“I’ll drive Grams over to Dad’s, we’ll scarf turkey while Tori tries to chitchat through the awkward silences, and then I’ll drop Grams back off at prison—I mean rehab.”
He cocked his head. “You want to come hang at the firehouse after? Gage is gonna Martha Stewart the hell out of the dinner. He’s already making paper plate angels for all the place settings. An inordinate amount of glitter is involved.”
She stood and tidied up her station, extracting ink needles and lobbing soiled tissues into the trash.
“I’ll be so busy with getting Grams settled and tying up loose ends.” Such as loading up her piece-of-shit car. Steeling herself for the journey ahead to the job she wasn’t sure she cared about anymore. Holding her ribs while her heart broke into icy shards.
Her body stilled as his masculine heat blanketed her from behind. “Querida, it doesn’t have to end.”
“We’ll have the fund-raiser on Christmas Eve, Beck. It’ll be a nice way to say good-bye.”
With a strong hand on her shoulder he turned her to face him. Those eyes blazed hard and furious, shining like bullets.
“Is that why you invited me? So you could say adios in a room full of blinged-out strangers. We’d eat some rubbery chicken and dance a sad old waltz, though God knows I’ll be crap at that. Maybe you’d get a final fuck-you in at your dad because you brought that guy he hated, then you’d wave to me as you wheeled Eleanor out the door.”
Burning emotion snarled beneath her breastbone. Damn him for making it so hard. “I was never going to stay, Beck. You knew that. I just can’t make a life for myself in the same place as my father.”
Storm clouds brewed in his eyes, myriad emotions battling beneath his usually calm surface. Kinetic energy seemed to bounce off the walls, in her chest, between their bodies.
“That’s just an excuse. So he screwed you over and you’re still pissed. Time to grow up, princesa, and figure out where you’re going instead of dwelling on where you’ve been.” He scrubbed a hand over his close-cropped skull. “You can’t deny what’s happening here with us.”
“Of course not. But it’s just chemistry, lust, nostalgia, whatever you want to call it—” She carved the air with her hand, seeking the right words to minimize the outrageous potency of what existed between them. “I’ve come too far in my career and my life to throw it all up for the special feelings caused by a return to the good old days. Besides, you had no problem letting me go before.”
“That was different.”
“How? How was it different?” She had never pried about his reasons—he hadn’t given her any insight at the time, and she had always ascribed it to the bad space he was in after Sean and Logan made the greatest sacrifice. Preferring not to know, if she was being honest.
“We were kids,” he murmured. “Now we’re all grown up.”
“You got over me, Beck.” A lot more easily than she recovered from the onslaught of him, she might add. “You threw me away seven years ago. It hurt. It really fucking hurt.”
Empathy laced with pain shone back in those terrible blue eyes.
“It was for the best. You know that.”
“I don’t know anything. Why was it for the best?”
He looked like he was weighing his options for evasion, when something clicked in his expression. Resignation. “I wasn’t good enough for you, Darcy. I was a street punk who wanted nothing more than to follow in my foster dad’s footsteps. Honest, hard, backbreaking work. Seeing you was like being blinded by a goddess. Touching your skin with my callused hands felt like sacrilege. Look at where you came from, at your people. How would I take care of you right?”
“So you did care about me—”
“I fucking loved you!”
All strength fled her legs and she gripped the edge of the counter behind her. Hearing those words spoken with such passion, even in the past tense, made her woozy.
Then, angry.
“Yet you dumped me.”
“For your own good.”
Outrage rushed through her. “You—you decided that I would be better off without you. You made that decision. Not us.”
He snorted. He may as well have said duh. “Look at how it all worked out.”
Goddamn him. “You think this is all because of you? That because you threw me away, it allowed me to flower into the woman I am today?”
Silence. Oh, the arrogant prick.
“How does your big fat head not fall off?”
A hint of a smile on his lips greeted that. “I think getting out from under your father’s thumb was good for you. We were kids, half formed, clueless about who we were. You needed to experience the world. Earn your ink.” He waved a hand around the shop, the supposed fulfillment of all her dreams. “If we’d stayed together, what would have happened? You were talking about switching to a college in Chicago or taking a year off. Already compromising yourself, maybe your future, for nothing.”
Nothing? She would have had him, her serious boy with the shocking blue eyes. Beck was all she had needed back then.