Roman (Raleigh Raptors 2)

She blinked rapidly and flushed. “Oh. Right. I sold one of the pieces that I left here. I’d just finished it right before…”

“Right before you left me?” I finished when she didn’t.

She nodded, having the nerve to look crushed. “I didn’t want to bother you,” she said as she walked past me to grab the massive canvas that she must have brought down from the studio before I got there. It was the blue one. The one she’d been painting when I’d made love to her in the studio after that away game.

My soul felt like it was being ripped out of my body, screaming in protest that she wasn’t just selling a piece of her art—she was selling us.

“I figured I’d be gone before you got home,” she admitted, gripping the edges of the canvas and holding it between us like a shield.

Funny, she’d never needed protection against me before.

“So, that’s it?” I leaned against the wall and tucked my hands into my pockets. “This is how twenty-two years of friendship and love ends? With you sneaking around so you don’t have to see me?” My lungs kept moving, kept drawing air, each one was more agonizing than the last.

“Roman…” Her face crumpled. “I thought this would make it easier.”

“Easier?” I knocked my head back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. “How can you even stand there, looking like you’re wrecked? Looking exactly how I feel, and say that you thought not seeing me would be easier?”

“You have no idea how I feel!” She yelled, letting the canvas fall against the wall and marched toward me. “You have no idea how impossible this is! How much it hurts! How hard it is to walk away from you when I love you!”

My gaze flew to meet hers. She still loved me?

There it was—the fire in her eyes, the passion that ignited so easily between us.

I pushed off the wall and stalked forward. She retreated, her breath hitching slightly when her back hit the counter of the kitchen island.

“Roman,” she whispered, staring at my lips.

“You love me.” I caged her in, gripping the cool granite on either side of her body.

“That was never up for debate.” She lifted her hands to my chest as I pressed my body against hers. Fuck, I wanted her. Even if she didn’t want me, she’d always own me.

“Then don’t do this.”

“Ro—”

“T, don’t do this,” I begged, letting my forehead rest against hers. “I love you. You love me. I know I’m not what you deserve. I’ll never be what you deserve, but there’s a compromise here if we can find it.”

“There isn’t.” She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.

“Sure there is.” I breathed in her scent and tried to memorize the feel of her curves. “You want to carry a baby, then we’ll get a donor.”

“Oh, God.” She melted. That little well of hope started to glow in my chest.

“Teagan, this isn’t something that we just walk away from. This is worth fighting for.” My hands moved inward, grazing her waist.

“It wouldn’t be the same.” Her eyes opened, and tears tracked down her cheeks, breaking me like nothing else could have.

“It would be whatever we want it to be.”

She looked up at me, haunted and…shit, she looked defeated. My stomach sank as the truth of the matter sunk in.

“But you don’t want it—what we have,” I said quietly as my heart broke all over again. “If you wanted it, you’d fight. But you’re just looking for any reason, aren’t you?”

Maybe Baker had been right—I wasn’t even a rebound, I’d been a phase. I’d been an outfit she’d tried on because she’d always wondered what it would be like to wear me. She might love me, but she wasn’t in love with me. Not the way that I loved her.

She tensed between my arms, and her hands fell away from my chest. “If you love me like you think you do, you will let me go.”

I’d preferred the freight train of a hit that I’d taken back before New Years to this excruciating grief ripping me in two.

“Roman. Let me go,” she begged.

Holy shit, I had her pinned to the counter, and she’d asked me not once, but twice to move. I put my hands up and backed away. This was Teagan, and I’d never force her—or any woman—to stay when she so obviously wanted to go.

Hell, she’d gone to lengths to be sure she wouldn’t see me while she was here.

She batted away another tear and forced a smile as she put something on the counter with an audible click. “It’s better this way.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

Her eyes flashed with hurt. “You’ll see.”

She took the widest path possible around me, then picked up the canvas and walked out the front door. The sound of it shutting felt more final than when she’d slipped the ring off, but that couldn’t be it, could it?