Pushing His Luck - Rhyannon Byrd Page 0,22
he’d been on the force for over forty years, in homicide like me, decorated numerous times, loved his job beyond reason, but”—he cleared his throat again, thankful for the dark interior that was hopefully concealing the heat he could feel burning in his face as he recounted the story—“nothing mattered to him more than his wife. He told me right to my face that she was the most important thing in his world. And it made me… Hell, I don’t know how to explain it. I think I finally opened my eyes to the fact that if the woman was the right one—if she really meant something to me—then the balance would come naturally. Sean even said the same damn thing to me after I screwed things up between us, but I was too fucking stubborn to listen to him.”
“That’s… I don’t even know what to say, Paul.” From the corner of his eye, he watched as she swept her tongue over her lower lip. “Was the wife okay?”
“Yeah,” he told her, exhaling another rough breath as he steered the truck down the offramp. “They had to take her in for surgery, but even though I was messed up over what had happened with Jenna, I checked in with him the next day and she was doing good. Expected to make a full recovery.”
“Thank God,” she whispered, shifting her gaze forward. She fiddled with the cardigan again for a few moments, then took a deep breath and said, “So, um, their story gave you a boost of courage, you asked me out later that night at the bonfire…and then everything fell apart.”
The unmistakable note of hurt in her quiet words made him feel like the biggest jackass alive. “I should have fucking called you,” he said in a tone that was low and rough, his hands tightening around the steering wheel on a fresh wave of frustration, every muscle in his body coiled with tension. “I should have talked to you. I know that, Rin. I just… I was in a bad place. I felt fucking toxic, and I didn’t want that shit touching you. But I… Christ, I know it makes me sound like a shit, but I didn’t trust myself to keep my hands off you if we stayed on good terms.”
“So you deliberately made it so that I’d want nothing to do with you,” she said, the finality of those awful words making him want to smash his damn fist through the dashboard.
“I…tried.” And fuck if it didn’t sound like he’d succeeded.
She gave a soft, bitter laugh. “Just for future reference, the next time you need to lose a woman, ghosting me would have done the trick. Bringing the blonde to that next bonfire was just overkill.”
His hands tightened around the steering wheel again, nearly snapping the damn thing in half, but he forced his tone to remain even as he said, “There won’t be another woman to lose. I’m going to win you back, end of fucking story.”
She looked out the passenger-side window again, but didn’t reply, so he kept talking.
“And it was a stupid plan to begin with, because even though I’d screwed things up between us, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I finally realized I was getting nowhere, fighting an impossible battle that I didn’t even want to win, that day I came up to talk to you on your balcony. It’d been hell trying to stay away from you in the weeks after my fuck-up—well, both of them—and that day I finally cleared my head enough to see that I was just going to keep going through life as a miserable prick unless I sucked it up, grew some balls and finally went after what I want.”
“I was there, Paul. I saw you with Lacey, and trust me when I say that no one had any doubt that it was her you wanted that night, and not me.”
“They saw what I wanted them to,” he scraped out, keeping one hand firmly on the wheel as he shoved the other one back through his hair. His frustration was so thick he was surprised he wasn’t choking on it, every single ounce of it directed at himself.
“You mean me. What you wanted me to see.”
“I know it sounds…bad, but she was just my drunk ass way of trying to stay away from you. That entire night was a mistake, but I told you the complete truth earlier. I did not sleep wi—”
“I don’t want