CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN RONAN
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
RONAN
NOW
It’s a good thing Damon sleeps like the dead because he doesn’t even stir when I slip out of the room and into the quiet night.
I don’t know what woke me, but for some reason my mind is screaming at me to check on Chloe, even if it’s just through the slightly open drapes of her room like I did when I went to the vending machine a few hours ago.
Seeing her beside Ryker hurt more than it should have. It’s been a decade. I shouldn’t still have such strong feelings toward her.
But time doesn’t always heal the wounds. They remain open and bloody, and the only thing that can close them is the thing that hurt you in the first place.
Keeping my footsteps light, I pause outside their room, peaking inside only to find the room completely empty.
My stomach rolls, panic flaring in my chest for a moment before I notice a phone on the bedside table.
They haven’t left.
Then where are they?
I glance around the parking lot but don’t immediately see anyone. Surely they didn’t go for a fucking walk at this time of night in the freezing cold.
But then I hear it.
A quiet moan.
One so familiar I’d know it in every single lifetime.
My chest tightens to the point of pain, but my feet carry me closer. I should walk away. I should go back to bed and pretend I didn’t see or hear anything.
But maybe seeing it will make it easier to follow my father’s orders. Maybe knowing she’s moved on and that there’s no chance for us will break the spell Chloe Weaver has always had on me.
Following another moan and a quiet voice, it only takes a handful of seconds to find them.
He has her pressed against her car, his body blocking her much smaller one from view, but being the glutton for punishment that I am, I step closer, needing to see her.
Needing to see that she wants this the way he so obviously does.
Chloe has her bottom lip trapped between her teeth, her eyes closed and her arms wrapped around his shoulders.
Any delusion that she wasn’t a willing participant flies out the window, and now I’m just watching the love of my life with another man.
The woman I always imagined marrying, the one I thought would be the mother of my children, the person I expected to grow old with.
Even in the darkness when no one could see, I still thought about those things every single day since she left.
Her eyes drift open, her lips parted as if she’s about to say something, but then she pauses. Her gaze locks on mine, body stilling for just a second, and for a moment I think she’s going to tell him to stop.
But then she moans a single word that tears my heart straight from my chest and stomps on it.
“Ryker.”
I should go inside and start plotting how to get her back to Miami, how to do as our father has ordered.
Except I can’t stop watching the way they look together.
And Chloe can’t tear her eyes off me.