It hadn’t gone well. That was obvious. And they’d just been at a restaurant, like I thought—a shitty restaurant that she didn’t like, on top of it. He hadn’t scored himself any points with that rookie move.
Hope swelled inside me. Maybe this was the last we’d see of Tyler.
Still, she was down.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, standing.
She stopped with her back to me and let her head loll. “Fine.” She paused for a moment. “He asked me to marry him.”
The punch to my heart knocked the wind out of me. What?
I was grateful she wasn’t looking at me because she would have seen it on my face. I couldn’t catch my breath. I almost couldn’t compose myself to answer.
I cleared my throat. “Oh yeah? What did you say?”
She waited a beat until she replied, talking over her shoulder. “I said maybe.”
* * *
While she changed, I made her a sandwich—no mayo, only one piece of ham, provolone, no crust—the way she liked it. I handed it to her wrapped in a paper towel when she came out of her room. She looked like she wanted to cry when she took it from me. I hated seeing her so upset.
We called an Uber so we could drink.
And drink I planned to fucking do.
I said maybe.
He wanted to marry her and she was actually considering it. I felt sick.
In the Uber, she sat next to me with her leg tucked under her in the back seat, her knee poking through the ragged hole of her jeans. She’d done her makeup. She gazed wearily out the window.
I stared at her hand on the seat. Her ring finger was bare. For now. “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.
She looked over at me. “You want to talk to me about my boyfriend?”
Boyfriend. She called him her boyfriend. Not ex-boyfriend. Boyfriend.
The knife twisted in my heart, but through sheer will I managed to keep my voice level. “Sure. I might be able to give you some insight.”
I was torn between wanting to remain blissfully ignorant and needing to be informed. Morbid curiosity won out. I reasoned that whatever was going to happen would happen whether I knew the details or not. And if she talked to me about it, maybe I could sway her decision in my favor.
She took a deep breath. “Well, he reenlisted. Only this time he won’t be in war zones. He’ll be translating for dignitaries and high-ranking military personnel.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “Translating?”
“Yeah. He’s a linguist. He’s fluent in nine languages—ten. Maybe now it’s ten. He said he’s studying Mandarin. I don’t know.”
Jesus Christ. How had Brandon failed to mention that this joker wasn’t some infantryman doing grunt work? He was smart, educated, and good-looking to boot?
Fucking Brandon. His penchant for understating things was killing me. I was completely unprepared for this guy.
So that’s why the Ice Queen liked him. I looked like a damn fuckboy next to Tyler. No wonder Kristen didn’t want anything serious with me.
“He wants me to marry him. We’d move overseas.” Her eyes flitted up to mine.
My stomach lurched. “And you said maybe?”
“I said I would think about it.”
I scratched my cheek, trying to act like none of this bothered me while inside I was losing my fucking mind. “What are your reservations?”
She didn’t answer me.
“Sloan would miss you if you moved,” I said. Not to mention what it would do to me.
But she just took a deep breath and looked away from me.
She gazed out the window, and I stared at her watching the road. When she turned back to me, her eyes were full of tears. Then she unbuckled herself, slid across the seat, and climbed into my lap.
My heart jumped at the unexpected affection. I pulled her in and tucked her head under my chin, breathing in the smell of her hair. The feel of her small, warm body in my arms was like home. There was no other word for it.
She was home.
It was hard to see how much he affected her. This was the second time I’d seen her crying and both times had been over him.
The jealousy was almost more than I could handle.
This woman was mine. She was mine, not his. Why couldn’t he have stayed away from her? Let her just get over him?
But then I realized the truth. She wasn’t mine—she never was.
I’m hers.
And it’s not the same thing.
I’d been fine being patient, because I was just waiting for her to come out of