Page 79 of Healed Heart

Angie.

Her beauty, her brilliance, her generosity.

She loves me.

And I fucking love her.

ChapterThirty-One

Angie

His kiss is desperate, raw, and full of emotion.It takes my breath away, makes my heart pound.He pulls me into his arms, pressing me close against him as he deepens the kiss.

“Jason…” I murmur against his lips, reaching up to tangle my fingers in his hair.

“I love you,” he says, pulling back slightly to look into my eyes.His gaze is intense and full of sincerity.“More than I’ve ever loved anyone.And that fucking kills me in a way.A sweet death, for sure, but damn.What I had with Lindsay, our daughter.How can I feel so much more for you when I’d do anything to have them back?”He shakes his head.“I’m twisted inside, Angie.Fucked up.”

I look up at him, my heart breaking at the pain and rawness in his voice.I cradle his face in my hands.“You’re not twisted or fucked up, Jason.You’re human.You’re allowed to feel love again, to move forward.It doesn’t mean you loved Lindsay or your daughter any less.”

He shakes his head again, this time more forcefully.“You don’t fucking get it!I love you!As if I’vealwaysloved you, and that means… Fuck, that means?—”

He stops abruptly and turns away from me.

My heart aches for his turmoil.

I want to help him, but he’s going through so much right now.

I wait for the right words to come to me.Anything to make this easier for him.

When I can’t bear the silence any longer?—

“Jason,” I murmur, “guilt is something we create in our minds.It’s not real.It’s what we feel when we think we’re doing something wrong.”

He looks at me then, confusion etched into the lines on his face.“You don’t get it.”

“Maybe I don’t.Maybe I never will.Maybe?—”

His lips come down on mine again, if possible even fiercer than before.

The world outside ceases to exist.

It’s just us, here and now.

The kiss is brutal.

The kiss of a man unraveling.A man trying to hold himself together with nothing but sheer will, and even that is starting to crack.Guilt is a living thing inside him, a slow poison that drips through his veins, curls into every thought, every breath.He doesn’t say it, but I feel it—the weight of what he carries, the suffocating burden of a crime he didn’t commit.

I want to understand.I want to reach inside his mind, sift through the wreckage, and make sense of it all.The accusation, the way it clings to him like a second skin.The doubt in his own innocence, as if the mere fact that someone could believe he’s guilty makes it true in some twisted way.

It isn’t.I know it isn’t.

But does he?

And then there’s Lindsay.The woman who came before me.The ghost I can’t touch but will always feel.His wife.His dead wife.I won’t ever ask if he loved her—I know he did.I don’t question the grief, the loss that must have hollowed him out.But I see something in him when he looks at me, something raw, something unspoken.Something that terrifies him.

Love.

Not just love—morethan love.Stronger than what he felt before, deeper, messier.And that terrifiesmetoo.