It was true; he didn’t deserve easy. Mac’s dark gaze flicked up. “Why are you here?”
Grady checked out the empty doorway, ensuring privacy, before saying quietly, “Eres mía. Caminaría a través del fuego por ti.”
After his initial bewilderment, Mac realized those weren’t Grady’s words but his own. There was only one person he could have heard it from.
Grady was watching him closely. “You fucking love her, man. I don’t know what happened, but you love her.”
Mac grimaced.
“She'syours? You’d walk through fire for her?”
“I was fucking her at the time.”
“You’vewalkedthrough fire. You wouldn’t say that lightly, not to some casual fuck who didn’t mean anything to you,” Grady demanded.
“She’s my neighbor,” he protested lamely.
“I wouldn’t walk through fall leaves for my neighbor,” Grady fired back. “So, fuck off with that.”
“I’ve put her in the hospital,” Mac pointed out. “See a happy ending here?”
“Earn her. Deserve her. Straighten your fucking head out and get her back,” Grady advised.
Mac closed his eyes. He could see her in his mind, whipping his kitchen chair at him and storming out of his cabin. The image was so clear, he could almost touch her. He’d brutally used Cassidy’s body, degraded her, and sent her away, hating him.
So how thefuckdid she wind up on a boat with him in the middle of the night?
And now he’d hurt her, and her dog was near-dead. “There’s no coming back from this. There’s no getting her back.”
Grady responded with a satisfied, “Gotcha.”
Mac grimaced. “Fucker.”
Chapter fifty-three
Mac
SOÑADOR DE DÍA
GradyandMacstoodon the dock, watching the boat slip into the water.
What should have been a day of celebration was anything but. Mac glanced back at the empty lake house. His eyes scanned the yard before his chest seized; Fred wasn’t there, wouldn’t be loping down the hill to join him.
Grady brought him back to the present, reading the name on the boat and giving Mac a side-eye. “Don’t suppose you found the one Spanish powerboat out there?”
Mac didn’t respond.
Grady looked at it again. “Soñador de Día. You put it right out there, bro. So don’t try to pull any shit about ‘I said what I said ’cause I was balls deep.’”
“Perfectly good name for a boat,” Mac defended, scratching his jaw. Things had been different a few weeks ago.
“But,Day Dreamer?”
“Nightmare would be more apt,” Mac muttered.
“Yeah, she’s not your biggest fan right now.” Smoothing down his light blue linen shirt, Grady grinned. “Of the three of us, I came out of this looking good. She talks to me. Okay, I ambushed her in the hospital, but she still talked to me.”
Mac tossed him a baleful look.