Forever in Cape May (The Sunshine Sisters #3) - Jennifer Probst Page 0,94
it’s Samantha? Is she going with you? Is she the new me in this scenario? I guess I’m trying to figure out why you don’t want to continue our friendship when you seem to be quite happy with the way things turned out anyway.”
He breathed out in a long rush of air and dropped his hands, taking a step back. “Samantha is just a friend.”
“Funny, that’s exactly how we started out.”
His jaw clenched, and his eyes burned bright, like jade fire.
Oh, crap.
His voice came out like a whip’s lash. “Since I don’t want to cause a scene at your sister’s wedding, you’d better follow me right now, where we can get a few things straight.”
“Fine.” She marched after him, threading through the crowd, and locked them in the private wedding-party room, where it was quiet and they wouldn’t be interrupted. Simmering with multiple raw emotions, she embraced the only one she ever felt truly comfortable with when challenged.
Anger.
She spun around and jabbed her finger in the air. “I don’t understand why you’re punishing me when this entire time you planned to be this new free spirit, jetting around the world.”
“And I didn’t know your new talent is rewriting history,” he said. “You made the choice to send me away. Hell, I tried to have a conversation about our options, but you didn’t want to hear it.”
“Because I wasn’t about to ruin your future!” she said with a touch of bitterness. “You always said we wanted different things, and I didn’t want to be selfish.”
“Lie.”
She flinched. The word was flung at her like a bullet. “No, you lied to me. Why didn’t you tell me in Paris that you planned to leave Cape May?”
“You never gave me a chance. You sold the painting and locked the door behind us without ever asking me. Do you know how badly I wanted to tell you how I really felt? What I craved from our relationship? The words I’d been swallowing back for weeks because I was terrified I’d spook you?” The surge of fury had tempered into a bleak resolution, and it made fear curl through her. “Did you actually believe we’d go back to our old dynamics, being best buds, without any consequences? Because I can’t do it, Taylz. I can’t pretend I don’t love you when I do.”
The breath left her lungs in a whoosh. The words should have been celebrated—the final admission they’d both tried to deny but knew as truth—yet the man who stood before her was like stone, his face carved into a blank slate.
“Pierce,” she whispered, “don’t you see I had no choice? Was I supposed to pretend one day I’d feel differently about getting married and having children and giving you a picture-perfect life in the beach town where we both grew up? I was trying to be a realist.”
He stared at her for a few moments before he spoke. “Did you really believe that? Or were you just terrified about gambling on an uncertain future, preferring to keep what was safe and controlled and orderly—a friendship that had lines and rules and stayed static?”
“It worked for us our whole life!”
“Yes, it did, until it changed and became more. We had the opportunity to embrace a new relationship, but instead you tore it apart. Don’t pretend it was to save me—that’s not fair to either of us. You didn’t let me choose. If you had, you would have learned one thing, Taylor Sunshine.”
He closed the distance between them and tipped her head back, forcing her to meet his gaze. She fell into the blaze of green fire and tried to regain her footing, tried to defend herself from the rip of her heart and the realization she may have been horribly wrong.
“You’re my home—you’ve always been my home. It was never about settling in Cape May or getting married or being a father or having a goddamn white picket fence. It was about feeling like my best self. All I ever wanted or needed was you. Can’t you see that? I was going to move to Paris to be with you. I had big dreams for myself, to study photography and travel and steep myself in a world I wanted, a world I chose. But you refused to let me even say the words. You shut me out completely.”
Her voice broke. “I was trying to protect you.”
He leaned in and spoke deliberately against her mouth. “You weren’t protecting me. You boxed me in and picked out