Emma’s face flushed, and she was thankful that the sun was likely protecting her from being revealed. She nodded, trying to gather the proper words to relay something she wasn’t always proud of.
“I guess you could say that,” she responded. “I grew up in a tiny town that barely had anything happen. Good or bad. So I had to stimulate my brain somehow.”
“So that means you have a good imagination?”
The heat in her cheeks swelled again, and she had to raise her iced coffee to her mouth to block her reaction.
“I suppose you could say that,” she said.
Emma didn’t realize that her tongue was playing with the straw before she wrapped her lips around it, forcing Ace to lose his breath for a second.
Christ, the man was so sexy and interesting that it was nearly impossible not to be flirty.
He grinned widely, then suddenly reached his hand across the little table.
“I want to ask you something here, seriously,” he whispered.
Emma placed her drink down, then pushed aside her plate with the remaining muffin. She found his hand with hers, and he squeezed it as soon as they made eye contact.
The moment was made even more intense when Ace removed his sunglasses. His swimmingly chocolate brown eyes called to her, asking her to go to the ends of the earth for him. She would. She knew right then and there that she would.
“I wanted to say this to you before anything goes down,” he began, voice shaking slightly. “We are both in strange positions. We can’t ignore that fact.”
Emma nodded, listening intently.
“It’s a hypothetical question, of course … do you think that we have a shot?”
Emma felt her heart ram up her throat. It wasn’t the kind of question she was expecting him to ask.
“A shot?”
“Yeah,” he said, stumbling on his words. “Even if we’re a part of rival families, do you think we could make it? As a couple?”
Her world began to crumble around her. It wasn’t because she didn’t want to admit to him how she felt … that she truly wanted things to work out between them. But as a person with high anxiety, she had to consider the truth, which was often as stark as a slap across the face.
They belonged to rival families, and neither family was exactly willing to be the first to bend. They had to consider that and know that running away together wasn’t an option either. Their families were masters in the art of finding traitors and thrived upon murdering them in the most heinous ways.
Emma’s mouth was dry as she tried to speak, opening up a few times, and watching the hope drain from Ace’s face. She wanted him to be happy, and she wanted to be happy too, but the truth continued to exist, even if we didn’t like it. It’s stubborn like that.
“Ace, I,” she began.
Just as Emma was trying to stammer out the words to him, a loud screeching sound rounded the corner. It took her a second to realize that the vehicle slamming on the gas was heading in their direction. She turned her head and watched it zip up to them, her body tensing with fear and anticipation.
The van suddenly slowed right in front of them. The window rolled down, and a small gun barrel crept out, pointed at Emma and Ace.
Emma’s life flashed before her eyes. She was back home in her sleepy Midwestern town, wandering the backyard as an only child, searching for the best place to plant herself and read a good book. It was almost always beneath a tree, giving her shade and some sun to frolic in as the day went on.
Those were truly the days of fun, of fairy tales, the last time she felt any kind of peace. She had done something so incredibly terrible, something that would force her to have to look over her shoulder for the rest of her life. She thought she had deserved it at the time.
But as she turned her head instinctively to look at Ace, she felt a rush of sharp regret. They both had been too afraid to say how they truly felt, and this is how it would all end.
She knew then that she wanted a life with him. She saw them searching for a tree to sit under in an open field, sitting and talking for hours, maybe even both reading. He’d have a plant collection that she would poke fun at, and he would make sure she didn’t worry herself into oblivion.
Everything moved so slowly, yet so fast at the same time. The bullet in the gun came at them, and Emma couldn’t do anything but sit there, waiting for fate to hit her in the face the way it often did.
Did she deserve it? No, not really. She had been a young woman who had an accident, and the mob family had taken advantage of her. The man that came into her life had shown her that her guilt wasn’t hers to carry.
Chapter16