Total pages in book: 122
Estimated words: 115997 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 580(@200wpm)___ 464(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115997 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 580(@200wpm)___ 464(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
I stabbed at the screen, taking the call off speaker, and I lifted the phone to my ear. “Mom! I will call you later.” My cheeks heated with embarrassment. Nate heard that.
“You’re showing a serious lack of judgment with your choices.”
“They’re my choices to make. I’ll call you when I’m back in DC.” I hit the end button with more aggression than necessary and chanced a look up at Nate. “I’m so sorry. She’s . . . my mother.”
His jaw flexed. “Nothing to be sorry for. She didn’t say anything about me that isn’t true.”
“She doesn’t even know you,” I argued as we reached the car and I traded my phone for the car keys.
“Where are you staying?” he asked, then scoffed. “I don’t know why I asked. There’s only one hotel in town.”
“I’m in the presidential suite,” I answered, opening the door I hadn’t bothered to lock. “It was all they had left.”
His tan jaw flexed as he nodded.
God, my entire body, as cold and waterlogged as it was, hurt for him. “I can stay.”
He looked back at the grave site. “No. I’m thankful you’re here. Really, I am. But I just want to be alone with her for a little while.” His mouth twisted in a grimace. “If I can get my aunts to leave.”
“Okay.”
“I hate that you saw that.” He wouldn’t look at me.
“I hate that you went through it.” His coat was soaked through as I reached for his forearm, desperate to touch him, to comfort him in any way I could. “Tell me what you need, Nate.”
“If I figure it out, I’ll let you know, Izzy.” He walked away, and I let him.
I tied the belt on my robe, then ran my brush through my wet hair as I walked back into the bedroom of my hotel suite, finally warm enough to feel my toes.
Serena had already called to apologize for accidentally telling Mom about my hasty exit at breakfast, but I wasn’t mad at her. My mother? That was a whole other story. It felt like she’d kicked Nate when he was already down, though I knew she’d been aiming for me.
There were no words for the way my chest ached for everything Nate had been through today, and my utter, complete uselessness to save him from any of it. Not the loss of his mother. Not the cruelty of his father.
I sat on the edge of the bed and checked my phone, hoping for a text or a missed call, some sign that he wasn’t going to spend tonight alone, when his emotions had obviously been flayed open and left bleeding. A sigh ripped through my lips at the blank screen, and I swallowed the knot in my throat that instantly formed at the idea of him spending the night with another woman.
Get over yourself. He wasn’t mine. Not like that. And I could hardly begrudge him any measure of comfort he could find. I put my brush on the nightstand, next to my ADHD medication, then picked up what was left of my room service tray from the polished expanse of the dining table. I’d devoured the cheeseburger the second my meds wore off about two hours ago. Opening my door, I set the tray down in the hallway and moved quickly to get back into my room so I wasn’t seen out in just the thigh-high robe, but the ding of the elevator down the hall caught my attention.
Nate stepped out of the elevator into the hallway, shoving his hands through his wet hair, still dressed in his suit from the funeral.
Our eyes met and held as he came my way, his strides eating up the distance between us with single-minded focus. My pulse jumped into a thundering beat. The hours we’d been apart hadn’t done anything to quell the restlessness in him. He still walked that dangerous edge between whoever he’d been when he lived here, and whoever he was now . . . whoever the constant deployments were turning him into.
And in the seconds it took for him to reach me, I realized it didn’t matter which version of him I was getting. I was inextricably linked to every single one of them. The guy he’d been when he lived here had been the one who’d pulled me from the plane crash. The one he’d grown into had knocked me off my feet in Georgia. And the man he was now . . . the one who made my heart simultaneously race and yearn for him—
Oh, God.
That feeling in my chest . . .
I was in love with him.
And he was going back to Afghanistan tomorrow.
My feet shuffled backward into my room, but I held the door open for him, and he followed me in, smelling like rain and the faint remains of his cologne.