The Regret Series Complete Collection Box Set: Lost to You, Take This Regret, and if Forever Comes (77 page)

Elizabeth kissed me desperately as she clawed at my neck, fingers sinking deep, cutting me more as she struggled to bring me closer.

More fucking pain.

“Tell me…tell me you don’t love me.”

Her hands fisted in my shirt, and she hit me, pounded my chest. “I hate you,” she whispered hard, tortured, her fingers curling into the skin at my jaw.

She kissed me harder as she locked her fingers in my hair.

We lit. A frenzy took us over as we gripped and clutched, as she bit and hit and begged.

The anger we’d left unresolved the day I’d walked out pulsed between us, a force that neither of us could stop.

My kiss was demanding, urgent as I consumed her. Hers, desperate.

I ripped her shirt over her head. “Tell me to stop,” I pleaded. My body strained, clashed with the fury of what she’d done, the pain she’d caused, collided with the grief that devoured Elizabeth.

Another sob.

My arm wound around her waist, and I dropped us to our knees and laid her on the floor. Her chest heaved as tears streamed.

She tore at my skin, claimed it again. “I hate you.”

I caged her, raked my nose up her jaw and to her ear. “Tell me you don’t love me.” It came harsh, acute and severe.

She slapped me across the face, before her fingers locked on the back of my neck, pulling me back to her. She forced her mouth against mine, and I lost it, kissed her and kissed her, tore at her clothes, desperate to feel her against me. I needed her. Oh my God, I needed her. And yet she’d hurt me, cut me so deep, I didn’t know how to see, had no clue how to make sense of any of this except I refused to let her go.

My pleas changed as I ripped the panties from her body and fumbled with the button on my jeans. “Tell me to stop, Elizabeth. Tell me to stop," I ordered as I shed my clothes.

“Don’t you dare stop.” She raked her nails down my back, drawing blood, her body begging for mine. “Don’t ever stop.”

I slammed into her.

I cried out in pleasured relief.

And I fucked her. I fucked her and fucked her, because I was angry. Angry she’d let that bastard kiss her. Angry that I had let her slip away. Angry that Lillie had been stolen from us. Angry that I hadn’t been strong enough to hold her together when she’d fallen apart.

And she was crying, crying as I claimed her. Marked her. Took back what was mine. I felt her convulse around me, her body gripping my cock as she came. Still, she cried, she cried and raged and pounded out all of her pain against my chest.

Her name crashed from my mouth as I poured into her. It was agony. It was ecstasy. I collapsed on her, my chest to hers.

Elizabeth went limp below me, but she was clinging, weeping against my skin. “Why didn’t you love her?” Fingertips bored deep, cutting into my spirit. “Why didn’t you love her?” she asked on a muted sob.

I held my weight on my forearms as I sank my nose in the warmth of her neck. I ran my fingers through her hair, kissed her jaw, whispered at her ear. “I loved her, Elizabeth…so much…I loved her so much.” It was low, ragged, a promise for the one who would forever live in our hearts.

A little girl who had touched our lives.

A little girl who had torn it apart.

A trauma we could not sustain.

And she wept. Elizabeth wept, and I just held her.

Finally I got to my knees, gathered this broken woman in my arms, and climbed to my feet. Elizabeth wrapped her arms
around my neck. I hugged her to me, kissed her forehead as I carried her upstairs.

“I love you, Christian.” I felt her words more than heard them.

“I know,” I whispered tenderly at her skin, all of mine held in the simple acceptance of what she had said.

With my foot, I nudged the bedroom door open. Crossing the room, I gently settled her in the middle of the bed. Elizabeth looked up at me with all the torment she had been unwilling to show, her eyes open wide, the darkness in the depths revealing how deep her pain really went.

My movements were measured as I climbed down beside her. I tugged her twisted sheets over us as I turned to my side and pulled her into my arms.

There was no resistance. Her arms were crossed between us as I held her whole, my hand at the back of her head while she cried out months of misery into my chest.

I held her, supported her the way I should have, even when she’d pushed me away.

“I’m so sorry,” I finally managed to murmur. I ran my fingers through the length of her hair. “I’m so sorry for everything. For everything.”

She curled her hand into the skin at my chest, fingers anchoring deep. “Don’t leave me.”

Exhaling, I somehow managed to pull her a little closer. I would never let her go.

“Never, Elizabeth. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was just waiting for you to come back to me.”

In all of this, that had been my greatest mistake, my biggest failure. Leaving her alone when she needed me most.

Another sob echoed from her mouth. “It hurts,” she whimpered.

“I know, baby, I know.”

She choked over the emotion in her chest. I held her tighter. Never again would I allow enough space for a wedge to be driven between us. I’d never sit silent. I’d no longer wait.

I whispered into her hair softly, “It is time, Elizabeth.”

I said those three words again, the ones that had continually been our ruin. I wasn’t scared saying them now. “It’s time to talk about it. To talk about her. Talk about us. You have to
tell
me what you’re feeling.”

Elizabeth burrowed deeper, her tears wet on my flesh. “It hurts,” she said again.

“I know. It hurts me, too, but we
have
to.”

Hiding only ruined us, destroyed what we had.

Slowly, she lifted her face to me, and I stared down at the woman I loved, silently encouraging her to open up to me.

She swallowed hard before her face pinched and a rush of tears streamed from the creases of her eyes. “That day, Christian.” Her lids closed as if she were trying to block the memory, or maybe she was finally allowing it in. The words were rough, pained. “Going through labor…it was torture.” She glanced at me, searching for understanding. “It felt like I was rejecting her when all I wanted to do was hang onto her. But then they brought her to me…”

She wet her lips, her attention darting away before it flitted back to search my face, agony set in every line. “All that time when I was holding her, I kept begging her to breathe. She felt so whole in my arms that I kept thinking she
had
to. She just had to take a breath, and everything would be okay.”

I could feel her panic, the pain as it rolled through her, as it tightened in her throat and hammered furiously in her chest.

I wanted to fix it, to fix her, to shield her, but I knew we had to face it, and facing it was going to hurt. All of it, the pain in what we’d lost and the disaster we’d created in its wake.

My arms constricted around her body. She felt so frail in my arms, so delicate. Shudders wracked through her as she trembled in my hold.

“Baby, I know it hurts, but you have to
tell
me. We’re never going to get past this if we don’t talk to each other.”

Her fingers burrowed into my skin, as if seeking an anchor. Her words came with a crush of sorrow, unbearable as she once again broke down.

“When they took her away, it was like reality finally hit me, and that was the moment when I realized she never would, Christian. My little girl was never going to breathe, and when they walked out the door with her, she took my ability to breathe with her.”

And I was there again, with her, seeing it through her eyes. And God, it was fucking devastating.

“I felt like I was suffocating, Christian, and I thought I was going to die. And you…you were the one who made me do it. You were the one who told me it was time.” She pinched her eyes closed. “God, this is so hard to talk about, I’ve kept it inside for so long.”

“Baby…take your time.”

She took a deep breath, blinking as she slowly shook her head. “I know now how crazy that was, Christian. I blamed you for something you couldn’t control, but it felt like you were
against
me, like you weren’t fighting for her the way I was. I hated you for it.”

Hearing her say it again punched me in the gut. I knew she had, but I also knew it’d come from trauma, from shock, that
she’d been lost to skewed emotions because she didn’t know how to deal with the loss.

I cupped her cheek, my thumb making a pass over the apple of her cheek. “It’s okay, Elizabeth. Just tell me…I want to hear it. I need to hear it so I can understand.”

She looked up at me through watery eyes, her expression intense.

“You didn’t hold her.” Her mouth quivered as she said it. She glanced away, then brought her attention back to me. “I know what I said to you was
selfish
because I know you loved her. But that hurt me, and it just added to the anger I felt toward you. Every time I saw you, the pain almost knocked me from my feet. I couldn’t feel anything else but the pain and the hurt and the hate. And the pain is still there,” she emphasized, “I need you to know that I’m scared and I’m confused lying here with you, but the pain is not obscuring what I really feel for you anymore.”

Hope wound into her voice. “The last few weeks, I’ve been feeling it, little flashes of something that felt as if it were calling to me. It took me kissing Logan tonight for me to realize what it was. It was you.”

“Seeing that tonight…it killed me, Elizabeth. It made me insane with jealousy.” I rolled her on her back and I propped myself up, hovering over her. My fingers crawled out to splay wide across her chest, and I pressed my hand over her heart as I stared down at the brown eyes that searched me through our misery. “Because I already knew that, Elizabeth. I already knew you belonged to me just like I belong to you.” I dropped my gaze to the empty spot near her head. I tried to rein in the depth of the rage that jealousy had evoked in me. Then I sealed my eyes on hers. “You hurt me, Elizabeth. I’m not going to lie and tell you it’s okay, because it’s not. You are my
life
, but you have to make
the decision you’re going to live it with me, even when that life brings hardships we don’t want to face.”

Grief twisted her face, but I continued.

“And I’ll never be able to express to you how sorry I am that I pushed you to let her go. It was stupid, but I thought I was protecting you and that you were just harming yourself by continuing to hang onto her all that time. I should have let you make the decision when you were ready.”

Hesitant fingers fluttered along my chest. Sadness deepened the lines on her face. She fisted her hand as if she had to work up to what she wanted to say. Her voice came quiet, ragged in its admission.

“But that’s the thing, Christian, I would never have been ready to let her go. And I think you knew that. You
know
me. Know me the way no one else does, in a way no one else ever will. I blamed you for what you were never responsible for. I couldn’t even look at you because you represented everything I had wanted, all of my hopes, my hopes for this little girl and for our marriage. In one day it was shattered.”

She slipped her hand up my neck, cupped my jaw, her eyes burning into mine.

“I’m scared that when you and I are together, I’m so happy. It feels like every time I give myself to you, I’m hit with the worst kind of devastation. I’m scared of what you make me feel. It’s so intense that sometimes it’s overwhelming. But tonight, with Logan…” Frantically she gathered my hand, arched her back so she could place my palm over her heart. “No one can touch this but you. My heart, it belongs to you just like every other part of me does. All of it…all of me. I’m yours.”

And I was reeling, staggered by the depth of her words. By what they meant.

“I love you, Elizabeth. Nothing can change that.”

“I’m so sorry it took someone else touching me to make me realize that, to knock me back into reality. If I’d have just held on a little longer, I would have seen, Christian. I’ve felt a change in me, a glimmer of light when I was so lost in the darkness. I know it would have lit on you.”

I brushed my lips over hers, the softest pass, an embrace.

She wound her arms around my neck and buried her face in my neck. “I’m never going to get over her.”

I ragged sigh left me, because I grasped the truth of her words. They were my truth, too.

“No one expects you to get over her, Elizabeth. Neither of us will ever completely heal from it. We lost our
child
. That is something we’re going to have to deal with forever. It’s never going to stop hurting, but it will get better, and we have to live through it together.”

We had to believe that our little girl was safe, free, that she wasn’t alone or feeling any of this pain we bore for her.

Elizabeth cried, hugging me tighter.

I ran my hand through her hair, whispered at her head. “People don’t always get to love like this, Elizabeth. Not the way we do. It’s a gift.”

I shifted so I could look down at her. “Please don’t ever let it go.”

The Epilogues

Elizabeth ~ Seven Months Later

A gentle breeze blew across the rising swell. Ocean waves tumbled in, crashing as they broke on the shore. Rays of sunlight slanted between gaps in the thin layer of clouds hanging in the late afternoon sky. My bare feet sank into the dampened sand, a feeling I had loved since I was a little girl.

Peace settled over me like the warmest embrace.

He stood on our beach just off in the distance. Locks of black hair beat at his forehead as wind gusted in. His face was still all sharp angles, his jaw strong, those lips still pouty and full.

But his eyes. They were aware, knowing and kind.

My heart stuttered as a roll of nervous energy hastened through me.

Yes, Christian Davison still managed to steal my breath. It was no different than ten years ago when he’d first walked through those cafe doors and changed the direction of my life.

I guess I should have known it then, the way he’d made me feel as if he’d knocked something loose inside of me, unleashed something I didn’t know existed.