Chapter Three #3
“Yeah.” He decided to lay it all out there. “I felt guilty because even though I still wanted you and I really had wanted our baby, I was also relieved that I wouldn’t have to try to be a dad and a husband while chasing that dream.”
“I get it,” she said. “I do. I remember how bad you wanted to play pro football, how you couldn’t wait to make it to the NFL, to be the starting quarterback for a top team. You used to talk about your dream of winning the Super Bowl, claiming the ring…”
He looked down at his tightly folded hands. “That’s right. I wanted it, all of it.”
“And then I got pregnant and you were stuck…” She let the words trail off. A long silence followed. What could he say? She was right, after all. She added almost tenderly, “You tried so hard not to resent me.”
“I didn’t resent you, Kenzie.”
“Oh, Finn…” She let out a slow breath and said patiently, “Yes, you did.”
“I knew it wasn’t your fault. I was the one handling the contraception, after all.”
Her grin was suddenly devilish. “And apparently, you were handling it poorly.”
He pretended to glare her. “Very funny.”
And then, her eyes were sad again. “We were only eighteen at the time. We did the best we could.”
“I guess you’re right.”
She tipped her pretty chin high. “We both know I’m right.”
“Fair enough. And then, after the baby was gone, I just wanted to get away from the guilt and the sadness, to forget our little boy who never drew a single breath. So I said I didn’t love you.”
Silence echoed between them. He was acutely aware of the decorative clock on the wall across from the table, of the clicking sound it made as it ticked the seconds away. He waited for her to ask if he still loved her, even now.
But she didn’t ask. Instead, she set her soft, cool hand on his tightly clasped ones.
“It’s alright, Finn. I mean that. And I meant what I said that day at the Grizzly.
It wouldn’t have worked for us. We were too young.
All the drama around my being pregnant and then having a miscarriage, the loss and the guilt—it was just too much. It broke us.”
There had definitely been drama. He remembered that far too clearly.
Including the unbearable family meetings—both families, his and hers.
His dad had made those meetings a living hell, yelling at Finn for being “a stone idiot,” accusing Kenzie of getting pregnant on purpose to “trap” Finn into marrying her.
Once or twice, his dad and Kenzie’s dad had almost come to blows.
And then, in the space of a few awful hours one night in mid-July, the baby was gone. Finn hadn’t realized how much he wanted that child until there was no child, after all.
Gently, Kenzie squeezed his hands. “We both needed to start over. Yes, I resented you for leaving me. But I also needed time away from you as much as you needed space from me. Every time I looked at you, I would think of our baby, think of losing him. Think of the emptiness where he was supposed to have been. I longed to get away from the reminder of him, of the little boy he never got a chance to be—and yet there you were, the father of the child I would never know. It hurt, it really did, just to be around you then.”
He turned his right hand palm up and captured hers. She held on and met his eyes. The look they shared then went on for the longest time. Finally, he said, “I’m so sorry, Kenz.”
“Oh, Finn. Me too.”
He looked away then. “You’re too easy on me.”
She squeezed his hand and he met her eyes again. “I don’t need to be hard on you, Finn,” she said with a sad little smile. “You’re plenty hard enough on yourself. And we were too young. Too many couples I know went off to college vowing to be true…and then one of them cheated.”
“Kenzie, come on. We both know that wasn’t us—I mean, yeah, we were too young and we might not have made it as a couple. But I never cheated on you and I never would have done that.” She sent him a pained look and eased her hand from his grip. “What?” he demanded. “You don’t believe me?”
“I do believe you. But people cheat. You know they do.”
He studied her face in search of clues to her real meaning. And suddenly, he knew. “You’re not talking about college kids. Or about you and me. You’re talking about your ex-husband, aren’t you?”
Now, she was the one looking away. He waited for her to face him again. Eventually, she did. “Tate’s a land man for Treasure State Oil and Gas. I think I’ve mentioned before that he traveled a lot for work.”
“You have mentioned that, yeah.”
“Well…” She cleared her throat and then finally continued, “Sometimes, toward the end of our marriage, he’d come back from a business trip and his shirts would smell like somebody else’s perfume.
Sadly, by then, his cheating was just more proof of what I already knew.
It was over. Tate and I didn’t want the same things—and as it turned out, we never had. ”
“What a fool.”
She seemed to shake herself. And then, she glanced at the clock.
He got the message. “Had enough of me for one night?”
Her gaze settled on him once more, the corners of her mouth turning down in a melancholy way. “I didn’t say that.” He wanted to take her hand again, to offer comfort. But he didn’t quite dare. She added, “And, Finn, I did have a great time today.”
“Me, too. Thank you for being my date. It was good to have you there with me.”
She nodded and then granted him a smile, one that belied the sadness in her eyes. He wondered about that ex of hers. Was she still in love with him?
He really wanted to ask her that question. But before he could work up the nerve to go there, she pushed back her chair.
Finn got the message loud and clear. He’d overstayed his welcome. He rose and fell in step behind her.
She led him to the door, where she turned to meet his eyes again and said almost tenderly, “Finn, I…”
He waited, barely breathing, in anticipation of whatever she might say next. The seconds ticked by and they just stood there, staring at each other. The moment was slipping away from him.
He dared to lift a hand and press his palm to her smooth, soft cheek.
“Finn…” A thrill surged through him as she tipped her face up to him. It was his chance and he seized it. His pulse roaring in his ears, he lowered his lips to hers.
She didn’t pull back. Instead, she welcomed him, sliding her arms up over his chest. He felt her sigh against his lips as she whispered his name again. “Finn…”
He gathered her close. And at last he was breathing in the sweet scent of her skin, feeling the roundness at her belly and the fullness of her breasts that brought him sharply to awareness of the baby within her…and also of the whole of her that he’d lost so very long ago.
The kiss took on a life of its own. He breathed her in, his tongue sparring with hers. She let out a soft and urgent little sound.
And then, he lifted his mouth from hers, but only to slant it the other way and get lost in the taste of her all over again.
It felt right, as if it was meant to be—to hold her in his arms, to press his lips to hers, to run his hands down her back, feeling the soft shape of her beneath the silky dress she wore.
The past rose up, filling his head with the memory of her in his arms all those years ago, of the kisses they’d shared—so many, some innocent, fleeting. Others long and wet and endlessly deep.
He remembered the way she used to let him in the window of her upstairs bedroom at her parents’ house, pushing the window open with aching slowness in order not to make any noise, whispering across the sill at him as he clung to a high branch of the bur oak that grew close to the house.
Shh, Finn. Don’t make a sound…
Somehow, he always made it inside without falling and breaking his fool neck.
Once he was in, she would lead him to her white cast-iron bed with the pink quilt covered in twining vines and purple flowers, and a mountain of pillows.
So many pillows that he would shove half of them to the floor to make room for the two of them, entwined.
“Finn…” She breathed his name against his lips. He marveled that now, tonight, all these years later, he was holding her close in his arms once more.
He thought of how much he’d missed her after he’d walked away from her, of how often he’d had to remind himself that she was lost to him. That he’d made his choice and she would never be his.
Not ever again…
“Finn.”
He blinked down at her. “Hmm?”
She pulled away then…but gently. Slowly. “Good night, Finn.” She whispered the words like a secret, a covert message for his ears alone.
He said exactly what he was thinking. “I don’t want to go.”
She gazed up at him, starry-eyed, almost smiling. “Finn…” She was shaking her head. “Friends, remember?”
Reluctantly, he nodded. “I get it. I do.” He took his hat from the coat-tree by the door and put it on. “’Night, Kenz.”
“Drive safe, Finn.”
“I will.” Smiling now, he stepped out into the gathering darkness.
He drove home thinking how much he wanted to turn his crew cab around and go back.
But he didn’t go back.
They were friends and friends only, as she kept reminding him. So shoot him, he found it easy to imagine becoming a lot more than friends with her. He liked her. So much. She’d grown up to be everything he’d always known she would be. Plus, she was even hotter now than back in high school.
Kenzie Osborne was special, no doubt about it. She was the kind of woman who made a man glad he’d had sense enough to finally come home again.