Long for Me (10 page)

“I decided,” she said into the emptiness of the room.
She
had made that decision and she’d been empty ever since.

A dull thud sounded outside in the hall and she straightened on the couch, looking at the door as the footsteps drew nearer.

He wasn’t just her friend. He was so much more than that, and he had been for a long time.

The very
thought
of that terrified her, because she
knew
what it did to a person when that part of you was ripped away. She’d lost a vital part of herself before, and she’d seen how her father had just faded away. He hadn’t given up, not really, because of them. But that spark that made him who he had once been was just gone.

If she really loved somebody, like her father had loved her mother, like her mother had loved her father, it left her vulnerable to that sort of loss.

The door opened.

As Guy filled the doorway, she realized it was already too late.

She loved him more than her own life.

* * *

For one breath-stealing second, his heart beat a mad little dance in his chest.

Time held still while Chris looked at him, her eyes unreadable, her face almost … peaceful.

Then she looked down and time shifted, resumed.

She stroked something she held in her hands, her fingers reverent, gentle.

“My family was over today,” she said.

He shut the door at his back, one fist braced against it. Her voice was level and cool, steady even.

But she couldn’t be steady, not if she’d spoken to her folks.

“Sorry,” he said brusquely. “I know that was rough.”

“It … wasn’t fun.” She reached over to the table and he saw that she’d been holding a picture. Tate had taken that one. He’d given it to him a few months ago, eyed him oddly, but hadn’t said a word.

“All this time,” she said softly.

Shoving off the door, he moved into the kitchen. He opened the fridge, staring inside like it held some answer. All it held was beer, a half-empty carton of eggs, and cheese. No answers there, but he grabbed two beers. He turned and went still as he saw Chris coming toward him.

Popping the top, he handed her a bottle and then opened his own. Staring anywhere but at her, he said slowly, “I don’t know what to say to you now. I’m sorry. I can’t undo what he did, but I’m sorry—”

“I’m not here about your father.”

The bottle clinked against the counter.

He lifted his head and found her eyes locked on him, a cool glint in them as she watched him, all but daring him to say anything.

Temper sparked around her.

He went with the safest thing. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She closed the distance between them, until her boots bumped his, her head tipped back to meet his eyes. “You’ve been holding back on me, Guy. For a quite a while. I think it’s time the two of us cleared the air.”

“Holding back.” Now his heart had gone and done a weird little short-circuit on him, hammering away inside his chest, until he could hardly breathe. It raced, banging against his rib cage until even breathing was a chore. His hands were damp with sweat, while blood crashed and roared in his ears.

Holding back? He wasn’t holding back on anything.

Except that one little thing that was everything.

But she didn’t want to hear that, didn’t want to know about that.

Unwittingly, he reached up, rested his hand on the curve of her neck and she sighed, leaned into his touch. Something that might have been heat, might have been hunger bloomed in her eyes and it added to the short-circuit thing going on in his heart. It was spreading, too. Spreading from his heart to his brain, throughout his entire being.

“Chris?”

“You’re holding back,” she said, her voice insistent as she reached up and curled her fingers into his shirt, her hands demanding little fists as she tugged him closer. Her eyes practically glowed, overwhelming him with their intensity. “Maybe I’m holding back, though. Because I never told you. How could I? I didn’t even admit it to myself.”

Standing had become a complicated process in the past few minutes and he couldn’t even stay upright on his own. Leaning his weight back against the island, still gripping her against him, he sagged, letting the island support him as he held her to him. “Admit what?” he asked, shoving his fingers into her hair.

“The truth,” she said simply. “About you. About me. About us.”

“Us?”

She curled a hand around his neck, her fingers dipping into his hair while that smile turned sad and sweet. “Oh, come on, Guy. Don’t make this difficult. You know what I mean. There
is
an us. You might even understand the fact that I’ve been running scared for a long time. After all,” she murmured, rising up and pressing her lips to the corner of his mouth. “Who knows me better than you?”

* * *

His arms came around her in a blink, tight and hard, banding her to him.

“Chris?”

The sound of his voice, ragged and raw, made her ache and the knot in her throat spread.

She rubbed her cheek against his. “It was there,” she murmured. “Even then. That weekend, just you and me, a couple years ago. I felt it then, and I lied. I couldn’t let myself see it, because I was scared. I’d lost Mom. Part of me had lost Tate because of the way he pulled back from all of us.”

She leaned back and although she tried, she couldn’t stop the tears. “I couldn’t lose anything else, so I shut down. I couldn’t lose you if I never had you, right?”

He yanked her to him, desperate, insistent and she went, every bit as eager as he. The words were a muffled confession against his lips and there were a dozen biting little nips pressed to her mouth, her cheeks, her neck before he let her breathe.

“You had me all along,” he said after a long, breathless moment.

“I know.” She pressed her face to his, struggled to calm her ragged breaths while her heart all but beat out of her chest. She cupped his face between her hands and forced herself to take a deep breath. She had to get this out, while she could. “And you had me. I just … I wasn’t ever very good at showing it.”

He blinked, a struck look on his face. Then, as his arms tightened around her, he sank to his knees, face pressed to her belly. “Chris…”

Bent over him, she pushed a hand through his hair.

“I love you, Guy.”

A hard, brutal shudder wracked his body.

“I’m done worrying about everything I might lose in life. I’m ready to start looking for everything I might
find
.”

Read all three installments of the Secrets & Shadows e-novellas

Burn for Me

Break for Me

Long for me

Available now from St. Martin’s Press

And don’t miss the first print novel of the Secrets & Shadows series
Deeper than Need,
available in June 2014 from St. Martin’s Paperbacks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shiloh Walker is an author of romantic suspense and paranormal romance. She has been writing since she was a kid. She fell in love with vampires with the book
Bunnicula
and has worked her way up to the more … ah … serious vampire stories. She loves reading and writing anything paranormal, anything fantasy, and nearly every kind of romance. Once upon a time she worked as a nurse, but now she writes full time and lives with her family in the Midwest.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

“Long for Me” copyright © 2014 by Shiloh Walker.

All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

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Cover design © by Kerri Resnick

Cover digital illustration © by Tricia Schmitt (picky me)

Author photo © Ayrica Bishop

eISBN 978-1-250-03266-9

First eBook Edition: June 2014