Forbidden Fate (Crowne Point 3)

To let him go.

I have to go back to Westley. The man I kissed before you.

We stopped just outside the towering wooden doors that marked the Hall’s entrance, but neither of us made a motion to open or knock to be let in.

Grayson looked down at me from his ridged nose with the same look he’d had in the car. It’s dangerous. I was so close to begging for more. It made me forget all the reasons I have to leave.

“Do you think it will snow tonight?” I asked. “My uncle and I used to watch the first snowfall. We’d watch the snowflakes and talk about the weird things poets did. Like my favorite poets would spend weeks, months, sometimes years, away from their lovers, and I used to read their love notes and letters…but that was something I couldn’t do with Woodsy, because it was way too dirty.”

The longer Grayson and I stayed outside the massive wooden doors, the more time seemed to push us to go inside. I could feel fate on our heels again, a runaway boulder.

“You want love letters, Snitch?”

His voice drew me back to him with fervor, it sounded like my heart, shredded and torn. But also hopeful, as though he could feel the boulder, as though he knew that this was our only time before we had to go back.

“I want so much more than love letters,” I whispered. “We should probably go inside.” I turned but he grabbed my bicep.

“No. Wait…just wait.”

“We’re already so late, Grayson. They’re all waiting for us. Your family, my…” My husband.

Fury and something else, something too much like heartbreak, splintered his blue eyes. “My grandfather owns every one of those people. Every one of them is a vote against…”

“Against?” I pressed.

His eyes burned. “Us.”

Us.

“What do you mean us?”

“Never mind.” He dropped me and shook his head. “You’re right. We’re late.”

He was closing his walls, building his thorns. Fate was almost upon us. I had to get it out. All the things I needed Grayson to know and hear and just listen to. The things only he could.

“I’m scared,” I said. “I’m scared I’m gonna do something wrong. What if I do something wrong?”

His eyes pinched, and he tilted his head, giving me that deep, probing look only Grayson could. The one that said he saw right through me.

“I shouldn’t be a mother. My mother shouldn’t have been a mother…but you would make a great father, Grayson.” He really would, he cared so much about his family. Grayson Crowne’s biggest secret wasn’t that he was a virgin, it was that the notorious playboy prince, known worldwide for being callous and imperious, loved his family and would do anything for them.

A small smile. “No, you would make a great mother, Story.”

It was fainter than a blurry Polaroid, but it was there, the image of Grayson and me, and our newborn. A happy family. A happily ever after. And no sooner did the picture come, did it vanish with his next words.

“I’ll be there for you, Snitch. I’ll hold your hair back. I’ll get you ice chips. Let you scream and hold my arm until you break the skin.” He stopped off, staring off somewhere I couldn’t follow.

And then what? What comes after, when the delivery is finished? He’ll go back to his wife and I’ll disappear.

“June…” That was my due date. “Almost a year to the day when this all started.”

“It’s hard picturing you gone from my life, Snitch.” He had the same look in his eyes as he had in the car, at the doctor’s office. I don’t know what it meant, but it made my gut tighten and throb.

Then he said, “Mistletoe, Snitch.”

I lifted my eyes.

It was like every stolen moment over the past months had been leading up to this second. We had a leak slowly eroding the moral line between us, and now that hanging flower above us was the final drop.