And all she could do was let go and hope to God that when the time came, she'd survive the heartbreak he was bound to leave behind.
* * *
Ella lay curled against Kyle's side, her cheek on his warm, solid chest and her hand on his flat stomach as he absently threaded his fingers through her hair in the shadowed bedroom. She was thoroughly sated and content for the moment to enjoy this quiet time with Kyle. In a few minutes, she was going to have to kick him out of her bed, because letting him spend the night wasn't a risk she was willing to take, not even if he promised to slip out at dawn. She knew he was heading back to the city in the morning, and already she was missing him since it would be another long week before she'd get to see him again.
You might as well get used to it, her mind taunted, because the terms of their affair weren't going to change any time soon, if ever.
"Ella . . ." Kyle's voice was deep and low and almost hesitant as it broke into her thoughts. "What happened between you and Tucker?"
She wasn't surprised he asked, considering how he'd reacted to seeing her ex-fiancé at the bar earlier, and as much as she didn't want to talk about Tucker right now, or ever, she wanted everything out in the open between them. No secrets. No misunderstandings. No resentments.
She exhaled a small breath. "What do you want to know?"
He absently wound a strand of hair around his finger. "Well, for starters, how did the two of you get involved in the first place?"
That was easy enough to answer. "We were always friends, but over time, that gradually changed. There's not a whole lot of available men in town, and Tucker was and is a good guy. Someone dependable that I always could count on, and I was . . . lonely," she forced herself to admit, because Kyle needed to know that, too. "When he asked me out on a date, I figured why not? What could it hurt?"
She felt Kyle's body tense slightly, but he'd been the one to ask about the relationship, and she wasn't going to lie about any of it to save his feelings. Besides, they'd already talked about the fact that he'd dated plenty of women in Chicago, even if they hadn't been long-term commitments.
"We had a nice time and he was easy to be with. It was . . . comfortable," she said, trying to find the right word to explain their dynamic.
A small, derisive laugh escaped him. "It sounds like you're talking about buying a couch for your living room. Nice, easy, comfortable."
She would have laughed, too, if he hadn't just nailed the painful truth. "That's just who Tucker is. He's not overtly sentimental or affectionate. He looks at things in a practical, sensible way, and I tend to be more . . . "
"Emotional?" he guessed.
The man knew her well. "Yes. And because of that, we could never really get past being friends. Not like us," she admitted, because despite putting Kyle in the friend zone, the chemistry and attraction between them had been too strong to deny. That had never been the case with Tucker.
"Yet you were going to marry him," he said gruffly, and she heard the hurt underlying his voice.
"Yes," she said quietly, and she wasn't proud of her reasons. "I want to be married. I want to share my life with someone, have a family with them, grow old together." Her throat grew tight because she'd always wanted, and had once envisioned, that kind of future for the two of them. "I don't want to be alone for the rest of my life, and I thought Tucker and I could make it work. Except, as time passed, I knew we'd never really get past being just friends. There was no passion in our relationship, nothing that excited or stimulated me mentally."
She swallowed hard and continued. "I knew in my heart that I wouldn't be happy married to him. And if I wasn't happy, we'd both be miserable. The last thing I'd ever want is to end up bitter and resentful because he couldn't give me what I needed, so I called off the wedding before we both made a huge mistake."
Kyle's hand drifted along her jaw, and he tucked his thumb beneath her chin and raised her gaze to his. A frown furrowed his brow, and the look in his eyes was tentative. "Did you love him?"
It was a hard question to answer, because love came in all different forms, and when it came to Tucker, her sentiment had been based more on fondness, caring, and respect. Not the kind of intimacy and passion and excitement-and a dozen other wild, exhilarating emotions-that she felt when she was with Kyle.
"Of course I loved him," she replied honestly, not missing the flicker of pain that passed across his features, then was quickly gone. "I never would have agreed to marry Tucker if I didn't have feelings for him. But it was never the way I loved you," she said, unable to hold back that truth, too.