But this…this was different.
This was intimate.
Important.
My family that was no longer really my family, and I no longer knew how to fit.
Maggie touched my knee where she sat next to me. “Are you okay?”
Empath.
I was sure of it.
I sent her a soft, shaky smile. “Of course.”
She frowned, not biting the lie. “I know I don’t know you that well, and it isn’t my place, but…but what I said earlier about seeing your face when Daisy fell?”
Unsure of what she was getting at, I managed a tight nod.
“I saw your face the whole time we were at your farm. From the second we drove up until you were leaving to the E.R. The way you looked at him.”
Undoubtedly, Emily had told her about mine and Richard’s history.
I swallowed down the tears I could feel burning at the back of my throat. “Sometimes it’s hard looking into the past.”
“It looked to me like you were looking at what should have been your future.”
“That’s the same thing, isn’t it?” I asked her, confused and uneasy.
Maggie shook her head. “No. Looking into your past, you might miss it, but you know it’s over. That’s not what your expression was saying, and it sure wasn’t what Richard’s was saying, either.”
Wow.
Okay.
I was getting read by a nineteen-year-old. I guessed I really was transparent.
Melanie laughed a quiet, wry sound. “You should have seen him on the way over there. Man looked like he was going to come out of his skin and the only thing that was gonna be left was his big bleeding heart and his poor, miserable, lonely dick.”
“Melanie,” Emily scolded below her breath.
“What? You know it’s the truth. That guy is always on edge, wound up like a kite, high and then low.”
I frowned. “That doesn’t sound like him at all.”
He was ferocity. Intensity. The beauty in his soul pouring from his heart and through his fingers.
A shining light wherever he went.
Mel leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table, sipping her drink and staring over at me. “A man changes when he gets his heart broken.”
I scoffed. I couldn’t help it. “I think it was the other way around.”
“Maybe he broke his own,” Mel hedged.
Emily was nervously chewing her bottom lip, looking between us. Whatever she’d been trying to hold back came spewing out, “You two went on a date last night?”
“Oh my god,” Melanie gushed and smacked her hand on the table. “I knew it. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”
“It was not a date,” I hissed low, holding it back like it was a secret and like the whole town wouldn’t know by then about the debacle that had unfolded in the middle of the restaurant.
“He took you to dinner,” Emily argued, pushing, searching my face when she did.
“He just wanted to talk.”
“And that’s it? You just talked?” Emily’s brow pitched high in speculation.
Redness raced. Blood sloshing at the reminder. At the thoughts that slammed me in prickly, lustful bits.
I dropped my head a fraction to hide it.
“Oh my god,” Emily whispered and edged forward. “Did you—”
“God, no.”
Except it was close.
Oh god, had it been close. Me nearly fully giving in, wanting him so desperately that I felt like I might physically succumb.
Death by celibacy.
Mel angled down, trying to see my face. “Look at her, Emily. She is lyin’ through her teeth. What did you two get up to last night?”
“Something I am sure to regret,” I admitted, wondering why I was trying to deny it in the first place.
The evidence was written all over me.
The testimony of my bleeding, mangled heart.
Melanie slammed her hand down again. “I knew it. Finally, Richard got himself a little lovin’. Maybe he’ll stop being such a Mr. Crabby Pants. All that pent-up energy and a giant dick and no one to sink it into—now that is one volatile combination.”
Her assertion was all kinds of solemn with a dash of amusement.
My eyes widened, and Emily smacked her on the shoulder. “What in the world is wrong with you?”
Mel shrugged. “I’m not going to apologize for telling the truth to my friend. Besides, stumbling in on Richard and Rhys in various states of undress while on tour is a hazard of my job.”
Maggie giggled in embarrassment. Maybe a little interest, too.
Cheeks pinking when she dropped her head to hide it.
“That’s it, all your hotel key cards are gettin’ revoked,” Emily told Mel.
But I was staring across at Mel, taken aback again by what she’d said. Trying not to believe it. For it not to matter.
“Is it true?” It came rasping out without my full consent, words scraping my raw throat, cutting me open wide to reveal the pain that wouldn’t abate.
And I didn’t mean the size of his dick. I was already well-acquainted with that.
“That he’s been alone since you?” Melanie clarified.
My nod was brittle.