Chapter 24 Peach.
Dane’s name pressed against the inside of my skull like a bruise touched too often tender, dark, impossible to ignore. Not just the memory of him, but the way he looked at me. Like I was a secret worth keeping. Like he knew every bent page of my wreckage and still chose to read on.
Blake used to have a way with words too. Used to make my body sing, used to make me believe it was love. But Dane?
Dane didn’t need lyrics. He spoke in movements. In touches that rewired me. Hands that told truths I wasn’t brave enough to write, and a voice that wrapped around my name, the one he’d given me.
Peach.
An endearment dripping with heat and sweetness and something dangerously close to devotion. A blasphemy. A blessing. A sin I’d let him commit again and again if he asked.
“Peach.”
His voice cracked through the office quiet like thunder rolling through a church. Holy in its own kind of wrong.
I jolted, clutching my chest as my chair spun away from the window’s indifferent light. “Shit.”
“Scare ya?”
There it was that smirk. All confidence and mischief, smug and stupidly devastating like he hadn’t just pulled me back from freefall.
“Yes. You did.”
“You were thinking about me,” he said, leaning against my doorframe like a man carved from careless temptation. “Me and my naked ass in the shower this morning.”
He waggled his brows.
My cheeks detonated. Heat crawling up my neck like a confession. I darted a look over his shoulder, praying the office wasn’t listening. He laughed rich and uncontained, like sin that had never learned to apologise.
“Relax, Peach. You’re wound up tighter than a damn watch.”
He dropped a stack of mail on my desk with a thud. My heart plummeted. On top: An envelope. Blake’s handwriting.
My ribcage squeezed. My throat locked.
“It’s from him, isn’t it?” Dane’s voice dipped no longer teasing. Grounded. Rough. Protective in a way that stripped me bare.
I nodded. Couldn’t speak. A tear slid down my cheek, then another, then another like they had been waiting for permission.
“Peach…” he murmured, eyes flicking toward the open office. So much glass. So little mercy.
I felt transparent. Exposed. Breakable.
He reached for my hand, thumb stroking over the tremble in my fingers like he could press the pain out through touch. “I’m here. It’s okay. Look at me.”
He crouched beside my chair, elbows braced on his knees, eyes locked onto mine.
“You’re not spiralling again, are you? Because if you are, I swear I’ll carry your ass outta here and straight to my place where you and I could hide from this whole place and the asshole that taunts you.”
“And if they stare? Gasp? Whisper?” My voice cracked on the last word.
“I’ll tell them two truths and one lie.”
I blinked. “What?”
He didn’t hesitate.
“One: love at first embrace.”
“Two: forever caught in the eyes of a wolf, bitten and marked.”
“Three: you’re knee-deep addicted to peach iced tea.”
A laugh tore out of me unwilling, messy, embarrassingly loud.
“Really?”
He grinned. “That last one’s why I call you Peach. You drink a disturbing amount. Figured your lips must taste like it.”
My smile stuttered, softened, struggled to stay. “I’m okay, Dane. It just… scares me. Blake only shows up to hurt me.”
“Then don’t let him.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“It is,” he said quietly. “Just think of me instead.”
His hand slid up, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear. Then he did it the thing that made the world inhale:
He kissed me.
Soft. Barely there.
A brush of lips like a promise he wasn’t sure I was ready to hold.
He pulled back with a wicked curve of his mouth.
“I gotta go. Mail to deliver. Hearts to break.”
He winked.
“Apparently, mail guys are top-tier office fantasies. Right up there with pool boys and watercooler dudes.”
Then he sauntered off, whistling like he hadn’t just stitched my ribcage together thread by thread.
I turned my chair toward the shadows. Away from the glass. Away from the goddamn daylight judging me.
The envelope sat heavy in my hands. Blake’s scrawl burned through the paper like acid.
Before I opened it, my phone buzzed.
Ping.
The dating app.
A message.
From Blake.
But not the Blake I married the Blake I buried.
His mask. His avatar. His lie.
“It’s killing me staying away. I lost a piece of myself. Time won’t fix it. Let today be the day you meet me. Let me fall for you in person, Pandora”.
I scoffed.
He was always a poet when he wanted something.
“Blake, you pull at old scars just to watch them bleed. You ask for time when I beg for space. This is fake.”
“Nothing’s fake but your picture. Your words are real. I’m falling for you.”
“Then fall in love with my words. But love like that is fiction four letters used to break people open. I’ve been shattered before. I’ve eaten the lie and begged for the ride to stop.”
Didn’t he hear me? Didn’t he recognise the rhythm of my grief? My breath? The way my words bent under weight?
“Love was always going to be tested. Think of this as a taste test. The recipe might finally be right.”
I nearly laughed. God loves a trier.
I slid under my desk, curling into the hollow darkness with my knees to my chest. The ocean shimmered through the tinted glass like it was mocking me.
I needed to disappear. Needed shadows. Needed dimness. Needed a place where my heart could break without an audience.
“You whisper poetry on a jaded tongue, offering promises my soul can’t carry.”
“Masked party. Friday night. Come. Let me find you. Let me kiss you in the dark. You’ll know it’s me.”
I chewed my bottom lip until it stung. Maybe this was the moment to end the game. To face him without him knowing he already had. To look him dead in the eye and watch recognition claw its way through him.
“Maybe a mask is exactly what I need. A breeze from the North when I’ve been drowning in the West.”
I set the phone down. My heart thudded like war drums against my ribs. Blake stayed in my veins like poison.
But Dane…
Dane seeped into me like warmth. Like sunrise. Like wreckage I’d choose to die beneath.
I grabbed my phone again, sending a message to Dane.
“I blamed everything on heartbreak, the fears, the ache, the way I fell apart. Love was a battlefield, and I wasn’t looking for another war.
But then you showed up. And you… You feel like fiction.
Like the kind of love my family writes about but never gets to live.
You make me believe in things again. Even the reckless ones. I like you in my world.”
Seconds.
Silence.
My knee bounced.
The envelope tapped against my leg.
I tore it open.
The smell hit first whisky, lemon, stale history.
Our bar.
A napkin.
His handwriting.
“Found someone new. Wanted to tell you first. Also, our daughter…I need an answer about moving her from the garden at the house to somewhere proper. Mum knows a place. I said as much in the divorce papers.”
He signed it with a kiss.
A fucking kiss.
My breath broke.
My chest cracked.
My palms went numb.
To ask to move Gracie, our daughter, like she was a misplaced ornament…It tore the last threads holding me upright.
I pressed my forehead to the carpet.
No more.
He doesn’t get to break me anymore. Not when Dane is building me skyward.
I dragged my laptop close, flipped it open with shaking hands.
And I wrote.
I wrote like bleeding.
Like resurrection.
Like every memory, every wound, every truth was a spell I needed to cast to survive.
Between the sobs, between the keys tapping like prayer, I felt it:
Dane isn’t just a man.
He’s a lighthouse.
And I’m done drowning.