Reckless Hearts (Oak Harbor #2)(56)

“Stop it!” I cry, shaking with emotion. I’m trying so hard to keep it together, but I can’t, not with him standing there, haloed in the neon lights, looking so good. So sure. Fuck, why does he have to look at me like that? “I can’t do this.” I back away. “Please, just let me go. It’s over, Will.”

“It can’t be!” He grabs my hand. “Tell me what you want. Whatever it takes. I’ll do anything to make this right,” he vows.

“I want never to have met you!” I can’t hold back anymore. All the hurt and betrayal comes flooding out, in wretched hiccupping sobs. “I want not to feel like my heart is breaking. I want never to have fallen in love with you!”

My voice echoes, an anguished plea in the dark of the parking lot.

Will looks like I just slapped him. “Dee—”

“That’s enough for tonight, don’t you think?” A calm voice interrupts us, and then Sawyer is draping my jacket around my shoulders, my purse already dangling from one hand. “I’ll take you home,” he tells me, before shooting Will a look. It seems like Will wants to argue, but after a beat, he nods his head.

“I’ll talk to you later,” he says to me, but I’m already walking away, somehow putting one foot in front of the other while Sawyer murmurs something to him too low for me to hear. Then he catches up to me in a few strides, slipping his arm around my shoulders and steering me back towards town.

I let him guide me, wiping away the tears still streaming down my face. We walk in silence across the square, my storm of emotions quieting by the time we finally reach my front door. Sawyer finds my keys and unlocks, then asks gently, “Are you going to be OK?”

“I have to be, don’t I?” I answer, pained. “Life goes on.”

I glance over. Sawyer looks like he’s thinking. “What?” I ask, then sigh. “This is where you’re going to tell me to forgive him. That he made a mistake, and he’s a good guy, really.”

“Not at all.” Sawyer squeezes my shoulders. “I’m just sorry you’re hurting. I know you cared about him a lot.”

I say goodbye and step into the dark apartment. I close the door and sink back, sliding to the floor, too weary to take another step.

Cared. Past tense. It sounds so neat and final, so why does my chest feel split wide open, every cell in my body aching with heartbreak and regret? There’s nothing neat about the way I feel right now, pulled in a dozen directions with no way to make sense of it all.

He looked so anguished, there in the moonlight. Like his heart was breaking right along with mine, as if he’d do anything to take my pain away.

But how can I ever believe him again?





Nineteen.


I make it through the week on autopilot. After what’s just happened, I wish I could just shut everything down and hide away from everything, but the rest of the world doesn’t seem to get the memo: life goes on, even though it feels like my world has fallen apart. My friends are great, so supportive, but I can see the questions lingering in their eyes, and the delicate way they dance around it. I know what they’re thinking, because I’m asking myself the same thing: Yes, he didn’t tell me the whole story, but he didn’t cheat, or straight-out lie, or betray me in any other way. We all have a past, and maybe he shouldn’t have hidden his from me, but he would have told me eventually.

So what’s the big deal?

I can’t explain how somehow what Will did has cut me right to the core, and pressed all my buttons. Every one of my darkest, most painful fears has been dragged into the bright sun, and I just don’t know what to do.

I broke my own rules for him. He told me over and over that he was a man of his word, and eventually, I believed him. I put my heart on the line, only to find he was hiding everything, keeping secrets about his other life.

Just like my father did.



I drift numbly through my regular routine of client meetings and open house viewings, paperwork at the office, and shiny new deals. Maybe it’s the universe trying to repay this massive karmic debt, but I find myself on a winning streak like nothing else, closing half a dozen pending deals in a single week. I watch the numbers go up and calculate my commissions, but I still can’t feel an ounce of my usual pride. I’m hollow, used up inside.

All I can think about is Will.

The night we met, that first electric press of my lips against his. Splashing in the creek, the heat of our bodies like an inferno, coming together for the first time. Lying curled and sick in his arms, feeling like nothing in the world could hurt me as long as he was there, holding me close. But those memories are too sweet to bear, and they get poisoned by everything else I don’t know: his life with Helena, the plans they made and the sweet nothings they murmured in the heat of the night. I torture myself imagining it all: his hands on her body, those delicious lips telling her all the same pretty words.

He says she wasn’t right for him, and that I’m the only one, but how can I trust that now? I always knew it was reckless and impulsive for him to just show up in Oak Harbor the way he did, but now I know the truth is so much worse: I was the rebound, his revenge on Helena for cheating. He threw himself into a fresh start here with me because he was running so hard from her betrayal.

Somehow, this thought is even worse than what he’s been hiding. It means what he claims he felt was an illusion, that he never really cared. I was a distraction all along, not the real thing at all. I may have fallen head over heels in love with him, but this was always just about Helena, not me.