Page 31 of November's Bad Boy: Kacen

Scarlett Monroe. All fire and ice and dark wind-blown curls, standing on my porch like a storm I no longer knew how to weather. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, her big brown eyes blazing hotter than the fire behind me.

“So,” she said, no greeting, no preamble. Just fire. “You’ve been living right under my nose all this time while I grieved you like a goddamn widow?”

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.

“No.” She stepped past me and into the cabin. “You don’t get to talk yet.”

She smelled like cinnamon and vanilla and memories of the past. Like holidays we never got to share. Like everything I’d lost.

“Scarlett—”

She turned on me. “Don’t you dare say my name like that. You don’t get to say it like I still belong to you.”

I closed the door. Not because I planned to keep her in, but because I didn’t want the cold to ruin the one thing in this place that still felt warm.

She looked around the room. Her eyes landed on the untouched tray of food. The sealed letter. The unopened laptop.

“So this is what your exile looks like,” she said, her voice low and streaked with pain. “This is where you’ve been hiding while the rest of us wondered what the hell happened to Kingston Raines.”

“I wasn’t hiding,” I said.

She snorted. “No? Then what would you call it?”

I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck. “Protecting you.”

That was the wrong thing to say.

She laughed but it didn’t reach her eyes. “That’s rich. You disappear without a word, go to prison, fake your own emotional death, and I’m supposed to be grateful you did it for me?”

“I didn’t fake anything. I just didn’t want you to wait around for a man who might not survive what was coming.”

Her mouth parted. For a second, she looked like I’d slapped her. “You think that was your decision to make?”

I looked toward the fire. Toward anything but her.

“Jesus, Kingston. You weren’t just some high school boyfriend. We were building a life. You were the man I loved.”

Every word cut deep into my heart.

“I still am,” I said, my voice coming out too damn soft, too fucking broken.

She didn’t answer. Just stared at me, her brown eyes brimming with tears I didn’t deserve.

After a moment, she reached past me and picked up the sealed envelope from the mantel. I’d scrawled her name across the front along with the address of the house where she’d grown up.

“Is this for me?” she asked.

“It was.”

“Can I read it?”

My heart twisted at the thought of her reading the words I’d written so long ago. Not because I didn’t mean them, but because I did. She deserved to move on and leave me in the past. Unsealing that letter would rip open wounds that had already healed.

“I don’t think you should. It’s too late.” I would have reached for it, but I didn’t want to move closer. Didn’t want her to see the man I’d become.

She didn’t open it. Just held it in both hands, like she wasn’t sure whether to tear it apart or tuck it into her coat and run.

“I don’t know what this is going to say,” she whispered. “But I want you to know that whatever you think you protected me from, you didn’t. You just broke me from a distance.”

Then she turned and walked out into the night, the letter clutched in her hand, and for the first time in eight years, I wondered if maybe I’d made the wrong decision after all.