How About No
Page 19

She opened her mouth, then closed it, seemingly stunned speechless.
“And my club doesn’t hate you. They’re worried about me, and they know that I still love you.” I paused. “Which is not a bad thing. As for another man? I think it’s time that we stop beating around the bush. You haven’t been with anyone else and likely never would. Please. Give us a chance.”
Her mouth dropped open. “I know that, but your club thinks I am. I get no respect from them. Your friends would cross the street to avoid walking past me.”
There was no denying it. They had my best interests at heart.
She got a worried look on her face, and when she started to stand up, I had no other option but to pull her into my arms and deposit her sideways on my lap to keep her from leaving.
The moment that her fine ass made contact with my lap, she started to squirm and pull away.
I refused to let her.
Locking my arms around her, I held tight, despite that her movements were making my leg jostle causing shards of pain to shoot along the nerve endings in my leg.
“Let me go!” she ordered fiercely.
I laughed.
In her face.
She narrowed her eyes and reached for me with her hands. Both buried in my hair as she tried to use leverage to push herself away.
Different shards of pain shot through me, but this pain was most welcome.
I wanted her hands in my hair.
I loved her hands in my hair.
I loved her hands on my body.
I smiled, and she got even more angry.
“Never. I’m never letting you go. All I need is time. Time to convince you that I won’t ever put anyone else first. Only you.”
***
Landry
Things had gone from bad to worse.
As if hearing that we were still married hadn’t been enough, Wade then took me to his parents’ home and proceeded to tell me that he wanted to stay married. That all he needed was time to convince me.
Was he crazy?
Yes, yes he was.
The fact that I was happy about the fact that I was still married to him should’ve been frightening. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t scary at all. It felt right.
Which was what scared me.
And when I’d tried to leave, Wade had grabbed me and pulled me into his lap—locking those strong arms around me and refusing to let me go.
I’d squirmed, pushed, and struggled all to no avail.
He wasn’t letting me get away.
I’d buried my hands in his hair, trying to force myself away from him and cause him enough pain to let me go—but he’d held strong.
“Let me go now, or I’ll hurt you, and I really don’t want to hurt you,” I hissed, letting one hand go to move to his bicep. There, I dug my nails in and started to rake them up and down his arms.
He didn’t flinch.
In fact, he grinned wider.
“Gonna take more than your claws to hurt me, baby,” he informed me, his eyes alight with mischief.
He was enjoying this, even though I could see that I was causing him at least some pain in his injured leg.
He was enjoying this immensely.
I wanted to claw his eyes out and wipe that smug, satisfied, superior look off his stupid, pretty face.
I struggled harder, being careful not to hurt my hand which I could feel starting to throb from all the movement, as well as keep most of my weight off of his injured leg.
And if I was hurting, my struggling was likely hurting him, too.
Yet he wasn’t saying a word.
He kept his mouth shut and put up with my struggles.
“God,” I hissed, giving one final attempt.
I squirmed out of the seated position he had me in and got my knees up and ended up practically straddling his body facing him.
All I ended up accomplishing was wedging the solid column of muscle and flesh that I’d been studiously ignoring with everything that I had further between my thighs. Now, it was pressed perfectly between the gap in my ass cheeks and I was frozen solid.
I leaned forward and put my face into his, all the while whispering words that I didn’t mean—and never had.
“I don’t want to do this,” I hissed.
He laughed in my face again, causing me to recoil.
I narrowed my eyes and leaned forward to tell him off, but he responded before I could. “That’s your problem, hellcat. You don’t want me this close to you because you don’t trust yourself. You love me. You’ve loved me from the moment that you saw me just like I’ve loved you from the moment I first saw you. I knew you were the one the moment you walked through that classroom door. I knew the moment that you walked away from me that I couldn’t wait to see you again. I just knew. Because my soul recognized its soulmate. And you’re it. You’re the other half of my soul, and I can’t find a single thing wrong with being back where we were always meant to be.”
“You don’t see a problem?” I shrieked. “We’re married again! You chose someone else over me! Someone who’s always been chosen over me!”
He sobered instantly. “And you will never understand how sorry I am that I didn’t put you first. That I didn’t see what I was doing when I did it. If I had…if I had, I would’ve been able to prevent spending all these months in a perpetual state of torture because you weren’t there by my side.”
I clenched my teeth and bared them at him.
God, his face. His sexy bearded chin drove me wild. I just wanted to plant my fist into it.
He wouldn’t be hurt by it, though.
He’d love it.
He’d love anything as long as it came from me.
Which stopped me in my tracks.
All the venom and rancor, all the uneasiness and need to get away—it just vanished.
I stilled and loosened up on my hands, allowing them both to drop to my lap.
He didn’t let up a single bit as he waited for what I’d do next.
“Nothing I say will matter, will it?” I asked, feeling something inside of my chest tighten.
He shook his head.
His perfect hair shifted, causing a lock of it to fall over those green eyes that I loved so much.
“No, baby,” he answered honestly. “Because I was always going to fight for you. I was always going to make sure that you had what you wanted. What you needed. And baby, what you need is me.”
I looked away and studied the rolling hills that blanketed Porter and Minnie’s massive backyard.
“You let me leave,” I whispered brokenly.
He dropped his forehead onto my shoulder. “I was so hurt when I got the papers from that nurse. You never even gave me a chance. I wanted to fight for you, but you wouldn’t give me a chance. I also knew that if I didn’t let you go, you’d find a way to do it without my help. You were that determined. But honey, I was also determined. I knew that one day I’d be back…I was biding my time. Each day, I made sure I found a way for you to see me. For you to realize what you were missing…and it worked, didn’t it?”
It had.
I thought back to how he seemed to show up wherever I was, no matter how hard I tried to avoid him. Whether it be him dropping his uniform shirt off for me to sew a button on it while I was at work, to arriving at my dog rescue to help me unload the pallet of dog food just to turn around and leave once it was accomplished. And nary a word was ever said between us. He was just there, and I was just letting him be there. It didn’t matter that I never said a word. He wouldn’t allow that to deter him.
Little things like him pulling up to get gas while I was at the gas station and pumping it for me, to him making sure to send me flowers even though he never signed them.
He really hadn’t left me, had he? I didn’t go out of my way to see him, but he always ended up in my vicinity.
He’d made sure that he was always on my mind.
I inhaled a shaky breath, then blew it out.
Moments after that…my mouth found his.
And that was all she wrote.
I was done.
The moment my lips touched his—the moment my tongue tangled with his—I knew that what we had would be forever. That, even if we weren’t together, he was always going to be mine.
Because he was right.
He was my soulmate.
And I was fighting a losing battle.