All for This (25 page)

“Hanna,” I growl. I miss the view and the heat of her against my cock. I release the headboard with one hand and reach for her.

She looks up at me from between my legs, her cheeks flushed, her hair wild around her face. “Behave,” she clucks, nodding to the headboard.

“You’re wicked.” Then I decide I’ve never been any good at following her rules. Grabbing her, I pull her up my body and roll until I’m on top of her.

She grins. “I might be wicked, but you’re naughty.”

“Damn straight.” I kiss her as my hands work to untie the knot on her robe. I kiss my way south until I’ve found her breasts. When I suck one pebbled nipple into my mouth, she moans.

“Maybe this isn’t so bad,” she murmurs. “Sometimes.”

Lifting my head, I take her face in my hands and shake my head. “No,” I growl, and her smile falls away. “I want more than sometimes and I want more than to be friends and parents together. I want you. Completely and always.”

“What if we can’t figure it out?” she whispers.

“We will,” I promise, sliding my hand between her legs. She opens her thighs and lifts her hips off the bed. “We will.”

Three Days Before Hanna’s Accident

I
WAIT
until Max leaves for work before I let myself into his apartment and lock the door behind me.

I head straight to his bedroom and the desk in the corner. Max is neat, and there are only a couple of stacks of papers on the desk—a meal and exercise plan for a client and some information about a new piece of equipment he has in the club.

I turn to the filing cabinet and start thumbing through files, not sure what I’m looking for. He wouldn’t exactly label it “Secret File About Hanna’s Bakery.” But I find a file labeled
Smith, Peterson, and Frank
and pull it.

There’s a copy of the agreement I signed when I agreed to start the bakery with the anonymous investor and some other paperwork from the lawyer, but instead of a deed to the bakery, I find papers from New Hope Bank and Trust.

My stomach twists painfully. It’s bad enough to know that he sold his grandmother’s house to get me the bakery, but knowing that he had to take out additional loans makes me sick to my stomach. No wonder he’s been letting employees go in favor of putting in long hours at the gym himself. He’s busy paying on the loan he took out for me.

For some reason, my gaze catches on a letter stacked neatly on the corner of the desk. It’s addressed to Max, but the name of a local investor jumps out at me. I unfold it carefully, and my stomach sinks.

This letter contains the details of the offer we discussed over lunch. I think this deal could be beneficial for us both, and I look forward to speaking with you further.

“No,” I whisper. He can’t sell his club. He can’t sacrifice his dream for mine.

My phone buzzes, and I pull it from my pocket to see a text from Nate.

Nate:
Heading to London. I miss you already. Been thinking a lot about our conversation. Call me?

I bring my hand to my mouth to stop the sob that threatens to escape. When I was a little girl, I imagined that one day I’d fall in love with an amazing man and he’d love me in return. I believed love was enough to overcome anything. But love isn’t like that. The heart has the capacity to love beyond anything my little-girl self could have dreamed up. And where I once thought love was a journey and the destination was being together, I now know that love is more like a state of awareness, and sometimes its best expression is in releasing the person from your life.

I read the text a second and third time and then delete it before I can torture myself with another read. The text disappears, but the history of our texts stays on the screen.

In one hand, my texts from Nate. In my other, the evidence of what Max has sacrificed for me to have my dream.

I hold my breath as I hit the commands on my phone to delete the entire thread. Then I delete my entire call history, and just like that, my phone’s memory of my relationship with Nate is gone.

Present Day

“H
EY,
H
ANNA.”
Sam stands to greet me at the bank and shifts uncomfortably as I stare him down. “Is this about Liz?” He’s really adorable in that clean-cut playboy-banker kind of way. His light brown hair is clipped short, and his strong jaw is shaved clean. Broad shoulders fill out his suit and tie.

“Not about Liz,” I say, and he relaxes visibly.

New Hope Bank and Trust is where Max does all his banking—unsurprisingly, since one of his best friends will inherit the whole thing someday.

Sam motions to his desk, and I shake my head. He works out in the open, and I’d rather keep our conversation between us.

“Somewhere private?”

He nods and leads me into a little office where they talk to clients about loans and such.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask the moment he closes the door.

He cocks his head. “Tell you what?”

“When Max got the loan for the bakery, why didn’t you tell me he was doing that?”

His smile is so fake that it wouldn’t fool a blind person. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Cut the shit, Sam. Why’d you let him do it? He sold his grandmother’s house for a down payment, didn’t he? Do you realize what kind of a position that’s put him in financially?”

His jaw tightens. “Max is a grown fucking man, Hanna. He makes his own decisions. He didn’t exactly consult me before throwing the whole damn world at your feet.”

“And you don’t approve?” The question comes out too snippy. The fact is, if I’d been in Sam’s position, I wouldn’t have approved of Max’s decisions to fund my bakery.

He shakes his head. “I didn’t say that.”

“He’s in debt up to his eyeballs, and I came to you, didn’t I? I see it in my planner. Before the accident, I came here and talked to you about what I’d found in his apartment. He was thinking of letting someone buy the club.”

Avoiding my eyes, he nods. “You wanted to know how much he owed on your bakery.”

“How much?”

“I wasn’t at liberty to tell you then, and I’m not at liberty to tell you now. But I promised you I wouldn’t let him sell the club. Will and I had offered to be partners before. I made sure he knew our offers stood.”

“Is that all I wanted to know?”

He studies me for a minute before finally admitting, “You wanted to know if you had enough in your trust fund to buy out your silent partner.”

Bile rises in my throat. “And what was the answer?”

“More than enough.”

“That’s why I decided to marry him,” I whisper, though I’ve suspected it for a while now. Ever since I remembered finding that letter in his kitchen. “I was counting on a decision I made for all the wrong reasons and you didn’t even warn me.”

“I didn’t know for sure, and you
were
in love with him.” He rubs the back of his neck. When I don’t reply, he says, “Max misses you, you know. He’s just waiting around like some love-sick puppy, and if you decided you still wanted him, he’d be yours.”

“I can’t,” I whisper.

“He would take good care of you. He loves you so much.”

“I know that.” My throat grows thick and I swallow back tears. “Is there anything else from before my accident that you think I might want to know?”

“Meredith,” he says. “The day you fell, I was jogging on the trail behind the bakery and I saw you two arguing.”

All eyes are on me when I walk through Meredith’s salon and back to her office, but I don’t care. For the first time, I’m taking Nix’s concerns about my “fall” seriously.

Meredith’s sitting at her desk, but her head snaps up at the sound of the door closing. “What are you doing here?” she asks.

If I expected her to act like the snotty Meredith who’s tormented me most of her life, I was wrong. Instead of sharp, her voice is distant, resigned. Maybe months of rejection are starting to get to her after all.

“I want you to give Max custody of Claire.”

She raises a brow. “The choices I make for my daughter’s life aren’t your business.”

“If you don’t, I’ll tell everyone that you were at my apartment the day of my accident.”

Meredith’s face goes white. “I thought you couldn’t remember that day.”

“I don’t have to remember to know what happened.”

She drops her pen. “How’s that even possible? No one else was there.”

“Sam saw you there. He saw you push me against the wall and yell at me. Why would you do it? I know you hate me, but I never would have thought you’d try to physically hurt me.”

She sits back in her chair. “Clearly you underestimate how serious I am about Max.”

I gasp. Because even though I’m here, I didn’t really believe Meredith was guilty. “So you pushed me down the stairs?”

She pushes out of her chair. “I didn’t do any such thing. I came to your apartment and fucking
begged
you to get out of the way so I could have Max back. And, sure, I punched you in that chubby face of yours, but you had on his ring and…” She clenches her hands. She’s sneering now, her hatred and disgust toward me evident on her face. “Whatever. You gave as good as you got. You gave me a fucking black eye, and then you ended up in the hospital and I had to leave town so no one would think I tried to kill you. And after all that, you didn’t even want him.” Her face crumples and she points to the door. “Get out of here. I’m sorry your fat ass couldn’t navigate a simple set of stairs, but I won’t listen to you blaming me for that.”