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“Sorry to bother you. I thought we needed to talk.”

“Okay.” I’m cautious, guarded. He might still have the power to shake me, but I stopped being impulsive a long time ago. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Seriously?” His sexy grin lights his hypnotic eyes, and my stomach tightens. His eyes never change, even if he does.

When I went to Nashville, he was thin, weak, and wounded. He was haunted, and darkness hovered around him like a cloud.

Not anymore.

Now he’s his old self again—but more. His forearms are lined, and his shoulders stretch out his shirt. I’m sure under his clothes he’s the same physically, and I can tell inside he’s more confident, more relaxed, surer than he’s ever been before.

“I heard you made a lot of money in Nashville.” Is being rich the difference?

He looks down, almost as if he’s embarrassed. “Patton had this idea for his dad’s company. He wanted to make it the Air BnB of commercial real estate. It was actually pretty brilliant.”

“I guess that’s why I never heard from you again?” Yeah, it’s a jab. It jumped right out of my mouth.

He scratches the side of his beard with his thumb and cuts those eyes up at me from under his brow. I wonder if he knows how fucking hot he is—especially when he looks at me that way. “I didn’t trust myself with you.”

My eyes narrow. Whatever that means.

He stands, taking a step into my room, and at six-foot-two, muscular and healthy, he completely fills my space. “We have a daughter.”

That old magnetic energy between us is in his eyes when he looks at me, and I feel it in my core, in my hardening nipples. Even if I try to fight, my body remembers everything.

His voice is tender as he steps over to watch Dove sleeping in my bed. “She’s so beautiful.”

“She looks like her daddy.”

He winces, then cuts his eyes at me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

My heart beats faster, and I do my best to fight my tears, to s

ummon the strength he’s always taken so easily. “We are not doing this right now.”

“I had a right to know.”

“And I was going to tell you…” My hands tremble, and all the emotions I struggled with so long ago are right at the surface, like they never left. “I started a letter a hundred different times… I-I guess I didn’t know what to say after what happened.” After you screamed in my face and threw me out.

“You could’ve called me.”

“No.” It’s a barely controlled snap. “Not after the way you left it.”

Going to my closet, I climb inside to where a box sits in the very back… A box filled with one letter wishing me happy birthday, a wooden Día de los Muertos mask, a pillowcase I slept with every night, and a box holding a turquoise ring I promised I’d never take off.

Moving these mementos aside, I dig out the crumpled sheets of paper.

I don’t even read them.

I don’t have to.

Climbing out of the closet, I return to where he stands and push the sheets of paper against his chest. “Here.”

Tears threaten, but I will not cry in front of him. “I wasn’t trying to hide her from you. I really didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want you to think I was trying to trap you with a baby.”

His large hands close over mine, taking the sheets of loose-leaf paper from me.

“That’s not what I meant.” His voice is quiet. “I never thought that.”