Page 200 of Hold Me Until Morning

None of that mattered.

The only thing that mattered was her.

“You are a piece of me I was terrified to admit existed,” she whispered as I leaned down and she peeled the fabric over my head.

Eyes the color of that river swept over me in the shadows that played across her room.

She reached out and gently brushed her fingertips down the center of my chest. “The first time I saw you all those years ago…from all the way across that field…I wanted you. Wanted something I’d never wanted before.”

She kept skimming those fingertips over my flesh.

Soft.

Adoring.

Healing.

“I thought it was physical. That thing called attraction. But maybe it was all of you, Cody Cooper. Maybe my spirit already recognized you. Because in all those years, I could never forget you.”

“There was always something that ached at the back of my mind every time I thought of you,” I told her.

She peeked up at me. “You thought of me?”

“How could I not think of you?” I asked it as I started to work through the buttons of her blouse, and a wisp of a sigh fluttered between her lips when I pushed the material back.

She wound out of it and let it drop to the floor just as I was taking her enormous tits in my hands.

I brushed my thumbs over the peaks of her nipples.

Whimpering, she pushed harder into my touch. “Cody.”

“I know it, darlin’. I feel it, too. You and me were supposed to be.”

I knew she felt some guilt over it. Could feel the minute flinch that my words brought. Her confession still rolling through the air and kicking me in the guts.

I was having a difficult time imagining that Brooke might have done what Hailey implied. That she’d purposefully taken her life. That it wasn’t some tragic accident.

Brooke had told me she got who we were to each other. That she agreed there wasn’t anything real between us. That it’d been just as we’d established at the beginning—a fling and nothing more.

Apparently, she’d led Hailey to believe something else.

I needed Hailey to know there would never be anyone standing in the middle of us.

“You are the first person who has ever really made me feel anything, Hailey. The first person who made my heart beat faster. The first person who’s ever kept me up at night.”

“And you are the first person who has really stood for me. You are the one who makes me feel safe. Cherished. Loved,” she whispered back.

“Because that’s exactly what you are. Cherished and loved. I love you so fucking much, baby. Never thought it would happen. And you…you changed everything I knew.” I reached around and unclasped her bra as I said it, and I dragged the silken straps down her arms.

A hiss slipped from between my teeth. “So fucking stunning. This face and this body and this heart. You turned me inside out, Hailey.”

“It’s you who changed everything, Cody. I think it was you that brought us here. I think you were calling us home.”

“That’s right, darlin’. You were the one I was waiting on all along.”

I tugged at the button of her jeans. “And no matter what, I’m going to be right here. With you. We’re going to take this bastard down.”

Fear flashed through her features, the dread that hovered around us in the periphery, waiting to consume. It didn’t have any place with us tonight, so I swooped down and captured her mouth, refocusing her attention on the things that were right.

---