Page 190 of Older

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Yes, it does.” He smiled.

No…it didn’t.

I couldn’t possibly know why he was here.

Licking a salty drop of seawater from my lip, I shook my head. “You’re here for work.”

“Try again.”

“Something with the studio. The building design. I?—”

“No.”

Tears muddled my vision. “Reed…”

Still smiling, he took a seat along the shoreline, drawing his knees up as his fingers sifted through damp sand. “I’m having a strange sense of déjà vu.”

I was having a heart attack.

Instinct and knee-crippling shock had me lowering into the water, sitting a few feet across from him as I splayed my legs and stared at the way the moonlight glimmered in his eyes.

My voice shrank to nothing. My limbs vibrated with ocean frost and incredulity.

“I spent the day looking for an apartment.”

“A what?”

“An apartment. In downtown. I found something that could work for now, a few miles from the studio. It could use some color pops. A woman’s touch.”

“Please speak in English.”

He grinned, his dimples shooting Cupid’s arrows to my heart. “I’m moving here, Halley.”

“You’re not.”

“I am. As soon as my lease is up on my condo back home.”

“Stop,” I sobbed. “Why are you saying this?”

He was messing with me. Cruelly playing with my barely beating heart.

Tears streamed down my cheeks as I brought my legs up, pressing my face between my knees.

“I’m saying this because it’s true,” he said. “Because I’ve been wanting to say it for over two years. Because I want it more than I want to breathe.”

“Reed.” I choked on his name, on his words, on his imaginary presence. This couldn’t be real. There was no hope for us. Yet, he was hinting at promises and serendipity and a future I so desperately ached for with such conviction, all I could do was cry. “But we’re doomed. We’re not meant to be.”

“Why?”

“Because…Tara. She would never?—”

“She gave me her blessing, Halley.”

My head snapped up, my blood pumping with hot-lava hope. “What?” I gawked at him, searching for the lie. The trick. “That’s not possible.”

“It is possible. I’m here. I’m here because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”