Then Derek begins speaking, and it only takes seconds for me to recognize where he’s quoting from. “‘Life is full of questions without answers, but as we lie tangled together, our hearts beating in unison, I know the definitive answer to one of them. I know that despite our many mistakes, despite the lost time we can never get back, and the little hurts that piled up along the way, there is nobody else out there for me. As reckless as he’d been with my heart, as much as he’d hurt me, I wouldn’t trade a single minute with him for a lifetime with someone else. Nobody else could fit me the way he does—the way he always has, the way he always will. I may not have chosen to fall in love with him, but for both our sakes, I’ll choose to love him now.’”
Tears well up in my eyes at this unspeakable cruelty. At the unfairness of him seducing me with my own words, prying open the sealed-shut door to the heart he shattered so many years ago. “Stop,” I whisper.
Of course, he doesn’t. “‘Our hearts beat together now, like they’ve known the secret all along. Like they’ve been waiting for us to catch up. He and I may have two separate hearts, but we share the same soul. I’m not positive where we go from he
re, but of one thing I am certain: wherever we end up, we will go there together.’”
Tears flow freely down my face now, so I wipe them away. I haven’t read my own books in ages, and his words remind me why. The pain is excruciating. There is so much love and pain and longing locked away inside Janie. All my hopes and dreams, poured into her, stitched up, and imprisoned between the pages of those books so I can live my life without their weight on my shoulders.
“We can have the same ending you gave them. Choose to love me now, Nikki,” he implores, meeting my gaze.
Brushing away another tear, I shake my head. “You swore you wouldn’t do this. You told me you accepted that it was over, that you weren’t here to ask me to come back—”
“I wasn’t,” he interrupts. “Did I ask you to come back that night? No. I did what I came to do and left.”
“And what are you here to do now, huh? Break off another piece of my heart? Don’t you know you already have the whole thing? I don’t have anything left to give you, Derek.”
“You have this,” he states, touching the inked skin reverently, like my words mean as much to him as they do to me.
Shaking my head, I tell him, “My love can’t trump your reality. My words don’t have power outside the pages of those books. Please stop making me turn you away. It kills me a little more every time.”
Instead of arguing with me, he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a rolled up stack of papers. His next words seem needlessly mean, and they nearly stop my heart. “I found Kayla.”
I stare at him, my chest tight, my eyes wide. “Okay. I don’t know why you’re telling me that. I didn’t even know you were looking for her.”
He holds out the rolled up papers for me to take. I do, carefully unrolling them and reading the top sheet to see what the hell this is all about.
Navigating the stepparent adoption process
Now my heart completely stops. My questioning gaze jumps to his.
“I want you to adopt Cassidy,” he states. Shaking his head as if to cut me off before I can even utter a single syllable, he says, “I hired a lawyer, I’ve researched the process, I have done all my homework, Nikki. Even if Kayla didn’t want to give up her rights, we probably could have done it because she has made no attempt to contact Cassidy in any way for almost four whole years, and that’s abandonment, plain and simple. But I didn’t want to bring this to you until it was foolproof, until I was sure she wouldn’t be a problem. I talked to her, told her it’s what’s best for Cassidy… I may have mentioned that if she would voluntarily terminate her parental rights, I wouldn’t go after her for the four years of child support she owes me.”
Heart in my throat, I wish I could fast forward him to the important part. “And what did she say?”
“She agreed,” he tells me. “I have to fly her out here for the hearing, but she’s going to give up her legal rights to Cassidy.” Taking a steps forward, he says more seriously, “Do you understand what this means? I’ll never have to choose between you and Cassidy again, because she will be yours. You, me, and Cassidy will be a family. Kayla will have no rights to her. It’s irreversible, I already checked. She can’t change her mind and fight it down the road. It can be like you’re the one I knocked up in high school, Nikki. You can be Cassidy’s real mom, and we can be together.”
I can’t breathe. All I can do is stare as Derek closes the distance between us, backing me up against my wall and cradling my face in his hands. His blue eyes dance with affection as he looks down at me. “We can have everything, Nikki. Just say yes.”
It feels like there’s no floor beneath my feet, like I’m standing on air. There was an insurmountable obstacle in our way, the same one that has always been there… but this time instead of letting that mountain stand between us, Derek moved it. For me.
I nod my head, not entirely trusting myself to speak.
Hope jumps in his eyes. “Yeah?”
I nod more fervently, bringing a shaky hand to his face and pulling him in for a kiss. I’m still not very composed, but it doesn’t matter. “Yes,” I murmur against his lips. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”
His low chuckle lights up parts of my heart I haven’t used in years. It feels like his words poured life directly into my veins, restoring parts of my soul I thought had died. Then he has the absolute gall to tease, “Are you sure?”
I release his face to smack him in the stomach. “Don’t push your luck, Noble.”
Smirking, he lets his hands fall to my ass, then he lifts me. I wrap my arms around his waist and he starts walking toward my bedroom. “I am a pretty lucky man,” he agrees.
Smiling, I lean in and brush my lips across his before murmuring, “You sure are.”
Chapter Thirty Three
I never want to leave Derek’s embrace, but eventually we have to get up. After we fucked each other to sheer exhaustion last night, he fell asleep in my bed. I don’t know if he intended to stay the night or not, but he definitely did.