Page 137 of Always

I don’t respond.

Not at first.

Every second she was gone felt like a lifetime. My heart washammering in my chest, so hard it hurt. I remember screaming for her, begging her to come back. I didn’t want the comics anymore—I just wanted her. The smoke filled the air, thick and suffocating, and I stood there, helpless, as the fire swallowed the house whole.

Finally, I continue. “Maybe. I don’t know if it was the comic books or not. But she went back in, and she got dragged out by a fireman with third-degree burns on the left side of her body.”

“Tell me,” she finally says. “Tell me what you need right now.”

I take a sip of my bourbon. “No one knows that story,” I say. “Not even Ben or my dad. She told him she went back in to get our baby books.”

“Have you considered that maybe that’s the truth?”

“No. She was in my bedroom when the fireman dragged her out.”

“So your father knows, then.”

“He knows she was in my bedroom. He assumed that’s where my baby book was. It wasn’t. The baby books were in a cedar chest in the living room underneath some quilts.”

“And Ben doesn’t know?”

“He was only three. He had no idea where the baby books were.”

“And you did.”

“Yeah. Sometimes Mom and I would look at them together. I liked looking at my first lock of hair.” I shake my head. “I haven’t let myself think about this in so long.”

Skye reaches out and touches my cheek. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not. It’s never been okay, and it never will be.”

Because the guilt is again swallowing me whole.

And it hits me like a freight train.

The engagement ring in my safe back home.

How she let me take her beautiful ass—and how I wanted to be the only one to ever go there.

How I was the first man to give her an orgasm—and how I never wanted another man to have that pleasure.

How much I want a life with Skye. Everything I’ve planned.

How I was never complete until I met her.

All of it. Everything and nothing. Skye Manning is my world.

My whole fucking world.

My heart plummets.

Because now…

Now it can never,neverbe.

Chapter Fifty-One

“You now know more about me than anyone else,” I say to her. “Anyone.”

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