I glare at the cop. “Did you fuck her?”
“Stop, Rick!” Candace shouts at me. “Stop now.”
Rick.
That’s what gets me. Her calling me Rick. No one but her calls me Rick. My gaze jerks back to her beautiful face. “I need to talk to you. Fuck. I need to kiss you. Do you know how long I’ve needed to kiss you again?” I step toward her again and John grabs me.
“Let him go, John!” she orders, pointing at him and then me, and to my surprise, she closes the one step left between us and pokes my chest. “What are you doing here?”
That poke isn’t just a poke to me. This is her hand touching me when I have lived a decade waiting for just that moment. My voice lowers, the tequila evaporating. “I need to talk to you.”
“You wrote me a Dear Candace letter. You broke my heart. You hurt me. Go away and just let me try to move on.”
She wants me to let her try to move on. That means she hasn’t moved on. “I didn’t,” I say. “I didn’t move on. I have never moved on from you.”
Her eyes meet mine, searching my face, the million right things about us in the air, alive and well, but the one thing that went wrong is so fucking there, too. The one thing that destroyed us is not only right here between us, the hurt I made her feel isn’t even close to gone. And bastard that I am, I can’t be sorry. Because fuck her fiancé. She’s hurting right now because I still matter to her.
“Go away,” she whispers again and then with a stronger voice she adds, “Savage.”
Savage, not Rick. I turn my cheek as if I’ve been hit again and she walks away, but not before I get a view of her cute little ass in a black skirt. That ass that belongs in my hand because she belongs in my arms. I’m not done looking when the cop shoves me toward the open car door and I slide in beside Adam. The door shuts behind me and Adam says. “Rick? You hate Rick. No one ever calls you Rick.”
“Except when she calls me Rick,” I say, glancing over at him. “That went better than expected, don’t you think?”
CHAPTER NINE
Candace
I’m shaking so hard I can barely stand up, but somehow, I shove open the door to Linda’s flower shop, the bells chiming loudly with my abrupt entry.
“Candace,” she gasps from behind the counter where she’s helping a customer. The gasp, no doubt, because I don’t do abrupt and intrusive like I am right now. I’m polite. I’m proper. I’m a five-star general’s daughter. I also just slapped the only man I’ve ever loved while he was in handcuffs. Today’s that kind of day. I’m pissed off among many other emotions I’ll deal with later.
“Why didn’t you warn me?” I demand. “Why did you call me over here for something important, which was obviously him, and not warn me?”
The woman standing at the counter turns to face me, her freckled face reddening. “I’ll ah, give you two a few minutes.” She rushes in my direction and behind me, the chimes telling me she’s exited, not likely to return and I don’t care.
“Why didn’t you warn me?” I repeat.
Linda rushes around the counter. “Because this is the kind of emotion the man you marry is supposed to make you feel.”
“Pain? Heartache? Hurt? That’s what the man I marry is supposed to make me feel?” I demand.
“Passion. Love. Investment. You two were young. He went off to war. He saw things. He did things you and I can’t fathom. And he’s here now. Talk to him. Just talk.”
“You don’t understand what you’re doing right now,” I all but scream at her. “You don’t understand.”
“I know this is the most emotion I’ve seen from you in a decade.”
I can’t speak another word or I will lose my shit as if I haven’t already. I rotate and launch myself toward the door. “Let’s go to the bar and have a drink,” she calls out. “We can talk and—”
I whirl on her. “Rick just turned the bar into a warzone. We can’t go and have a drink there. And I don’t want to go have a drink with you anyway.”
“Because I told him you’re engaged. That should tell you where his head and heart are right now.”
I don’t say another word. I leave and once I’m in the BMW that I worked my ass off to buy while Rick Savage was nowhere in sight, I grip the steering wheel. He’s not just going to rip my heart out again. He’s going to end up shattering my world in ways he can’t possibly understand.
***
Savage
I’m leaning against the cell wall a foot from Adam when the doors open. “About damn time we get our one call, John. Dear John, the little prick,” I snap at the sight of the asshole. “I bet it is little, too.”