Page 45 of Fierce Love (Tucker Billionaires)

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Hollyn

W ith Kinsley gone for the night, we order dinner, and we eat it at the kitchen island while talking about the show’s episodes and Kinsley’s incredible progress at almost every single skill in adventure racing.

She’s discovered numerous new loves, and I’ll have to figure out how to make at least one of them work when we return to New York. A blessing and a curse.

After dinner, Nate checks with Owen to see whether the security company’s employees can do puppy pee breaks.

There are lots of people on the island who do pet visits, but Nate is paranoid about giving anyone who could possibly have ties to my parents access to the house.

He seems to think their net extends quite wide, and maybe it does.

My parents don’t seem to be nearly as poor as they once were.

While they look rough, as though life has been hard on them, they don’t appear to be struggling financially.

I know them well enough to assume someone else is now suffering on their behalf, hustling to pay whatever debt they owe Mick, making good on whatever scam my parents are running on the island.

Any wealth they’ve accumulated hasn’t been earned through legal means.

Given how small Bellerive is, it always amazes me that my parents are capable of finding new people to draw into their webs.

At the kitchen island, Nate mixes himself a gold rush, and my lips tingle at the thought of tasting the bourbon later.

While I still don’t drink much at all, there’s been something about the smell and taste of bourbon that’s appealed to me from that first night I met Nate in the bar.

At least with me, he was never one to overindulge, and for the first time in my life, alcohol wasn’t linked to a negative experience.

Teenage Nate, when he’d had a couple drinks, only became more loving, more gushy, more bright happiness illuminating my life.

And so that smell, that taste, is intrinsically tied to goodness, to a period in my life when I felt his warmth shining on me.

“You’re thinking deep thoughts,” Nate says as he slides a glass of sweet tea, that he special orders every week from the hotel, across the kitchen island toward me.

“Am I?” I give him a little smile and take a sip of my drink.

“It’s probably about how much you love Bellerive.” A teasing glint is in his eye. He hasn’t gone so far as to outright ask me to stay, but he frequently dances around it. “Off the top of your head, what’s one good thing about your native land?”

“You,” I say without even a second of hesitation.

He meets my gaze, surprise clear in his blue-green depths, and I wonder if I should have said it.

Sometimes, given how things ended between us the first time and my refusal to stay this time, he gets frustrated when I make comments that he thinks should mean something they can’t.

I understand, so I’ve tried to be careful, to keep my reemerging feelings buttoned up more than I want to as we’ve lived together the last few weeks.

Even if I love him, even if part of me truly believes now that I’ll never love anyone the way I love Nathaniel Tucker, I also know that the deal I made with Celia Tucker means right now is all I can have, all I’ll ever get.

“Me?” he says, his voice hoarse.

“It’s always been you, Nate. Always .” It’s the closest I’ll ever come to telling him the truth.

He steps around the island, closing the space between us and sweeps me into a passionate kiss, the maple and vanilla notes of the bourbon he drinks sweet on my lips. I wrap my arms around him, and I savor the pureness of this moment, where I can confess something without ruining anything.

“If you never admit to any other feeling,” he murmurs as he kisses me again, “that’s enough.”

“What do you mean?” I draw back and frame his face with my hands. A little frisson shoots along my spine.

He searches my gaze for a beat and then he shakes his head. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s obviously not nothing.” I follow him around the island so we’re on the same side again.

He swirls his drink and takes a long sip, then he sets it on the marble top. “I never asked you when we were kids, but what does love mean to you, Hols? Like if you had to describe it to someone, what is it?”

Strings that strangle you. Sacrifices you don’t want to make. Losing things you want to keep. Nothing good comes from love.

“Why?” I ask, and I can feel myself closing off.

Even though the love I feel for Nate right now, the love I felt for him back then, wasn’t initially negative, those thoughts are my instinctual reaction to his question.

Except for him, anyone who’s ever said they loved me or pretended to has wanted something, has needed me to give up something for them. Love has always come with conditions.

“When we were kids, I said it to you all the time. And you never said it back—”

I open my mouth to protest, and he holds up his hand.

“Which was fine. I felt it, and I don’t know that I needed you to name it.

But it feels like you’ve got one foot here with me and one foot on the threshold of leaving.

And I guess I’m still…” He picks his glass up again and takes another drink.

“I’m trying to figure out what enough I need to give you to get you to stay with me.

” His tone is measured, and I can tell he’s holding himself in check.

“Love, money, protection, kids, no kids, house, no house, Bellerive, no Bellerive—there’s literally nothing I won’t give you or do for you or sacrifice for you, but I don’t know how to make myself enough , I guess. I guess I just wish I was enough.”

My heart constricts in my chest, and I know I’m about to damn us both again—that once I cross this line, he’ll make it impossible for me to ever consider crossing back, and I’ll have to. I have to leave—the island and him.

Messing up my own happiness all those years ago was a given, but it guts me to realize I have so thoroughly destroyed his too.

And not just his happiness but also, somehow, his sense of self-worth.

And he is literally everything. Everything .

There is no other man on the planet who is as good, who loves as hard as Nathaniel Tucker.

“You are enough,” I say, my own voice thick with tears.

I want to tell him that he’s always been enough, but it’ll ring false when I threw so much away last time.

“You were right. I loved you then. So much that leaving the island, leaving you, made me feel like I couldn’t breathe.

” My voice catches. “And god help us both, I love you now. I love you. I love you so much.” My chin trembles, and I can hear the shakiness in my voice.

I’ve only ever said those words to Kinsley and my aunt, and even then, I guard that emotion closely, use the words sparingly.

Maybe New York is far enough that Celia’s wrath won’t touch me. Maybe we can run away and hide from the fallout together in a way I couldn’t when I was eighteen.

And as he closes the distance between us a second time, telling me over and over again how much he loves me, how he’s not letting me go, I let myself believe this is possible, that there’s a corner of the earth we can journey to where Celia’s long tentacles won’t constrict me or Kin, that there’s a reality where she won’t force me to pay the same price or worse, again.

I want a different reality so badly that I refuse to let any other thought in as we strip off our clothes, as he makes my body come alive in ways only he’s ever been able to do, as we fuse together, two hearts and bodies straining toward the ending we both want.

“I love you, Hols,” he says, one hand on my hip, the other cradling my head as he rocks into me. “To the ends of the earth,” he murmurs before he scoops my lips into another kiss, angling his head to get deeper, closer.

But I can’t tell him that I’m capable of the same commitment, as much as I want to, because my heart is too busy breaking and reforming in my chest, desperate for an outcome I’m not sure we’ll get.