Chapter 17 #3
Bonnie smiled, relieved that he had honored Cassidy’s silence yesterday but today was acknowledging her right as a parent to know something about Cassidy’s visit to the station. “She told me last night that she told you I was sad.”
“She wanted to know why you’ve been sad. I didn’t want to lie to her, so I answered in general terms. I didn’t give her any details or hints.”
“Thanks. But ugh. That had to be tricky to navigate.”
“I managed.” He shrugged. Paused. Said quietly, “She also asked me if I’m going to stay.”
Bonnie’s eyes widened in surprise. “What did you tell her?”
“The truth.”
“Which is?” she prompted when he said no more.
He didn’t string her along or tease her. It was a serious question and deserved a serious answer. He said plainly, “Yes. I’m staying in this town as long as you’ll have me here.”
She looked at him for a long moment. The diner was behind them, its brick rear wall impersonal and disinterested. The parking lot was empty except for his truck, her Subaru, and a nondescript sedan that belonged to Irma.
“Gray.”
“Hmm?”
She stepped forward and kissed him.
It wasn’t a tentative kiss. It wasn’t a question. It was a deliberate choice. As if she’d decided she was done waiting for certainty because it didn’t exist. As if trust was a choice made with incomplete data, and she was making it now.
Gray kissed her back. His hand came up to the side of her face with a gentleness that contradicted everything about his size and strength. It felt right. He felt right. Something settled inside her that had been unsettled for a very long time.
Not the guilt. That was still there, quieter now, reframed and retreating inch by inch, but not erased yet. Not the anger. That burned steady and slow like a hot coal smoldering in her belly. She suspected it would burn like that for a long time.
What settled was the fear. The bone-deep terror that trusting someone again meant inviting destruction.
This man had sat her down and shown her the worst truth she’d ever faced. He hadn’t gone behind her back. He hadn’t deceived her. He’d handed her the evidence as clearly and completely as he could and let her decide what to do with it and how to feel about it.
That was the opposite of Brent, who had lied. The opposite of the mayor, who had used her. Gray’s honesty was the only foundation trust could survive on, and Bonnie was finally, after all these years, willing to build a relationship on her trust for this man.
They pulled apart. His hand stayed where it was, his thumb tracing her cheekbone. His gray-silver eyes were steady and sure, even if they were more than slightly dazed, which she found enormously satisfying.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for a while,” she said a little shyly.
“I was going to make a move eventually. I laid out a timeline for myself.”
“Of course you had a timeline.”
“It was a spreadsheet, actually. With contingencies.”
She burst out laughing. “That’s the most Gray thing you’ve ever said.”
“Thank you, I think?”
She smiled broadly and he smiled back, the unguarded warm sexy smile that transformed his face.
Standing there in the parking lot of Rose’s Diner with the mountains white around them and the whole terrible, beautiful mess of their lives waiting to be navigated, they were just two people who’d each found exactly the right person at exactly the right time.
She reached up and laid her hand over his on her cheek. He threaded his fingers between hers and lifted the back of her hand to his mouth to drop a kiss on her knuckles.
He’d just lowered her hand between them, still holding it, when Ruth Sanger chose at that exact moment to walk out of the alley beside the diner.
Ruth stopped where the alley emptied into the parking lot. Her eyes went wide. Then narrow. Then they went wide again, and a smile spread across her face that could only be described as triumphant. She had the gossip scoop of the year and was going to milk this moment for all it was worth.
Bonnie groaned under her breath and Gray rolled his eyes as Ruth turned smartly on her heel and headed back toward the diner’s front entrance. The diner door hadn’t even closed behind her before they heard her voice, pitched to carry to both ends of Main Street and beyond, crowing, “I told you so!”
Bonnie dropped her forehead against Gray’s chest. “We have approximately ninety seconds before every person in Cobbler Cove knows about this.”
“Sixty,” Gray said. “Ruth has a cell phone.”
She lifted her head. Her eyes were bright and defiant. “I don’t care.”
“Me neither.”
She kissed him again, fast and hard, and then she headed quickly for her car as if she might stand here all afternoon making out with him if she didn’t get out of here soon.
He knew the feeling.
He watched her drive away, the way he’d watched a green truck drive away from Foster Ranch a few days ago.
But this was different. Bonnie wasn’t leaving.
She was going back to her office, to her double life, to the unbearable daily performance of loyalty to a man who had at least a part in killing her husband.
And she was doing it because she was brave, and because the evidence package was almost ready, and because the truth—their truth, the one they’d built together—was going to outlast every lie Lucas Shoemacher had ever told.
He stood in the parking lot for another minute, feeling as if he’d just been given the answer to a question he’d been afraid to ask.
Are you going to stay?
Yes. For as long as you’ll have me.
And she’d kissed him.