“I don’t want to call you what everyone else calls you. Not when I’ve already admitted things I probably never should have said out loud. Not when I’m about to ask you for so much more and hope like hell that you don’t think I’m crazy for wanting something I shouldn’t be allowed to have. So, please, what’s your name?”
“Kamryn,” I whispered, then cleared my throat to say, louder, “My name’s Kamryn.”
“Thank you.” That crooked smile crossed his face as he pushed me back toward the opposite counter near the sink and placed his hands on the counter on either side of me, caging me in. Dipping his head, his gray eyes looked directly into mine as his soft voice filled the space between us. “I have been thinking about my life, my situation, and you ever since I ran into you at my brother’s house. No matter how you think about this, it seems wrong, and I know it won’t be easy for us—and if you’ll go through this with me, I’m so sorry for putting you through this in advance. But I need you to know some things before I even ask you to do this.”
“Okay,” I said warily, waiting for him to continue.
“Kamryn, I need you to know that I don’t do this. I’m not this guy. I’ve been faithful to my wife even though we’ve had a shitty marriage. I need you to know that I haven’t slept in the same bed as her for almost five years, we’ve been married for almost six, and the first year of our marriage I was away in the Army. Even still, I have always been faithful to her and never even given another woman a second glance . . . until you.”
“I don’t . . .” I trailed off, shaking my head quickly. “I don’t understand why you’re married to her then. Jace and Kinlee said she was horrible, and with what you just said, I just don’t . . . it doesn’t make sense.”
“Olivia and I have been together since high school. When I left for the Army after we graduated, we stayed together for two completely different reasons. For me, it was convenient to have someone when I visited home. For her, she liked dating someone her parents hated. But it was just a title, and someone to fool around with when I was here, nothing more. Then she got pregnant, and I figured if I was man enough to get her pregnant, I was man enough to marry her.”
My stomach clenched and dread filled me. I couldn’t do this to a child, I couldn’t break up a kid’s parents.
“I wasn’t going to let her go through that alone. But that entire first year after we got married she wouldn’t even see me, and she wouldn’t let me see our son until I left the military and bought a house for us. Once that happened, we shared a bed for a few months, but we still didn’t share a bed most of that time. After those first few months of living together, we went to separate rooms, and it’s been that way since.”
“You have a kid?” I breathed.
A dark look fell over Brody’s face, and he slowly shook his head back and forth. “No, I don’t.”
The pain and hardness in his voice had my body tightening, and I knew it was a sensitive subject for him. Whatever had happened, it was clear that Brody wasn’t ready to tell me. “Then if you don’t have any kids, why are you still with her?”
“Because I married her, and there’s been a lot of hard times for us. I couldn’t just leave her.”
A harsh breath left me, and my eyebrows slammed down. “Then once again, Brody, what is the point of all this? If you’ve stayed married to someone like her, and just admitted to me you couldn’t leave her before, why are you here? Why are we doing this—whatever this is? I don’t know what I was expecting from you, but from what you said the other day, it wasn’t this. I’m sorry, but I’m not okay with being someone’s mistress!”
“Kamryn, no! You’re not getting it. Yes, I stayed with her even though my life has been hell over the last five years since I’ve been back in Oregon, but I thought it was my punishment, and it was a punishment I would have gladly paid for the rest of my life if I’d never met you. But I did.”
“Punishment?” I whispered, my voice barely audible.
Brody continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Kamryn, if—if I’m not the only one feeling this, needing this, then I’ll leave Olivia to be with you, and not once for the rest of my life will I regret my decision in doing that. But it’s going to take time. Olivia has some issues, and there are things I have to work through with her first to make sure she’ll be okay when I do leave. She spends most of her time with her parents anyway, but I just need to make sure she’ll go to them rather than do something stupid. Her family is vicious, so we’ll need to be quiet until I can file for divorce. I know this is asking a lot of you—to be patient with me before we can be completely together. If you can’t do that and you want to wait until I’m already divorced, then we’ll wait. But if not, I told you on Monday, this isn’t going to be an affair, for me this is all or nothing.”
My mouth opened, but no words came out as I stared into his sincere gray eyes. I believed he wasn’t the type of guy to normally do this, and if he said he was all in, then there wasn’t a part of me that worried he was lying to me about leaving Olivia. I still didn’t want to be the person who broke up someone’s marriage, but I had to agree wholeheartedly with what he’d said earlier this week . . . I would be insane to walk away from this.
The old Kamryn would have run in the opposite direction as fast as she could, and I knew Barbara and Kinlee would never approve, but I also knew that going through life and never again feeling the way he made me feel would be the opposite of living. No matter how happy I’d been here in Jeston before I met him, I could never go back to the way I’d been.
“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” I whispered and lowered his head so his forehead was pressed against mine. “If it’s with you, Brody, then I want it all. I agree we need to be quiet about it. I don’t want to be seen as the girl who ruined your marriage to anyone. Your family, friends, Olivia, her family . . . I don’t want to be that person.”
“You’re not, and you won’t. I wouldn’t do that to you, and I’ll protect you from any fallout from leaving her, all right?”
“This is crazy,” I breathed.
“I’ll be right there with you through all the crazy.”
I worried my bottom lip, and it felt like we both stopped breathing in those few seconds before I nodded my head and said, “Okay, Brody.”
His eyebrows shot up, and his grip on my waist tightened. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
He pressed his lips against my forehead, then moved back to look me in the eye. “That word has never sounded so good.”
WE STAYED LIKE that before eventually making our way to the couch, where we talked for hours into the morning. Now that we knew what we were doing, we were trying to make up for all the getting-to-know-each-other time we had lost. He told me all about his childhood and time in the Army, and I shared stories of Barb and what made me want to open the bakery. Not once did our hands leave some part of each other, and never once did we go past that. And when I rested my head on the back of the couch and rubbed my eyes under my glasses, he stood up and pulled me up with him.
“I’ve kept you up way too long, I’ll let you get some sleep.”