Page 112 of The Lonely Road

“And what did you do to her?”

A dry, cutting chuckle slips past my lips. “I fucked her over.”

“Yeah, you did.” She tilts her head, her eyes warm with compassion. “But it’s fixable.”

“I’m not looking to fix anything.”

She flicks my nose.

“Ouch.”

“The answer is almost always yes if you come back, and you mean it, and you earn it. The question is whether you’re willing to do the work.”

The thought warms me from head to toe, but I refuse to succumb to it. I don’t deserve her. I don’t deserve to fix this. “I don’t want to do the work.”

She throws her hands up in frustration. “God! You’re so fucking stubborn. You always were.”

I raise the wine glass as if in a toast. “That’s what makes me good at my job.”

She smirks. “You mean the one you don’t have.”

The cat loses interest in me and begins washing his face.

“I just need a couple of days of peace and quiet, Lana.”

Her gaze softens with understanding. “You can have them.”

“Thanks.”

“But I’m going to keep telling you to go back to her. Because life is…fuck, Mace, life is hard, you don’t need to make it any harder by giving up the woman you fell in love with.”

“Peace and quiet, Lana,” I remind her.

“Fine!” She relents. “I was going to watch a horror movie.”

“Which one?”

“Dusk Till Dawn.”

“Classic.”

So we sat in her cinema room—because she built a company that sold for enough money to have a cinema room, and she considers this a reasonable use of square footage—and watched a movie I’d seen with her before, and drank more of her wine, and I woke up the next morning with a respectable hangover and the absolute inability to go thirty seconds without thinking about Taya.

Which used to not be who I was.

I have compartmentalized entire wars.

I have walked away from things that would flatten most people and not looked back.

I have spent eleven years being the most professionally detached man in any given space.

Taya Morningstar takes up every cell in my head and has since I met her, and I don’t know yet what to do about that except sit in my sister’s place in San Francisco with a cat who hates me and wait to find out.

CHAPTER 29

taya

I’ve been a lawyer long enough to know that prepared and ready are the same thing when everything else fails you—the relationship, sleep, the faith in your own judgment because you looked at a man for three months and read him completely wrong. Ready is what you have left, and you work with it.