in a long breath, her words warming the coldest corner of his heart. “Yes, you can. God, Kit-Kat, you can do so much better than me. I want that for you. I want you to have everything.”
“Pete, please.”
Letting go of her then was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Harder than hearing of her accident, harder than going to her memorial service, harder still than living with the belief she’d been dead. But he forced himself to do it. As he reached the door where Slade stood waiting to take him into custody and turned to look back at her, he knew her grief-stricken face was going to stay with him forever.
Just the way it should.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Florida
Three weeks later…
Kat sank down to the end of the bed and stared in stunned disbelief at the thank-you card in her hand. She’d picked it up when she’d been downstairs getting coffee this morning and had brought it and a few other pieces of mail back up with her while she got ready for the day.
She thought she’d cried herself dry weeks ago when Pete had made his deal with the government and been taken into custody. Obviously, she’d been wrong.
She reached up to rub fingers over her medal and read the last line of the letter one more time.
…We cannot begin to tell you what your donation means to us here at St. Thomas’s Orphanage. You truly are a gift from God. May the Lord watch over you always.
Sister Mary Francis Gilbert
Six million dollars. Every last proceed from Pete’s auction in New York City had been donated to St. Thomas’s Orphanage outside Seattle. Her orphanage. After reading the letter, Kat had called Pete’s lawyer and discovered the arrangement had been made two weeks before the auction. Two full weeks before he’d even known she was still alive.
A tear slipped down her cheek and landed against the paper in her hands. In a blur she looked up and scanned the bedroom of the house she’d been staying in since coming to Miami.
Pete’s bedroom in Pete’s big house in Miami Beach, with its leather and mahogany headboard, dark woods, sleek lines and masculine colors. She hadn’t heard from him since that morning at Maria’s apartment, and no one was giving her answers. And she was dying inside not knowing what was happening.
She’d been heartbroken when she’d met his friend Rafe and he’d told her of the deal Pete had made with the government. Then shocked speechless when Rafe and Pete’s lawyer had shown her the papers transferring his assets into accounts with her name on them. But the clincher, the one that had her picking her jaw off the floor and wiping the gush from her eyes whenever she thought of it, was when she’d realized he’d turned Odyssey over to her.
In that one act she knew he didn’t think he was coming back. Not anytime soon. He’d made that deal and given up everything. For her.
That pressure returned, right beneath her breastbone. Every time she thought she was doing better, that breathing wasn’t such a monumental feat after all, something happened—like getting this thank-you card—that brought her world spinning back down again.
She closed her eyes tight, unsure how she was ever going to be able to go into Odyssey today and pretend to run a gallery she had no clue how to operate. Even with his sister Lauren volunteering to help, it was more than she could handle. The thank-you card slipped from her grasp and floated to the ground.
Being here was tearing her up. Seeing everything he’d built and envisioning him in this house surrounded by all his things was slowly eating away at her insides. Imagining where he was now while she sat on the end of his bed, wearing one of his Turnbull & Asser designer dress shirts like she’d done every night since she’d been here, was slowly killing her.
“I can’t do this much longer,” she whispered into the stillness of the morning.
“Do what?” a voice asked from the bedroom doorway.
Pete dropped his duffel at his feet and tried to steady his racing heart as he watched Kat lift her head and turn his way. Those molten chocolate eyes of hers, damp as if she’d been crying, focused, then widened in shock.
“Pete!”
She launched herself at him and took him down to the floor before he even realized he was off his feet. He landed half in the hall, half in the bedroom. But that wasn’t what got his attention.