s future.
On everyone’s future, who shared that disease.
Then there was her. She’d been his and his brothers’ savior, he’d said.
Everything good when his father made their lives dark.
She was declining. The acquisition might make no difference.
Especially if he were with me when something happened.
I needed to let him go home.
I smiled at Mitchell then, willing the tears to dry.
My life was changing too. I was right on the cusp of everything changing. He knew that. I knew that.
We both knew we were doomed from the start.
Afterward, as we lay there tangled in the sheets together, talking about everything and nothing. I suddenly remembered what Sarah had said about the architect. How I’d promised her a tour. After all this and I still hadn’t seen more than half of this place.
“I met her,” Mitchell said. “The architect. We were at some party in New York. I told her I was considering taking some time away, and she told me about this place she designed in a jewel of a town tucked into a forested hill in Vermont. Said the closest neighbor was some ex-tennis pro a whole kilometer away, so I’d have total privacy.
” He kissed my palm. “She didn’t know Blake was here, of course. It was just… kismet.”
He traced a thumb over the tattoo on my wrist.
This man. Hobnobbing with world famous architects. Willing to be my monster and my prince.
What would Mama have thought of Mitchell?
I didn’t notice that he’d paused, his thumb under the word library.
I looked up to meet his gaze.
To my surprise, he said, “Lets do the tour now.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“This was the architect’s favorite part of this house,” Mitchell told me as he rested his hand on a door at the end of the hallway. It was larger than the rest, an ornately carved forest scene on the expansive slab of wood. “I think it could be yours, too.”
He swung the door open.
I let out an audible gasp.
A massive room stretched out before us. It was two stories, with us connected to the first floor with an ornate, winding staircase.
Clusters of velvet chairs and couches were artfully arranged over Turkish rugs, and downstairs, a massive fireplace occupied the main wall.
But my eyes weren’t on those. My eyes were on the walls, which were lined, floor to ceiling, from first floor to the very top, with books.
My heart squeezed like a vice had clamped around it. “You have a library.”
Mitchell looked up at the books, beaming like a proud little boy as we stopped at the railing by the stairs. “Do you like it? I’m sorry I didn’t show you sooner, we were just… doing other things.”
I’d laugh, but I couldn’t speak. My chest felt as if it had caved in. A library. A real library in a real castle, with a real prince.
Mama would have no words.
Mitchell looked down at me and his expression shifted instantly. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask me why I was falling to pieces. He just picked me up and pulled me onto his lap as he dropped down onto the top step. He wrapped the blanket he’d worn over mine and let me cry softly into his chest.
I don’t know how long we sat like this. There was a clock in here somewhere; it ticked softly from down below.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just… the library was the only place he never tarnished.”
Mitchell stroked my hair. “Never say sorry,” he said. A long beat passed. Finally, Mitchell said, “You don’t ever have to tell me about it, Winona. But maybe, sometime, you should tell someone. Sometimes shining the light on things gives them fewer places to hide.”
My skin zinged at his words. When I first met Mitchell, I’d wanted to stuff my past into the darkness. I thought if I never went in, I’d never have to feel that pain again.
But I’d been exposing myself to pain every day I was with Mitchell. Opening up bit by bit, and it hadn’t killed me yet.
Mitchell was right. Adam would love to lurk in the darkness. To stay hidden, controlling me still with my avoidance.
I’d never told anyone about Adam before. I’d never wanted to.
I never could.
But Mitchell had seen so much of me. It was only fitting that he be the one to know the truth.