My Cone and Only (King Family #1) - Susannah Nix Page 0,49

I heaved into my lungs.

“Andie?”

I looked up and saw Wyatt standing in the doorway, his expression bewildered and alarmed.

A fresh sob tore out of me at the sight of him. I didn’t want him to see me like this. I didn’t want my weakness on display in front of the man who’d already left a giant crack in my defenses. I shook my head and buried my head against my knees.

I knew I couldn’t make him go away, but I couldn’t stand to face him.

13

Wyatt

I’d never seen Andie cry before. Not once in all the years I’d known her. Not even when she was a little kid.

She’d always been tough as nails. Seemingly immune to pain. Even that time she’d fallen out of the big tree on the farm and cracked her head open, she hadn’t shed a single tear. I’d been scared shitless because there was so much blood, and she’d just sat there making jokes while Josh tried to hold her scalp together with his bare hands.

I had no clue what had made her cry like this, but it scared me even more than when she fell out of that tree. Instinct took over and I propelled myself at her, kneeling on the floor to pull her against my chest. I didn’t know what else to do, so I held her, rocking her and stroking her hair as her body shook in my arms.

Eventually her heaving breaths eased, and her sobs quieted down to sniffles. She pushed out of my arms and turned her face away. “That was embarrassing,” she muttered as she wiped away her tears.

“What happened?” My throat was so tight I sounded like the one who’d been sobbing instead of Andie.

“Nothing.” She pulled her legs up underneath her. “Nothing at all.”

Worry made me impatient, causing my words to come out sharper than I intended. “Something happened to make you cry.”

She shook her head. “It’s stupid. I was just reading those letters.”

“Was there something upsetting in them?”

I didn’t understand how a bunch of old love letters could have made her this upset. So what if her grandmother had once had a boyfriend on the side? Did it matter anymore?

“No, not really.” She sniffled and rubbed her eyes. “Just more of the same stuff I read out loud to you.”

“Andie.” I reached for her face and turned it toward me.

Her eyelashes lowered as she ducked her head. “Don’t look at me. I’m all gross and snotty.”

“You always look beautiful.” The words slipped out of me before I could think about what I was saying.

Surprise flashed across her expression as she lifted her eyes to mine.

I hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but now that I had, I didn’t want to take it back. How could I? She was the most beautiful person I’d ever known. My thumb stroked over her cheek, wiping away some of the wetness. “It’s gonna take a lot more than bodily fluids to gross me out.”

Her lips curved as she let out a soft huff of amusement.

I was so relieved to see her smiling that I bent my head and kissed away a tear inching its way toward her jaw. She stiffened, sucking in a sharp breath as my lips touched her cheek, but she didn’t pull away.

Neither did I. Instead, I let my lips linger there for a moment before I found another tear to kiss away below her eye. Her eyelashes fluttered against my lips, and I moved higher, kissing her forehead before gazing into her eyes.

“Tell me why you were crying.”

She swallowed and looked away. I let her go, dropping my hand from her face as she swiveled it away from me.

“It was the last letter.” She picked up a page lying on the floor and passed it to me.

I skimmed it, then went back and read it again more carefully. After I’d finished my second read, my gut clenching at all the parts that hit way too close to home for me, I turned to her with a frown.

“Why did this make you cry?”

It was desperately sad, there was no denying that, but it shouldn’t have been enough to get this kind of reaction out of Andie. She hadn’t even cried at Toy Story 3, for Christ’s sake.

“Because they obviously loved each other and they didn’t end up together. It’s such a fucking waste.” She waved her hand at the stack of letters on the floor. “There’s like twenty letters here describing in vivid detail exactly how devoted