He smatters kisses all over my face, his whiskers scratching my skin, and I laugh. “I want to move on. Christ, you don’t know how much I want to move on.”
I think he wants to believe that, but how can he move on if he’s hiding from everything he’s lost? I have no qualms about moving to Old Harbor if I can find a job, if Talia can find a little slice of life she can call her own and we can be happy, but Rick has a lot of decisions to make and he never will if he thinks he has none.
“Okay. We can do that. What should we do for dinner?” I ask, brushing a kiss across his mouth before standing and heading to the fridge. A hot meal and hot sex through the night sounds like a lovely way to put off thinking about tomorrow. It’s going to wreck me to drive away, but I can’t let him know it.
“There’s a package of hamburger in there. If you can make something with that, I’ll be your slave for the rest of the night.”
“Sex slave,” I say, quirking my mouth at him.
He comes up behind me and presses a kiss to the top of my head. “Thanks for not being mad.”
I turn around and let him trap me against the fridge. “It’s not my way to be mad, or I would be a shriveled up old shrew by now. But I think,” I say, pushing my hands up his t-shirt, “that maybe some of the things you’ve been fighting with since you moved here will go away if you confront them. You don’t know why your wife left you—” He opens his mouth to interrupt, but I speak over him, “—not really. You haven’t gone to the office in Cedar Hill since you moved to Old Harbor, right? What about your employees? What about your apartment? Is it full of your things? When I left Cedar Hill, I left things behind there, too. My mother’s on the streets. How can I help her? Can I write her off as a lost cause? Should I? I had friends in the city, people I dropped who would have stuck by my side through the whole Stevie scandal. I hide and say it’s better for Talia, and in some ways it is, but it’s an excuse, too, to keep my head in the sand.”
His eyes grow stormy, and I know he’s at the end of his patience.
“I’ll stop talking about it now. I promise. I was poking around your kitchen when I made soup and I think you have ingredients for spaghetti. How’s that?”
He braces his arm against the fridge above my head and rests his hand on the back of my neck. He’s frowning, and the part of the scar that runs through his mouth twists his lips in an ugly grimace. I could be scared of him, but he won’t hurt me. He’s wounded, and he’s used to people kicking him when he’s down. A rich, powerful man, he could have let it turn him hard, merciless, ruthless, like Declan Everett, another rich and powerful man always in the news and always, it seems, one step behind Rick, but instead, he let it turn him into a vulnerable puddle and that makes me love him all the more.
His voice is rough. “I hear what you’re trying to say, but like I have to remind Beau, you need to let me do things at my own pace. I’m still healing. Mind, body, and spirit, as my masseuse likes to say, and I need time, Devyn. You can’t rush Talia through her recovery, and you can’t rush me through mine.”
“You’re right. It’s your life, and you need to live it how you need to live it.” I dig the package of hamburger out of the fridge and face him again. “But no one said you had tostaythere, did they?”
He scowls.
My eyes bright, I turn my fingers in a circular motion in front of my lips and throw away an invisible key.
“I need a drink,” he mutters.
“And a pan,” I add. “Can I have a drink, too?”
He swallows, and instead of going for a pan or a drink, he cuddles me to him. We stand in his kitchen for I don’t know how long and I’m near tears by the time he releases me.
Together, we make dinner without speaking, sipping on a shared glass of Glenlivet.
We go to bed early, but we’re too busy to sleep.