Page 88 of The Lonely Road

She doesn’t move.

“Not right away and—” I stop. Start again. “Soon. I have to—the project has wound down, and I have other work, and I’ve been⁠—”

The sentences won’t construct themselves. I am a man who has held cover identities for weeks without the seams showing, and I cannot finish a single sentence in my target’s grandmother’s kitchen.

Finally, I say it, “I won’t be staying in Wildflower Canyon.”

She studies me like she’s trying to understand with the full weight of her attention, without mercy, without softness.

It’s a silent cross-examination.

I can feel my cowardice, and the way it takes a real, complicated truth and files it under something too simple to be honest.

She deserves the real answer.

She deserves the whole truth set down on this table the way she set down I love you—directly, without preamble, without making her work for it.

Instead, I give her: Because I’m not staying.

She sits with it.

Outside, the drums go on. The bear’s heartbeat. Steady. Patient.

She stands, smiles, holds her hand out. “Come, let’s go to bed.”

Her generosity blows my mind—breaks my heart, does things to me that are shattering and also gluing me back together.

“Taya Morningstar, you’re the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met.” That’s the only truth I can give her.

CHAPTER 22

taya

“That’s a bad idea, Counselor.”

I’m not going to pretend that wasn’t a direct hit.

It landed exactly where things land when they’re true, which is somewhere below the ribs, in the place that the body will remember for years to come.

But I’m also not going to fall apart in my grandmother’s kitchen.

I also know what this is.

I’ve seen it in enough courtrooms, enough depositions, enough moments where a person knows the answer and can’t yet give it.

He’s not cold. He’s not indifferent. He’s a man who has made a decision and is executing it poorly because part of him doesn’t believe it.

I could push. I’m a lawyer. I know how to push.

I smile as I hold my hand out to him. “Come, let’s go to bed.”

“Taya Morningstar, you’re the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met.”

Then why can’t you admit you’re in love with me and stay?

The sheets are still warm from our bodies, the air thick with the musk of sweat and sex.

Mason’s chest rises and falls against my back; he’s still half-hard where he’s pressed between my thighs, sticky with the mess he left inside me because we’ve reached that point in our relationship where we stopped using condoms. It took a year with Griffin.