I nodded. I remembered it vividly. I’d been scared out of my mind and I would have promised him anything if he’d help me. Anything at all. I was lucky he’d been too decent to collect. “You thought I told you I loved you so you’d come and help me get away from Hector?”
He shrugged.
“That wasn’t why. I thought he might kill me, and I just didn’t want to die without telling you.”
And since it was obviously confession-time, I might as well get it all out there. “I fell in love with you a long time ago. Before you went to Memphis the last time. Before the thing with Perry. I was in love with you almost from the beginning. That’s why I couldn’t say yes when Todd proposed. That’s why I drove all the way back to Nashville that night and showed up at your door.”
“And here I thought you just wanted an orgasm,” Rafe said with a grin.
I blushed, but shook my head. “It wasn’t about that. I mean, I enjoyed that part of it...”
The grin widened, and my blush deepened. I pushed on. “A couple of days later I saw you kiss Yvonne McCoy, and I wanted to kill her. And then a couple days after that, I thought you’d died, and I lost my mind. And then I realized I was pregnant, and you weren’t there, and I had to deal with whether to have your baby when I didn’t have you...”
I looked up at him. “I would have told you that night in the hospital. Everything. About the baby and that I loved you, all of it. But my mother showed up and you walked out—my sister said to tell you she’s sorry, by the way. She didn’t know any better.”
He shrugged.
“But I love you. It took me a while to tell you, you weren’t here, but I told everyone else. Dix and Catherine and Tamara Grimaldi and my mother...”
“You told your mother?”
I nodded. “I want everyone to know. That way, if you ever think of leaving me again, I’ll have a whole support network of people dragging you back.”
“Promise?”
He nodded. “I promise. I’ll never leave you.”
His voice was solemn, and so were his eyes looking into mine. It had the weight of a vow, and I held on to it—and to him—as he pulled me close and kissed me and we tumbled onto the bed together.
# # #
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenna Bennett writes the Savannah Martin mystery series, as well as the bestselling Do-It-Yourself home renovation mysteries from Berkley Prime Crime under the pseudonym Jennie Bentley. A former Realtor® and home renovator, she makes her home in Nashville with a husband and two boys, a hyper-active dog, a dive-bombing parakeet, two African dwarf frogs and two goldfish. A native of Norway, she’s spent more than twenty years on US soil and still hasn’t managed to kick her native accent.
For more information, please visit Jenna’s website: www.JennaBennett.com
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
ABOUT THE AUTHOR