Let Me Love You Again (An Echoes of the Heart Novel Book 2) (32 page)

“What if
I
mess it up again?” Selena said, voicing her deepest fear. “What if I can’t love Oliver enough to stop . . .”

To stop being terrified.

“You can, Selena. Take my word for it. I’ve seen you with your daughter. Kristen Beaumont can’t stop talking to people about how the kids at school adore having you sub for them. You’ve given me a second chance, and I know I haven’t made that easy. You don’t know how
not
to love, honey. You’re just going to have to trust the rest of us—including Oliver—to love you back.”

“Thanks, man,” Oliver said to his brother. He punched the call closed and tossed his phone onto his truck’s dash. “Travis says to take as long as we need.”

Selena didn’t move in the seat beside him. She hadn’t said a word since they’d left the hospital, driven down Main, grabbed the takeout Dru had called in for them at the Whip, and finally pulled into Belinda’s driveway behind Selena’s junker.

“How the hell,” Oliver said, needing a target for the frustration he’d been suppressing for hours, “did you manage to make it all the way south in that heap?”

She swiveled toward him. “Fred’s good as gold. He’s never let us down.”

“Fred?”

“Flintstone.” She waited for Oliver to work it out.

He smiled when he did. “Does that make your daughter Pebbles?”

“Cricket.” Selena tucked her hair behind her ears. “I call her Cricket. The way she’s always loved to play outside. She hops all over the place, dances, rolls in the grass, like a—”

“Adorable little bug. I get it. You never used to be able to sit still, either. Like mother, like daughter.”

He watched some of the wariness ease from Selena’s expression. Hopeless, bottomless love took its place.

“Camille likes to spread out one of Belinda’s quilts,” she said, “and lie in the sun and read. Over by—”

“The camellia bushes? I saw her out there the other afternoon. It made me think of us, when we’d hang out back or in some field somewhere, like the one in Bethany’s painting in the Dream Whip.”

“Yeah. I saw it. The first time I did, it made me think of Camille.”

“Why?”

“You.” Selena looked down at the fingers she’d clasped in her lap. “And me. It was my birthday, and we made love by the tree Bethany painted, just before we . . . the week before I broke up with you. I’ve always told myself that was the afternoon we made Camille. Even if I didn’t know for sure, I’ve always wanted her to be yours. I see so much of you in her. But wanting doesn’t make it so, Oliver. I appreciate what you did this morning. But I don’t want you to feel obligated—”

“She’s my family, Selena. As much as Dru and Travis and Fin and Teddy and all the other kids.”

“Yes. But . . .”

“But what?”

“It’s different with her. With you and me and her. I couldn’t bear Camille being just an obligation for you. For Brad or for your parents.”

“You know my family better than that.”

“But do I know you? Really? What do you want, Oliver?”

She was the one who’d given up on them when they were kids. He should have gone and found her in New York. Maybe then she wouldn’t have married that slime Parker. Oliver should have kept loving her until she was strong enough to love herself better. But that was seven years ago. And even then she hadn’t known if he was what she wanted.

“You first,” he said. “Stop making this about a daughter we may or may not have together. Camille will be taken care of and loved, whether I’m in the picture or not. Your secret’s out. But you’re still pulling away, waiting for some other shoe to drop. Tell me what this is really about. One minute you’re kissing me. The next you’re telling me to back off because you don’t need me in your life unless I meet some list of conditions you seem to add to on an hourly basis. Why—”

“Why are you here with me now?” Selena demanded. “Why aren’t you at the hospital with your family, or over at your parents’ house looking after their kids? Because you’re trying to make everyone happy? Which, by the way, is impossible. Or because being here for me now, or at the hospital for Camille this morning—worried and angry and out-of-your-mind furious at Parker on her behalf—is what makes
you
happy?”

Oliver clamped his hands around the steering wheel. He knew what she needed to hear. Why couldn’t he just say it? “I’ll give you everything I can, Selena. I always would have if you’d have let me. I didn’t come back to town thinking this would happen. I can’t honestly tell you I wanted it to. My family needs me
to keep doing the work I do. Working to help them is what my life’s been about pretty much since I left Chandlerville. But—”

“But what? You’ll take one for the team with me and Camille? Be a good guy and pay for whatever it takes to be involved in our lives, too. Love me a little whenever a client doesn’t need you—as long as you don’t have to commit emotionally for any longer than you want to. Until I wake up one day and realize I’ve been alone all along. And that you’ve been finding someone else to console you, because being with me and my daughter has just gotten too damn complicated for you to handle?”

Selena’s rant hiccupped to a halt.

She’d inched away, her back pressed against the passenger door.

“Parker?” Oliver asked.

Don’t think you can bully me,
she’d said when Oliver first confronted her about Camille. And after the ugliness that had gone down in the ER, he had no trouble believing her bastard of a husband had been mistreating her long before she filed for divorce. Oliver was going to meet Parker Gryphon one day. His next excuse to travel north, he was hunting the slime down and working a few things out man-to-man.

“He cheated on you?” he asked.

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

“Slept around?”

“And around.” Selena’s laugh had Oliver wanting to use the travel app on his phone to book a red-eye to New York that very night. “But Parker is a good provider. And he was willing to keep providing, as long as I could adjust to our arrangement.”

“What arrangement?”

“The one he’d made entirely on his own, where he found a ready-made family that gave him the appearance of stability he
needed. And he gave me the security I’d been so desperate for when he saved me from having to run back to Chandlerville at eighteen and beg my mother for help. He provided for Camille what on the outside looked like a family that any little girl would love, in a stylish high-rise apartment in the heart of Manhattan . . . and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t abandon her to that, Oliver. She deserves to be surrounded by real love, even if it’s only mine.”

“And what do you deserve?” Oliver asked.

“I . . .” Selena’s lips trembled, just like her daughter’s did when she lost control.

“Whatever this is between us, I don’t want it to stop again. But you
can
stop it if you’re determined to. Like when we were teenagers. I was loving you the only way I knew how then, too.”

“And now your way is by throwing money at people to keep them from expecting more. Like you do with your family. Like this morning with Camille in the ER. I know I sound paranoid. But I’m not setting myself or my daughter up like that again. Especially with someone I love as much as I’ve always loved you.”

Selena looked at him, into him, shocked by what she’d revealed.

Before he realized what he’d done, Oliver had hauled her closer. Or maybe she’d launched herself at him, stretched across the truck’s center console, her hands gripping his arms, her beautiful eyes searching. Like in his dreams, it was just them, and Selena was needing him like she wouldn’t survive without him. The way he wouldn’t without her.

They took each other’s kiss, and he was transported back to where they’d been as kids, where they’d always be—loving each other with everything they were. With Selena in his arms, he’d be home for as long as she’d let him have her. He framed her face with his hands, angling her mouth for more. Her fingers threaded
through his hair, gripping and urging him closer, their kiss roughening, desperate.

This
was what he wanted.

More. And then more. And always. He’d always wanted it with Selena. No matter how many women, how much time, how much work he’d used to fill the emptiness, or how far away he’d traveled . . . being here, home, with Selena had always been where he’d belonged. Enough to keep moving on forever if he was never going to have her back.

She was still in her workout clothes. He kissed down to her neck, tasting salt and sun.

“I think of you when I run,” he whispered into her ear, feeling her tremble. “I was thinking about you the night before I came back, after I was supposed to have let go of the past as part of my recovery . . . but I couldn’t stop myself.”

He kissed her lips, the tip of her nose. He watched her eyes flutter open.

“Anytime,” he said, “I’m free of the work I’ve filled my life with, whenever I try to sleep, when it’s quiet and just me—you’re always there, making me want you. All of it, everything I’ve done since I left has had something to do with you, Selena, and how good we once were for each other. How much I want that back. I’ll never be free of you.”

The need in her brown eyes deepened until he swore he could see her heart. A tentative smile spread across her face. Her tongue was a flirty temptation, caressing her bottom lip. His body tightened just shy of pain.

“Really?” she whispered. Her chest rose and fell in rhythm with his. “I couldn’t forget, either. This. All the rest. The hours we’d just sit and talk, or sit and do nothing, out back by the camellias, in town somewhere, some quiet place where no one
would find us. I could never forget you. And when I run now, to clear my head so I can think . . . I never can, completely, because you’re always there.”

“I thought I’d never see you again,” he confessed. “And I couldn’t be in Chandlerville without you. I’m starting to understand that. Without you I couldn’t face coming . . .”

“Home.” She kissed him.

Oliver drew her hands from around his neck and placed her palms against his chest, knowing he was taking a risk. She’d just had a shock. Camille was still in the hospital. And Parker was ramping up the pressure to get Selena and her daughter back. Selena was off balance and still not one hundred percent sure of Oliver, or of them. But what if this was their last chance?

“We’re both here now.” He searched her expression, seeing her love and fragile strength. Craving both. But did she really see him—the way he was, instead of the mixed-up kid she’d once known? “We’ve been circling this for days, for years. You can’t tell me what you’re going to need next—for Camille or yourself. And I can’t promise I can be that person for you, not until we sort things out. But we can have this.”

He gave her the gentlest kiss he could. Like their very first kiss—when she’d shown him how to love again.

“This can be ours,” he said. “No being afraid. No one, nothing between us. Please, Selena. Be with me one more time.”

She watched him for what felt like hours. For too long. She smoothed her palm over his heart like she would push him away. But then she was in his arms again, holding him as if she’d never let go.

“God, Selena.” He crushed her closer. “I love you. So damn much.”

It was his last coherent thought.

Selena surfaced from drowning in Oliver’s kisses, her vision as clouded as her mind.

“We can’t do this,” she gasped.

“We can’t?” Oliver gritted his teeth, his jaw tightening in brutally harsh lines.

She drew him into a soft kiss this time, afternoon sunlight slanting through the windshield of his truck, nearby trees caressing them with swaying shadows.

“Not here,” she explained. “Where anyone could drive by and see us.”

They’d been the talk of the town since the night of the AA meeting, since before that. Now they were making out in his very recognizable truck, in her mother’s driveway.

“Right.” Oliver fumbled his keys out of the ignition. “Inside.”

He was beside her door before she could get it open. Hand in hand, they hurried across Belinda’s yard and to the porch and through the front door that was still slightly ajar from Selena and her mother rushing Camille to the hospital. Selena closed it behind them, turned, and Oliver backed her into its wooden surface. He pressed his body to hers. His mouth tortured her again, everywhere, anywhere, not nearly enough places at once.