Never is a Promise(26)

But by the time I realized living life as a diamond wasn’t all I thought it would be, it was too late. It had become me. I wore my perfect façade like a well-tailored coat, taking it off at night when it became too heavy and putting it back on before leaving the apartment each morning.

“They said you’re not very likable on camera,” Harrison had broken the news to me after my first failed audition at twenty-three. His words scalded my ego, but I was desperate to be better. To be perfect. “We need to change that. Make you softer somehow. I’ll call around tomorrow. Maybe it’s your hair. Too angled around your face?”

I practiced and honed perfection like my life depended on it after that. Hours spent smiling in mirrors and rolling my Kentucky twang into a gentle Midwestern lilt and learning how to stave off tears during emotional news pieces all paid off in spades the moment I booked the weekend show.

There I was five years later, sitting face to face with Beau, letting my guard down for the first time in a decade. Letting my cracks show. And it hurt. It physically hurt.

My words refused to come up for air for fear of what I might say.

“You okay?” he asked, rising to come my way.

I envied people like him, people who weren’t afraid to wear their emotions like their favorite old t-shirt; easy and comfortable.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied, waving him away. I grabbed a tissue from a nearby box decorated with rustic birch branches and dabbed the corners of my eyes. I loved Beau. No question. I’d dreamt of the day he’d tell me he still loved me too. But the timing was awful. “It’s a little late, don’t you think?”

“Late?”

“To come back for me.”

“We didn’t exactly set a date.”

“I know, but too much life has happened. We’re two very different people living two very different lives. The damage has been done.” It didn’t feel the way I thought it would – the way I’d imagined a hundred thousand times before. I shook my head, relishing how wonderful it felt to hear him say he loved me and imagining how horrible it would feel when I told him about the child he never knew existed.

His child.

“What damage?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I’m not the same girl anymore. I think you’d be disappointed if we were to entertain anything as crazy as getting back together at this point in our lives.”

“I may not know you anymore,” Beau breathed. “But I know what I feel. And damn it, Dakota, you’re the only thing that feels like home to me.”

“You’ve spent all of five hours with me in the last eleven years,” I laughed. “You just want me to be who I used to be. I’m not her. I haven’t been her for a very long time, and I’ll never be her again.”

“I missed you like crazy,” Beau said, placing a hard-wearing hand across his heart. “Sometimes it came in waves. Sometimes it drowned me.”

I wanted to tell him the feeling was mutual. Instead I held my cards close and played dead.

“There are pieces of you in every song I ever wrote.” He stood up, walking over to me and staring down into my eyes. He leaned down, taking my hand and pulling me up into a standing position. Beau’s hand cupped my cheek, forcing my heart into a runaway gallop. It wasn’t but two seconds before my lips parted, silently inviting him to crash into me the way he had earlier that day.

I’d forced the kiss from my mind the second Ivy showed up, but I couldn’t ignore what was going on between us any longer. I was drowning too, and he was the air. His lips claimed mine harder than ever before, breathing life into me and igniting a flurry of butterflies in my core. Beau was a man now. A grown man. He’d filled out and bulked up. He’d matured and slowed down. He was a man with power. A man who knew what he wanted and wasn’t afraid to take it.

He wanted me.

He could have any woman on the face of the planet and still, he wanted me.

Over a decade had passed, and he still had the ability to make me feel like I was the only girl in the whole wide world when we were together. I hated him for that.

But I was strong, and I wasn’t caving in so easily. My heart was wrapped in a custom blend of fear and anger, thick like wool and sharp like barbed wire; well insulated and guarded from any and all potential hazards.

“You have no idea what you do to me, Dakota. What you still do to me after all these years.” His voice was a low growl between kisses. His lips left mine, grazing down my neck as his hands slowly traveled my sides. Tugging up on my shirt, he pulled it up and over my head, attempting to take what he deemed his even to this day. “God, you’re so damn beautiful.”