Page 114 of Back in the Saddle

She didn’t even let him finish saying that if she didn’t want to move here, he could maybe move to Scotland. That he’d already started thinking about it.

He didn’t know how long he sat in the complete darkness. His mind raced, overwhelmed by an enormous strength of different feelings and emotions. He was furious. Angry. Hurt. Frightened.Broken.Terrified that he was never going to feel this way about anyone else.

If he could hate her, he could clutch on to that. If he could hate her, he could be happy that she was disappearing from his life. And it was just what she would do. There was no risk of bumping into her while shopping or awkwardly seeing her across the bar or restaurant. He wouldn’t pass her in a workplace corridor or see her as he drove through the Oklahoma City streets. She’d be gone. In a different country, on another continent. An ocean and thousands of miles away.

He felt his heartbeat quicken as the realisation hit him.

He’d never see her again.

‘You left so fast I forgot to give your keys back.’

He heard her open the door, but Caroline didn’t switch the light on. Her voice was almost a whisper. Gone was the confident, high conviction from just a few hours ago.

He grunted in acknowledgement.

‘I’ll just leave them here.’

He heard the keys being placed in a glass bowl on the shoe cabinet by the door.

‘Are you going to be OK?’

‘Now you want me to believe that you care?’

‘That isn’t fair. You know I do.’

‘Do I?’ Hunter stood, feeling a bit wobbly. Like he had ahangover even though he hadn’t had a drink in two weeks. He reached over to the floor lamp next to the TV and switched it on. ‘I thought I knew you well but, apparently, I was wrong. Never in a million years would I have thought you’d say you’re going back to your husband.’

Caroline hesitated, but then she closed the front door behind her. The darkness swallowed her without the faint glow of the outside area lighting. She took an uncertain step towards him.

‘I’m not going back to him.’

Hunter furrowed his brow as she took another step forward. ‘Then why are you going? Please, Caroline, help me understand. Because it makes no sense.’

She was so close now that he could see her green eyes in the light from the lamp. They were glassy and full of sadness. ‘Finn has a mass in his brain. His best friend called me today and asked me to come. I can’t … I can’t—’ She burst into tears, choking on the words.

Wrapping his arms around her was like instinct. He pulled her to his chest, holding her tight as her tears soaked through his shirt. His senses froze when she’d said the two words that ripped the makeshift bandage over his barely beating heart: mass, brain. Images of his father’s brain on the big screen in the conference room at the hospital flashed in front of his eyes.

‘You need to be there for him,’ he whispered into her hair. He wasn’t sure he’d said it out loud but he felt her chin move against him as she nodded.

‘I love him.’

Hunter’s jaw tensed but there was not even a flicker of anger left in him. He knew what she meant. Finn was important to her. He would always be important to her, in acomplicated and messy way. If it was Tamara, if there was anything he could’ve done … If he could’ve been there for her in the end …

He wouldn’t have hesitated. He would’ve bargained with the very essence of who he was if that meant she lived.

‘I know.’ His own eyes pricked with tears.

She wriggled out of his arms and took a step back. Her face was red but her eyes appeared to have run out of tears. ‘I don’t want you to think thatwedidn’t matter. Because it isn’t true. I’m only sorry that it got this far.’

‘I’m not sorry.’ Her head snapped up at his thick voice. ‘I could never be sorry that I got to know you.’

Caroline looked down at the floor. ‘I never wanted to hurt you.’

Hunter took her hand into his. ‘You asked why I haven’t told you I was engaged before.’ Her body stilled. ‘Her name was Tamara. She was killed in a car accident not long after I proposed. It was five years ago, and between the heart-ripping grief of losing her and my father getting sick … I wasn’t living. I was merely existing. Until I met you.’

He ran his thumb over her knuckles, struggling to breathe through his rumbling heart. ‘You brought happiness back into my life. You showed me that I can be happy again. Don’t ever be sorry for that.’

‘I am though. I didn’t want things to end this way.’ She sniffed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about her?’