Page 137 of Never Quiet

He’d kissed Isabella.

He’d fucked her.

Every moment touching her felt like the darkest betrayal of the woman who changed everything. The woman who pierced his armor and found her way to his heart. So effortlessly, she’d loved him and made him love her. Maybe it was timing but he thought it was just her.

Amanda.

Her outer beauty was prized by the entire world but it was her inner self, the soul of her, that made him fall deeply and irreversibly in love.

He let her leave.

He didn’t go after her.

He hurt her publicly.

All the while Hayden knew why he did it. He knew he had to answer the question of Isabella once and for all. He had to close the old chapter of their relationship and see if a new one could be written.

The guilt, the love, the hope.

She was only two years younger, rather than twenty. They shared a child together, a girl she’d brought into the world in utmost secrecy.

Their families had substantial history.

Her sister Gabriella loved Harper and Elijah – the only man Hayden had ever loved. His younger brother Harrison and his lover had inadvertently adopted Hayden’s child, raised her for fourteen years with love and devotion. Their parents had done business together for decades.

It seemed to be fated that Hayden and Isabella end up together...but he didn’t believe in fate. For the longest time, he didn’t believe his heart worked at all. He certainly hadn’t believed there was one woman meant to fill it.

Amanda proved him wrong.

Dear god, how she’d loved him, filling every moment with acceptance and bright energy that he didn’t even know was possible.

Day after day, touching him, mending the broken and bleeding places inside him, smiling directly from her soul into his own.

She was too young for him, too good for him, but it didn’t change the fact that there wasn’t an hour that passed when he didn’t think about her.

He lifted the binoculars and watched Amanda Lang work magic in front of his eyes.

He’d hurt her and hated himself for it. In the past three months, two different people told him he’d made a mistake and he agreed. It wasn’t new information but he was glad other people saw it.

From the first time he kissed Isabella, they never stopped fighting. There was constant chaos and rehashing of the past. He missed having a love that made him feel like a better man instead of a worse one.

When he couldn’t take it anymore and ended things with the first woman he ever loved, she was relieved. She finally accepted that she’d romanticized what they had since she was fifteen. She put him on a pedestal and viewed their time together like a love story.

The reality was much different than she remembered. He was a junkie who emotionally abused her for years.

Finally, the door to his past was closed. His questions were answered. The man he was at forty needed Amanda.

He planned to give her time to forgive him for touching someone else then seduce her into returning to his arms.

Once he did, he was never letting her go again.

How he loved her.

How he wanted her.

How he needed her.