Chapter Sixty-Three. Rowan
SIXTY-THREE
Rowan
I stand looking at a man I’m in love with while knowing I’m about to marry another.
One is wrong for me. One will give me what I need.
One makes me feel alive—even now. And the other doesn’t make me feel anything.
My chest hurts so badly, and all I keep thinking is I can’t cry. I can’t mess up my makeup because it wouldn’t be fair to my makeup artist to have to redo it after all her hard work.
That and it’s so much easier to think about my fucking makeup than it is to think about how much my heart surged in my chest when I heard Holden’s voice on the other side of that door.
Every little girl dreams of the man coming to save her from making the mistake.
Too bad that as much as I want Holden Knight, he is also the mistake.
But I have one more question to ask before I can let this go. One more nail to put in the coffin my heart resides in.
“Do you love me, Holden?” I whisper, my voice getting stronger with each word. “Were you actually falling for me or did you say that, imply that, just so I’d give you every part of me so you could break me all over again?”
His jaw clenches and his nostrils flare but he doesn’t respond.
“You want to know why I was going to marry Chad? Why I stayed the course? Because I must have known you were too goddamn good to be true. And lookee here. With your lies and your deception and your plans, the only thing you did was prove me right.”
He nods ever so slightly. Almost as if he is welcoming my words. Almost as if he’s welcoming the pain they bring because he deserves the punishment.
“I love you, Holden. I’m in love with you.
But you stand there with your unflinching posture and your hard gaze and you don’t say a single word back to me.
And your silence proves to me that love was built on a lie.
” Tell me you love me. “That I was nothing more than a pawn in your game.” Please tell me I wasn’t crazy.
“You asked me to step into the gray with you and here I am, standing in that gray, but then there’s you, standing on the other side. There’s you, still coated in black.”