Love Triangle Six Books of Torn Desire - Willow Winters Page 0,442

like that one…or worse. So please, Drew, don’t ever feel the need to apologize for anything your girls say.” My face brightens as we turn the corner, our fingers entwined, heading down the row of flowers Alyssa and Charlotte are now exploring. “Nothing should discourage them from saying whatever pops into their mind. And, if I’m being honest…” I tilt my head, meeting his dark eyes. “I think it’s sweet they want me to go to Disney World with you.”

He licks his lips, a yearning in his gaze. “And, if I’m being honest, I’d want you to come with us, too.”

We stop walking and I face him, smiling a wide smile. I don’t want to put too much hope into his words. I’ve made that mistake before. But right now, a part of me wants to believe they have meaning. “Me, too, Drew.”

We spend the next twenty minutes following Alyssa and Charlotte through the butterfly exhibit. When they seem to have had enough, we make our way toward the exit, my hand still enclosed in Drew’s. Everything is perfect as I look between him and the girls, who walk ahead of us, a map of the museum stretched out in front of them, arguing over where to go next.

As Alyssa points to the space exhibit, they nearly ram into a woman. Drew and I are so lost in our own conversation, he almost doesn’t realize it himself, pulling them back just in the nick of time.

“Lyss, Char, watch where you’re going.” He scolds them mildly. “You need to be mindful of other people when we’re in public.”

I turn my eyes toward the woman at the same time Drew does. In an instant, every muscle in his body becomes rigid. It feels like all the oxygen has been sucked from the area, my own heart squeezing, a pain in my throat. As I look to Drew, I know my pain is no match for the agony covering him as he’s forced to face the one woman who broke him, who ruined him, who destroyed him. And in doing so, she destroyed me, too.

Chapter Nineteen

DREW

Everything around me seems to fade as I stare into a pair of brown eyes I thought I’d never see again, that I hoped I’d never see again. Six years of wondering, of questioning, of agonizing, and not a single word from this woman who was supposed to love me in sickness and health, in good times and bad.

In retrospect, the odds were stacked against us. I just didn’t want to believe it at the time. I was young, going through life with blinders on. Having just signed a ridiculously large contract for the season, I was on top of the world. I was hockey’s “it” boy. Sponsors were knocking down my agent’s door. My face was plastered on magazines, billboards, t-shirts. So when a petite brunette sauntered up to me as I had a post-game drink at a New York hotel bar, her eyes trained on me and me alone, and asked if she could come back to my room, I was only too happy to oblige.

But I’m not the type of person who can just hook up with someone with no emotional attachment, at least I didn’t use to be. My mother’s sudden disappearance from our lives all those years ago affected Molly and me differently. Molly went through her adult life shunning all forms of committed relationships, thinking real love wasn’t real life, whereas I coped another way. While Molly ran from love, I ran toward it, clung to it, hungered for it. That’s why having to stay away from Brooklyn destroyed me. When Carla entered my life, I was convinced she was precisely what I needed to forget, to finally move on. But it wasn’t enough. No matter what I gave her—the house of her dreams, a car that turned heads whenever she drove down the street, jewelry—it didn’t make her happy. I didn’t make her happy.

We didn’t make her happy.

It took me months to get over the anger she caused when I learned she’d been cheating on me with one of my teammates, then left with no remorse for her actions. I’d just lost the one thing I was good at, being forced into retirement from one too many injuries. Losing her almost killed me. It wasn’t her lack of love that affected me. It was the idea that I’d never feel love again. All it took was one look at my girls