“You’re talking in past tense.” Her voice broke.
“Well, what did you expect, Brynn? That I could keep it up indefinitely? That I’d keep loving someone who saw me as a boy toy she couldn’t stand outside of the bedroom?”
“You’re being unfair—you never once even hinted that it was anything else. I thought we were on the same page.”
He pulled his sleeve away from her grasping fingers. “You’re right, it’s not fair, Brynn. It’s not fair that I had to watch you throw your heart at countless other men while I had to make do with a string of vapid women who would never be you. And now that I’m finally ready to move on…finally ready to get on with my life, you want to drag me back in?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“For what?”
She was crying for real now, and she folded her hands loosely in front of her before shrugging and saying the only thing there was left to say.
“I love you, Will.”
She saw that it rocked through him. He shuddered and closed his eyes briefly, and her heart nearly broke at the searing emotion on his strong, familiar features.
He turned on his heel and walked away from her.
“Wait!”
He didn’t.
“William Thatcher, you can’t walk away from this! You didn’t stick this out for half of your life to chicken out now.”
He kept walking.
“Shit,” she muttered. “Shit!”
Tyler gave her a reproving look from the front desk, but she barely noticed as she went tearing back out into the humid Chicago air.
She saw him start to get into the driver’s seat of a car and sprinted full speed toward him, not stopping until she slammed into his side.
He glanced down. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“I don’t care,” she said, wiping at her cheeks as she dug through her purse. “I came prepared for you to be a stubborn ass, so I brought something.”
“I can hardly wait to see.”
She shoved a large cylindrical Tupperware at his chest. “Here.”
He stared down at the container in confusion. “You brought a plastic tub full of shredded paper to prove your love.”
Brynn nodded in earnest, shoving it closer to him so he couldn’t give it back. “Not just any paper. My lists.”
His lips parted for a second as his grip tightened on the container. “Your book? It’s all in here?”
“Well, not the cover…it was too thick to shred. But the contents. The thirty before thirty, forty before forty, the ten characteristics of a respectable husband, the ninety-nine rules of leading an exemplary life…all in there.”
“Why?”
“I don’t need them anymore,” she said simply. “I thought they were helping me live my life, but they were actually keeping me from it. I thought that by planning everything, that by doing everything just right, that I could stop being Dumpy Dalton. And I guess I succeeded, but I also turned into…”
“A bitch?” he supplied.
She swallowed and pressed on. “You’re my life, Will.”
Brynn heard an awkward clearing of a throat, and belatedly realized that Dana was in the passenger seat. She didn’t care. She only cared that Will would hear her. Want her. Love her.