Written with You (The Regret Duet #2) - Aly Martinez Page 0,17

I deserved the slash through the heart he’d caused with his little stroll down memory lane.

I avoided his gaze by retrieving my remote from the drawer and then a blanket hanging on the ladder across the room. “Anyway. You want to watch a movie or something?”

“Shit. Hadley.”

God, I’d have given anything to hear Willow roll off his tongue. Just once. But that was the price I had to pay to keep Rosalee.

She was worth it all.

He set the tiramisu on the coffee table and sank beside me on the couch. “You know I was kidding, right?”

I nodded and clicked the button to turn the TV on, desperate for a distraction.

He plucked the remote from my hand and set it on the table. “Look at me.”

I swallowed hard.

I was Hadley.

I had a daughter who deserved a mother who loved her.

He wasn’t the boy who had saved my life.

He was just Caven. Nothing more.

I plastered on a smile that I hoped looked more genuine than it felt and turned toward him. “What kind of movie are you in the mood for? Action? Suspense? Comedy?”

“I shouldn’t have called you crazy,” he rushed out, taking my hand in his and intertwining our fingers.

I willed my smile not to falter. “You didn’t call me crazy, crazy.”

“I did and I’m sorry. You told me you were in a bad place the night we met, and I know how brutal the memories can be sometimes, and finding a way to survive is never crazy.”

I could have lived the rest of my life in complete and utter happiness if I never heard another apology from Caven Hunt again. “It’s okay. You weren’t wrong. That night was crazy.”

“Still.” He sighed and sagged against the couch. Lifting his arm, he silently invited me into his side. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

It was an offer I would never refuse. He could call me Hadley every day. But in his arms, I would always feel like Willow.

Tucking my legs up beneath me, I settled into his curve and dragged the blanket on top of us both. “You don’t have to censor yourself with me. I know we have a past. It sucks. But it exists. I’m not upset.”

“That night sometimes feels like the elephant in the room with us. I thought maybe, if we could make light of it, it wouldn’t feel so damn awkward all the time. I still remember so much from that night, but at the same time, it feels like it was a different life.”

Because it was—at least for me.

“Elephants were meant to live in the wild. Maybe we should let this one go.”

He kissed the top of my head. “I like how easy you make everything sound.”

“Good. I like the way you bring me cheesecake.”

He laughed, and it finally broke the fog of regret swirling all around us, but as I traced my fingers over the black tattooed feathers on his forearm, an awkward silence settled in its place.

We needed a subject change. Something light. Something innocuous. Something…

“Two of those are for your parents.”

My fingers stilled, and my stomach churned. I had no idea what he was talking about, but if the gravel in his voice was any indication, I didn’t want to know, either. I’d told him once that time only marched in one direction. But Caven was clearly headed back to the past.

“My mom…” He paused to clear the emotion from his throat. “When I was ten, my mom died of cancer. She knew her time was coming, so she started talking to me and Trent about it a lot. I guess to prepare us. She never used the word ‘dying’ though. She would say things like soon she was going to get her angel wings.”

I sucked in a sharp breath, dread rolling in like a thunderstorm as I waited for the part where this sad story from his childhood somehow converged with my parents and his tattoo.

“After the mall, I tried to go on with my life. Trent didn’t really understand what I was going through. I pretended a lot. Pushed the guilt to the back of my head. Compartmentalizing.” His lips curled in a devastated smile. “It didn’t work. When I graduated high school, I went off to college and met Ian. He was the first person to see how bad things really were inside my head. He forced me into a therapist’s office, and day after day, for years, he went to war with me. It took a lot time for