Stay With Me (41 page)

As I pulled into his neighborhood, my whole body started to tremble. My heart shoved blood at an alarming rate and my hands and feet went tingly.

“Calm down, Savi,” I whispered, trying some slow breaths. “All he can do is tell you to leave. Nothing mortifying about that at all.”

Fuck me.

I stopped the car and sat there for a second, getting my speech together. I was going to start with an apology and tell him I wasn’t in my right mind, that I thought of him constantly and wanted to try to make this work. That he was important to me.
Please don’t leave
.

It all sounded good in my head, till I started walking up the driveway and he opened his door. Oh sweet fuckity-fuck, he wasn’t even going to let me come to the door. My legs went watery and I wished for something to hold on to. I could back up and sit on my hood and wait for him like a hood ornament, but I figured I’d kind of out-aged that maneuver.

So I kept walking, slowly moving forward, until he was standing in front of me on his sidewalk, wearing a black T-shirt and dark jeans. Well, well.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. Not in a mean way, just kind of weary. Like he was tired of it all. I was too.

I pulled up my speech, looked in those blue eyes that never failed to make me sweat, and opened my mouth.

“I love pancakes,” I said.

One eyebrow lifted. Shit, here we go.

“I lied when I said I didn’t,” I said. “Just the last person who made them for me told me he loved me and was gone four days later.”

The eyebrow came back down, as I assume it made a little more sense.

“I don’t do love,” I said. “It doesn’t work for me. Romance doesn’t work for me. I’m a fucked-up mess,” I said, my voice failing me at the end.
No, keep it together, Savi
.

His face fell. “I shouldn’t have—”

“Yes, you should have,” I said. “You were right. I’m messed up. I avoid everything good so it won’t hurt when it goes bad. And when we started getting good . . .” I blew out a breath. “I panicked. I hit the blow-up button. That’s what I do. It really had nothing to do with Ian, that just fell at the same time. He and I, we’re not good for each other. He’ll always be my first love and my dearest friend, but—things are different now.”

“In what way?” he said. “Because he no longer lives here?”

My lip quivered, and I bit it down, pointing to my heart. “Because he no longer lives
here,”
I whispered.

The hardness left Duncan’s face, and I felt like a weight lifted off my chest as I said that aloud. I took a deep breath and let go slowly.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me again,” I said, feeling the burn in my eyes. Shit, this crying shit was for the damn birds. “But I couldn’t just let you go without trying.”

“Savi—”

“Oh, fuck, please call me Savanna,” I said, the tears winning their battle. “I was so mean, and I’m so sorry. I love the way you say my name, I have since the day I met you. You said the day we met you thought about what our first sex would be like. Well, I thought about kissing you naked and you saying my name the way you do, over and over.”

Both eyebrows went up on that one, and he opened his mouth to speak but I couldn’t stop. Again.

“I think of you constantly,” I said. “My bed still smells like you. My clothes I wore that day still smell like you, because yes, even my own clothes will work for a souvenir in a pinch. I’m messed up like that, Duncan.”

His expression broke into a chuckle. He opened his mouth to speak and then stopped and held out his hands. “Anything else?”

He was making fun. He was done with me. He’d said he was, and here he was shutting me out. I nodded. That was okay. I deserved that.

I blinked two more tears free and met his eyes. “I love you,” I whispered.

The humor left his face, going very serious. I closed my eyes and turned around, starting what appeared to be the longest trek back to a car ever. I’d said it all. I’d put it out there. I’d have no regrets—well, not about this night, anyway.

I made it about ten feet when I felt his hands on my shoulders, turning me back around so close that I could feel the heat coming through his shirt. Before I could even process a thought, his lips were on mine and goose bumps spread over my body. His hands were in my hair, pulling me to him, kissing me long and slow and thorough until I felt my muscles relax and melt into him. My fingers dragged up his back as I tried to pull him closer. He didn’t hate me. God, could I get this lucky twice? When he finally pulled back, he looked into my eyes, with his reddened a little.

“I love you, Savanna. Don’t you dare leave.”

• • •

I don’t ever remember making love like that. Not like that. With those words burning in the air and the looks and the touches and the everything. And two more times after that.

I was in love. In bright fucking Technicolor. Who would have thought that?

I was lying on his chest, listening to the evenness of his breathing as he slept, watching the clock tick across the room. I was in love with him. But it was three forty-five in the morning, and I needed to go.

For one thing, I justified, Gracie would be antsy or eating the bathroom rug or something, but that really wasn’t true because I’d fed her before I came. And she had a doggie door.
So get to the point
. I couldn’t stay. He hadn’t asked me to. We’d just sort of passed out from sheer sexual exhaustion after a while, but then I awoke with a start, realizing where I was. And it hurt my heart in so many ways. Waking up in his bed the next morning meant something to me. It always had. It meant reality and love and life and forever. Okay, so we had one of those, but it was new and I was just getting my head around that part. Did we need to push it? Was I panicking again? Or was I right? I needed to go.

I got up carefully, retrieving my jeans and shoes and underwear, and seriously thinking of stealing his shirt. He would find that funny. But not if I just disappeared. I couldn’t do that. That would be hideous. But getting ready first gave me strength, somehow. Like he wouldn’t be able to talk me out of it once I had clothes on.

I looked back at him, so beautiful at rest. One arm thrown back, the sheets twisted and mangled and just covering the sexy parts. It made my chest ache. I wanted this.
This.

I had to look away as the burn hit my gut. I pulled on his shirt, grabbed my keys and phone and took a deep breath before I sat on the side of the bed, making him stir.
Here goes.

His eyes blinked and focused and he reached for me. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

He looked me over, taking in the dressed status. “You’re leaving.” I didn’t have words. All I could do was look at him. Slowly, he nodded. “I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” I whispered.

“You’re afraid,” he said softly.

I blinked. “Afraid?”

“Of this,” he said, pushing up to an elbow. “Of trusting it.”

I scoffed and shoved the emotion back. “I’m a work in progress, Duncan. This grown-up thing is new to me.”

He smiled and so then I did too.

“It’s new to me, too, baby,” he said. Baby. I totally loved it. “I’m still single, if you haven’t noticed. So maybe I have some messed-up stuff myself.” He took my hand. “We learn together.”

I licked my lips. “But staying the night,” I began, feeling my heart speed up with nerves. I didn’t want to mess it up, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings either. “That may not be a big thing to some people, they do it all the time, but to me it’s real, Duncan.”

“Hell, yeah, it’s real.”

“No, I mean
real,”
I said. “That’s waking up together and making breakfast. That’s reading the paper and walking the dog and deciding whether to mow the grass or go to the grocery store and remembering to set the DVR to tape the other one’s favorite show.” Duncan was smiling at my babbling, but hey, he loved my babbling, so what the hell. “That’s something to me. That’s the no-walking-away kind of real,” I said, my voice quivering on the words.

“On both our parts,” he said.

And it hit me then that he had that same insecurity. And look what I’d done to him. Twice. And yet here I was. And I was wanting to leave so that it didn’t seal us in. He’d said the words and yet I never had. I was so obsessed with what other people weren’t doing for me, I never stopped to look at myself.

Be happy, Sav. Let yourself be.

“I love you,” I whispered.

“Then stay, Savanna,” he said, his eyes soft in the low light. Eyes I could look at and get lost in forever. “Please.”

Slowly, I pulled off my jeans and underwear, left on his shirt, and climbed back under the covers with him. He pulled me back against him, spooning me, holding me tight and kissing my hair.

“I love you, baby,” he whispered.

I hugged his arms and buried myself against him, letting him make me feel safe. “So much back at you.”

“Nice shirt.”

I smiled. “Old habits.”

Rolo Brownie Recipe

1 box dark chocolate cake mix

1/3 cup evaporated milk

1/2 cup butter, melted

40–50 Rolos, unwrapped (Lily feels the need to stress this)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray an 8x8 pan or line with nonstick foil. In a large bowl, mix the cake mix, milk, and butter together until well combined. Take half of the mixture and place it in the pan. Bake this half for 8 minutes. Cool 10 minutes.

Place the Rolos carefully onto the cooled brownies very close together. Cover the Rolos carefully with the other half of the mixture, taking care that all the Rolos are covered. Bake 20 minutes. Cool completely.

Excerpt from Don’t Let Go

Be sure to check out

this small-town Texas romance

by Sharla Lovelace,

Don’t Let Go

Noah Ryan and Jules Doucette spent every moment together, first as best friends and later as young lovers. The two had planned a life together—until one unspeakable decision tore them apart for good.

Twenty-six years later, Jules is still carefully living the life her mother planned out for her. She’s running her mother’s store, living in her mother’s house, following her mother’s rules, and keeping the secrets her mother made her bury.

Then Noah comes home and any sense of an ordered life flies out the window. Noah’s return does more than just stir up old memories—it forces Jules to see her life in a whole new way and uncovers secrets even she didn’t know were buried. Secrets that could easily destroy her world once more.

Chapter One

I love red. It’s my absolute favorite color.

I have a red car, a red coffeepot, have been known to have a red purse on occasion, and there is one accent wall in my living room painted a dark red. This was done both to make me happy when my daughter and I moved into my mother’s old house and to spite my mother. Who hated red. Two birds and all that.

Certain times of the year, however, the color red gives me the willies.

The end of January, for example.

January—let’s be honest—is a dead month. The hype of the holidays is over and people are back to work, slaving to pay off the credit card bills they just amassed. Resolutions have already been attempted and failed, for the most part, after the first few weeks. All there is, is cold. And wet.

In Texas, that wet cold is very rarely white. It’s pretty much just gray. In fact, I’ve seen it actually snow—and stick—probably four times in my whole life. One of those times was when my daughter was in the sixth grade, and the whole school district shut down for the three inches we got. Kids were having snowball fights on the playgrounds and the high schoolers had a snowball war on the football field. It made the local news.