Sinful Love (Sinful Nights #4)(74)

In her silence, a bird chirped in a tree, and somewhere on the other side of the cemetery, footsteps crunched on stone, and he spotted others visiting headstones, too. These moments surrounding him—of life and death and love and memory—tugged at everything inside him, yanking on all his heartstrings. “Okay, so maybe that’s similar to how I feel for her.”

“And how she feels for you,” Shannon added. “But you have to rethink your all-or-nothing view of her. Because she’s falling in love with you now, too.” She poked him in the chest for emphasis. “She loved you then, and she loves you now, and you’re fixated on what came in between. You need to let it go, because it’s foolish to think there’s only one great love.”

“There is for me,” he protested, but it was fainter this time, and his words seemed to hold less weight than they had before. Was she right? Was he proving his own theory wrong by falling in love with her all over again, but with the woman she was today?

“The girl she was at sixteen and the woman she is today are the same, but they’re different.” She ran a hand across her round belly. “And look at me. I love both of my babies. I love the baby I lost and the baby inside me,” she said in a broken whisper. Then she held his gaze. “We have so much more capacity for love than we let ourselves feel when we’re grieving.”

He exhaled, then inhaled, letting her words expand and dig roots inside him. He knew she was right. He knew she was onto something. And he knew he needed to get out of his own way and let this love take shape.

*

Later, he met Sophie and Ryan for a drink at the Chandelier Bar after a fundraiser for a children’s charity.

“Did you ask Annalise to come to the wedding?” Sophie asked once they ordered.

Michael shook his head.

Sophie pouted. “You’re going to ask her, though?”

He shrugged but chased it with a probably. He needed to figure out what to say to her about so many things.

“Well, when are you seeing her again?”

“I honestly don’t know. She doesn’t get away much, since she helps take care of her mother. Unless it’s for work.”

Sophie raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

Michael tilted his head, trying to figure out what she meant, then decided he was tired of decoding. “Yeah, that’s so.”

*

When he returned home from work the next day, there was a delivery waiting for him at his building—a slim lavender envelope. Gripping it tightly, he rode the elevator up to the twentieth floor. His nerves were tense, tight, in case this was bad news, in case it was the end. If it was, he needed to be alone as he read it.

As soon as he entered his home, he leaned back against the door, slid his finger under the seal, and ripped it open.

Dear Michael,

Sometimes, phone calls don’t suffice, and email becomes insufficient for our hearts. But I worry I’ve been negligent with yours. That I’ve assumed too much, and said too little—that my fears of losing a love have held me back. Forgive me for not being as open as I wanted. Sometimes the possibility of losing someone I care deeply for is like a fist squeezing my voice, choking it.

So I turn to the written word. We’ve always been good with letters, haven’t we? I can write down what is too hard to say at times. And that is this. You asked me something on your last night in Paris, and I gave you an answer you didn’t like. But you need to know that a part of me also never stopped loving you. How could I? You were my first, and I wanted you to be my last. That part was quieter, of course, during the last decade, as it should be.

But now that part is an active part. And what I feel is so much more than a lingering fondness for a first love. It’s an aching, hungry place in me, and a blissful, joyful one, too. I want you in my life, Michael. I want new experiences with you. I want pictures of you and of us, of the places we’ll go, and the things we’ll do. Together.

I’m trying to give you all I can. I said it badly in Paris, so I’ll say it again and again.

I’m falling in love with you.

Will you please let me fall in love with you?

xoxo

Annalise

His heart beat furiously, like it had a thousand wings, trying to carry him away to her. When he called, her phone went straight to voicemail. He called a few more times but she didn’t answer. That was unlike her.

At some point, he crashed on his couch, the lights of Vegas flickering brightly through the windows, watching over him.

His phone bleated sometime well after midnight. Blinking, he rubbed his eyes and hunted for it. He must have knocked it off the couch, since it sounded from the floor. He grabbed it, a slow smile spreading across his face when he saw her name.

Sliding his thumb over the screen, he answered, his voice still gravelly from sleep. “Hey you.”

“Hi. Is there any chance your bed fits two?”





CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE


Anticipation skated across her flesh as she walked down the hallway on the twentieth floor, as she raised her fist, as she rapped on his door.

In less than five seconds, he opened it, looking sleep-rumpled and impossibly sexy. His black hair was a mess, his jawline was thick with stubble, and his blue eyes twinkled.

He wore black pants and a striped button-down shirt. The top two buttons were undone, and the shirt was wrinkled. It was nearly one; her flight had been late. She was slated to have landed at nine, and while she’d toyed with emailing him from the plane, she’d opted for the surprise.