Page 20 of The Promise Of Rain

Finding out the truth should have given it to me.

But I’d been woefully unprepared for the emotions that reared up after seeing her again.Never mind what sitting across from her, smelling her, breathing the same fucking air as her, did to my senses.

And learning how utterly I’d failed her woke the nightmare.

Being here now was perhaps the biggest mistake of my life, but I couldn’t walk away.Not without seeing what might be.

I stepped closer to the counter.

Her eyes widened, panic lacing her voice as she blurted, “I don’t want you here, Deacon.”

My name stuttered from her lips like it was difficult to pronounce.

Stopping in my tracks, I rubbed my hand over the scruff covering my jaw.

After ten years of shaving religiously, the rough bristles felt odd.Somehow, they grounded me to the present and my new reality.

I was a different person, a civilian once more, but a grown man compared to the green barely out of my teens youth I’d been when I first fell for the woman in front of me.

At twenty-one years old, I didn’t know shit.

And I didn’t know that I didn’t know shit.

Jenny had been skittish when I first found her.Both insecure and suspicious of my motives.

The entire first year, we were more off than on.Eventually, I gained her trust and convinced her to let me move in with her because I fully planned on putting a ring on her finger as soon as possible.

Those two years I spent loving her were the sweetest of my life despite our tumultuous beginning.

Now?

If her story was true, and I had no reason to believe it wasn’t, she’d been right to question my commitment.

But walking in on that scene, her lovely limbs wrapped around her old boyfriend in his bed, my knees buckled on the spot.

I stood there with my heart crumbling to ash, and she didn’t so much as twitch.And now I knew why.

I fucking left her there.

Vulnerable and unprotected.

If I could bring that man back to life, I would, only so I could kill him myself.

Slowly.

Jenny deserved better than me then and more now.

If I was half a man, I’d honour her request and leave her in peace.

I nodded shortly.“I’ll try to steer clear.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

I held it together until I got to my truck.

Slamming the door, I gripped the steering wheel and stared at the snow on my windscreen.

Thank you.