Melissa bunched her brows together in a look of disbelief and answered in the tone people reserved for addressing the slow-witted. “The dog is fine. Britta found him hiding under a bush two doors down, scared but not hurt, and took him to Hannah. Changing the subject much?”
“Right.” He seemed to be saying that a lot lately. “Okay, I’ll just jump in here.” Talk, don’t think. “The way we left things in June, you know, I wasn’t sure. And then you were sure and I was . . .” Bloody hell, he should have rehearsed. Why hadn’t he rehearsed?
She held up a hand. “You aren’t very good at this, so why don’t I start?” She took a deep breath. “You were right. About me, in June.”
Cage settled against the chair back and pursed his lips, trying to look intelligent but with no clue what she meant. He decided he couldn’t fake it. “Well, I do enjoy being right, but what was I right about, precisely?”
“That I was using you . . . oh, Cage, I’m so sorry. I was scared, and you made me feel safe. I put you in a horrible position.”
Fucking hellfire and brimstone, she was going to cry.
“You’re wrong.” He leaned forward and grabbed her hand, clarity finally slapping him in the face. They’d been so awkward together because each was trying to keep from hurting the other. “I knew you didn’t love me, that you’d find your way back to Mark eventually. But I was a bastard to let you get close, knowing I didn’t . . . to make you think . . .” He ran out of steam, his verbal locomotive chugging to a halt under a dearth of power.
Melissa looked at the floor, and Cage steeled himself for the tears, but when she looked up, she was laughing. “We were gonna tell each other the same thing, weren’t we?”
He smiled, and all of a sudden his body felt almost weightless. The unsettled questions between them had weighed on him more than he’d realized—whether or not she’d hate him, or blame him, and knowing he deserved it. “I do love you, you know.
She looked him square in the eye, with a touch of the old playfulness he hadn’t seen since his early days in Penton. “I love you, too, Cage Reynolds. I think we’re going to be great friends—already are. I’m just not ‘in love’ with you.” She formed little quote marks with her fingers. “Just like you’re not ‘in love’ with me. Truth?”
Cage looked at the ceiling, examining a pattern of rough paintbrush marks that crisscrossed one corner of the rectangular space. He was so out of his element.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been in love.” What a pathetic thing to admit—but, hell, loving was hard enough without the “in love” part, if it even existed. “Never stayed anywhere long enough, I guess. But, really, at the heart of it, is there a difference? Isn’t ‘in love’ just love mixed with infatuation? And when the infatuation cools, isn’t love what’s left over?”
Melissa laughed and shook her head. “You really are such a guy. Yes, there’s a difference between loving and being in love. There really is.”
Her words brought a grudging smile. “I haven’t heard you laugh like that in . . . maybe ever.” Things hadn’t exactly been cheery since he’d come to Penton.
She tucked her feet underneath her on the sofa and propped on the upholstered arm. “I realized something last night when Mirren told me about Matthias being alive. If I let myself get lost because of what he did to me, he wins. That’s true for all of us. If we let Matthias, or the fear of Matthias, tear us apart, he wins, and Penton dies. We deserve better than that.”
Cage smiled. “You’re a wise woman. Penton is one of the reasons I came back.” He took a deep breath. “You were the other. To set things right between us.”
She reached over and squeezed his knee. “I don’t know if I have a future with Mark. In the long run, I don’t think he’ll want me. But here’s something I realized while you were gone. You don’t love me, Cage, except as a friend. What you love is Penton, and you’ll always have a home here.”
Thank God he’d been turned so many years that he couldn’t cry anymore, or he might sob like an infant. Instead, he kept his eyes on one particular loose thread of carpet and said, “I want that.”
And if he was to have it, to have Penton the way he wanted it, he had to fight for it. They all had to fight. They’d given Matthias Ludlam and the Tribunal too much power. Everyone who loved Penton so much, including himself, was so afraid of losing it that they were destroying it with their own fear. Doing Matthias and Frank’s work for them.