Page 90 of At Midnight Comes the Cry

They both stopped. Hadley had heard the phrasedidn’t know if I wanted to laugh or cryand now she was living it.

“You were afraid.” Flynn took a step closer.

She nodded. “I didn’t want to lose you. I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

“I thought I must have disappointed you. So I ran away. Self-fulfilling prophecy.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m so—”

“Stop. Stop apologizing.” She was the one who took a step closer this time. “I don’t want us to be… to be two people who have nothing to say to each other besides ‘I’m sorry.’”

He looked down at her. “It was you who pushed the chief into finding me, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” She wanted to be completely candid. “I wanted to stop thinking about you and worrying about you. I tried. But it didn’t work very well.”

“You know, the whole time I was up at the militia camp, pretending to be someone I wasn’t, I kept you in a little compartment hidden away under here.” He tapped the center of his chest. “And the few times I was really alone, I’d open up the door and be myself. My best self. Because that was who I was with you.”

Dammit. She could feel her eyes filling with tears. She blinked hard.

“Oh, sweetheart. Don’t cry. I didn’t mean to make you—”

She wiped her cheeks. “In my life, I’ve been so burned and so betrayed, and most of the time I did it to myself. I couldn’t trust my judgment and I couldn’t trust anyone else.” She made herself look him in the eyes. “So when I fell in love with you, I had no idea how to live with that fact.”

Flynn smiled, just a small upward tilt of his mouth. “That fact?”

“Oh, don’t make me say it.”

His smile broadened. He opened his arms and she walked right in to where she fit, just under his chin, warm against the length of him. He enclosed her in a hug. “You know, I’ve loved you since I first laid eyes on you.”

She pressed her nose against his flannel shirt. It smelled of smoke and pine needles. “That’s ’cause I was hot-looking.”

He laughed. “You’re still hot-looking. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. But what I love is your guts. The way you mother your kids and care for your granddad. The way you refuse to let the world define who you are.”

She felt a flush of pure pleasure rise through the core of her.

“How about you?” he asked.

“How about me, what?”

He squeezed a little tighter. “What do you love about me?”

“Oh God.” She shut her eyes in embarrassment. “The way you fling yourself into everything with such enthusiasm. How smart you are. How much you care about everyone. And your red hair.”

Flynn laughed. “Ah, the power of the ginger.”

She laughed as well, and it felt like everything Christmas was supposed to be, in that grubby office over a truck depot.

“Hey! Hadley! Kevin!” MacAuley’s voice echoed from the space below. “Get a move on, we’re about to pull out!”

Flynn released her. “We’ve got a lot to sort out, but I guess it’ll have to be later.”

“Like…?”

“Like how do we have a relationship when I’m three hours away in Syracuse?”

She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Nobody told you.”

“What?”

“Syracuse fired you, Flynn. Unexcused absence.”