“Wait.” I watch his throat work as he swallows. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry about Evans, for everything you went through… If only I’d listened to you after the thing with the car…” There are tears in his eyes.
“It doesn’t matter,” I whisper. “It’s over now.”
“It matters to me. I… God!” His throat works again. “When I saw you out there with him, I think a part of me died, of fear. I would die without you, Rachel. You are my life.”
Now I’m crying. “I love you so much.” My voice breaks, “When I saw you start to go over, I think my heart stopped beating.”
“You think?” He gives me a teasing grin. “You passed out.”
I laugh through my tears. “Yeah, I did.”
“When Joe pulled me back, and I saw you lying there, for a moment I thought I failed and that he hit you.” He shakes his head. “Joe had to pry me off yo
u.”
“They sedated you because you kept on screaming about me.” I smile. “They couldn’t work on your wound.”
He chuckles, and for a long moment, we lie there grinning at each other. Then I get up and fetch him the water. He drains the glass, then sighs and closes his eyes, resting his head back on the pillows.
“Do you want to go back to sleep?”
“No.” His eyes open, and he taps my side of the bed. “Come back.”
I do as he says, going back to lie beside him.
“The reason I was home early that day…” He stops and takes my hand again. “I wanted to talk to you, about San Francisco, about Ava, about the fact that I could see that I was losing you.”
“You weren’t…”
He shakes his head. “You were here, physically, but emotionally, you were drifting away. I could feel it, and I knew it had something to do with Ava, her stabbing, how I reacted to it...”
“It doesn’t matter now,” I tell him. “I love you, more than anything. I don’t care about Ava now.”
“But at the time?”
I sigh. “I was… I don’t know what I was feeling. That she still meant too much to you. That was why you wouldn’t get Evans locked up after he tried to hit you with his car, why you were so broken up when you heard about her stabbing… She told me, more than once, that you always came back to her, and that I was only temporary. She’s known you far longer than I have, and she was so confident... I tried to ignore it, but watching you so devastated about her, it all came back.”
He sighs. “She always came back, Rachel, after every divorce or high-profile breakup, and if I was single, which I was mostly, I let her in, because she already knew, more than anyone else, that I didn’t want permanence, at least I didn’t, before you.”
I close my eyes. “She made me think she was the great love of your life.”
“You’re the great love of my life,” he grins. “And I have a scar to prove it.
I smile sadly. “You’re already joking about it. It’s going to take a while for me.”
Landon sighs and squeezes my hand. “About Ava...” he pauses. “We dated after college. I was working here, trying to do something with the hotel. She was attending college in the city, and I knew some of her extended family. We were set up, and we hit it off because, according to her, she didn’t want anything permanent or exclusive. She said she didn’t want love. Which was perfect for me, because I had no intention of giving it and ending up like either of my parents.
“What happened?”
“She used to leave, come back, and then leave again. I didn’t understand it then. I thought it was fine that she wasn’t committed because it meant that I wouldn’t hurt her when I decided to walk away. I didn’t realize until recently that she was trying…”
“To make you admit that you loved her.”
Landon nods. “She wanted me to realize that I couldn’t do without her. Every time she abandoned me to go to Capri with some fashionable trust-fund baby, or some software billionaire, she was asking me to come after her, and every time I didn’t, she became more frustrated. She finally proposed, some leap year thing… and I said no. A week later she was married to a European racecar driver.”
“She thinks she broke your heart,” I say.
“She told you that. Trust me, she knows it isn’t true. When she left her husband a few years later, she asked me if I hadn’t been able to love her because I’d been too busy working to restore the Swanson Court Hotels. I told her the truth. I had no intention of ever making that kind of commitment,” he looks at me. “At the time.”