offer a hand and pull you back in. It sucks balls that we all assumed someone else was taking care of it with you, Walker. I’m speaking for all of us that we won’t make assumptions about that again.”
Silence stretched as they all stared at me, waiting for me to say something.
“Guess it’s my turn, huh? I’m glad you all pulled your heads out of your asses. If this happens again, I won’t wait so long to call you out on it. Fair?”
“That’s fair.”
“Now untie me. I can’t feel my damn arms.”
That prompted Jensen to break out into a chorus of “Can’t Feel My Face.”
Brady told him to shut it. Jaxson started singing along.
Ash started to untie me, but Nolan said, “Wait. He might go ballistic when we bring up the Trinity thing.”
My head snapped his direction. “What about her?”
Nolan said, “I tracked her down and tried to apologize to her.”
“You tried to apologize?”
“She said that you were the one I owed the apology to, not her, for violating your trust and being a first-class douche canoe—whatever the hell that is. And she’s right. I don’t know what possessed me to make cracks about your dating history to a chick like Paris. But I promise you it was just that one time. It wasn’t like I’ve always been talking trash behind your back. Seriously, sorry. Total dick move.”
“Put me in the ‘tried to apologize’ category too,” Jensen said. “She went off on this tangent about me not having a right to judge crazy because everyone has some craziness in them. Then she talked about never painting a person or a situation with a wide brush or you’ll just end up painting yourself into a corner. Does that make sense?”
An artist’s analogy? That made my heart twist. I missed her so damn much. It’d been hard as hell staying away from her—that’s why I’d spent the last three days on my boat. She needed to come to some realizations on her own or this would never work between us.
“So, uh, yeah,” Jensen started. “I said some stupid shit to her that she did let me apologize for. I thought I was looking out for you the way you do for me, but I botched it. No surprise. Sorry.”
“I did a dumbass thing last year, talking out of turn to that woman Lennox used to be friends with. I have a different perspective seeing it from the other side.” I looked at Brady and he nodded. “Now we all squared away? So you can untie me?”
Ash undid the knots fairly quickly. As I tried to get the circulation going again, they loaded the cooler onto their boat and prepared to leave.
“We would stay and shoot the shit with you for the rest of the day,” Brady said, “but I figured you wouldn’t be sticking around after I relayed this last bit of information from Mom.”
“What?”
“She decided to have your piano delivered this morning.”
“Jesus. Why? That thing has been in storage for years.”
“No idea, but when she was leaving, Trinity showed up at your house. And—” He and Jens exchanged a look.
“And what?” I demanded.
“Not and what. You should be asking with what. Evidently she had a sledgehammer. And a cat.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Nope.”
I had no idea what Trinity was up to, but I needed to find out ASAP.
Jensen said, “Dude, word of advice from someone who’s recently hugged you? You need a shower before you race off to deal with your not-crazy girlfriend and her pussy.”
Nolan high-fived him.
I flipped him off and pulled anchor.
Twenty-two
TRINITY
I was in the living room of Walker’s house when the door blew open and he stormed inside.
Finally.
“Trinity! Where are you?”
“I’m right here.”
Walker stopped five feet from me. His hair was wild. He was sunburned.
He was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Waiting for you.”
“Why?”
This time, my rambling stream of consciousness wasn’t random words I’d struggle to remember. I had had days to plan out exactly what to say to him. “To apologize for running out on you. To grovel for being an idiot and believing for one second you had anything to do with trying to buy off Kierkegaard. As soon as I got home I realized the situation had my father’s handprints all over it.”
Walker didn’t move. He waited, patiently, like he always did.
“I’m here to tell you that you are the most amazing man I’ve ever met. You get all the weirdness and neurosis that is me and yet you prove time and time again that you like me anyway.” Now that I’d reached the hardest part, I swallowed with difficulty. “And yes, I knew it killed you to let me walk away. But you did it anyway. You are the strongest, most self-assured man I’ve ever known. You believed in this—in us—from the start even as I kept unintentionally trying to derail this with my actions and my words. You knew earlier Saturday night before the storm hit that I loved you, but I was too afraid to say it. You let it go when you should’ve demanded the truth from me. I regret that so much. It wrecked me when you snapped at Nolan about how he’d humiliated me, the woman you’re in love with, because I could see that it gutted you for me to find out that way. And yet I never doubted that you meant it. But even knowing that? Saturday night as I stared at the ceiling, miserable and alone, I told myself I didn’t deserve you.” I stomped over to him and got right in his face. “But you know what? Fuck that. I deserve you and you deserve me, a woman who loves you with everything she has, who will always give you her all. I love you, Walker Lund, more than you can ever possibly comprehend, so I will spend the rest of my life proving it to you. You will know every minute of every hour of every day how much I love showing you how completely you belong to me. And—”
Walker’s hands cradled my face, his mouth landed on mine, not to stop the flow of chatter but to show me how profoundly my declaration had affected him.
He shook so hard I clutched him tightly to quell his tremors, proving I was strong enough to be the one who anchored him for a change.
The kiss slowed from full-flown passion into tenderness. Sweetness. With maybe a little relief thrown in. When he released me, I burrowed my face into the crook of his neck, grateful the warmth and scent of his skin filled my soul.
“Trinity.”
“Let me just stay like this for a minute.”
When the minute was up, he shifted back to look at me. “I love you.”
“Yay me!”
He laughed. “Not the reaction I expected, but oddly enough I have come to expect that from you.”
I gave his smiling mouth a smacking kiss. “What else is on your mind? Because the smile doesn’t hide the clouds in your eyes, babe.”
“Your father is an asshole.”
“Uh, yeah. I told you that.” I poked him in the chest. “You should listen to me about that kind of stuff. Wait. Did you talk to him again?”
“I wanted to let my fists do the talking, but I refrained. He tried to play off bribing Kierkegaard as an honest mistake that his ‘name’ could fix.” Walker splayed his fingers around the back of my neck and followed the arc of my jawline. “I hate that he did this to you.”
“I’m not being flip when I say I’m used to it. It’s a perfect example of why he’s out of my life, Walker.”
“I get that now. And I’m sorry for being a jerk about you not telling me, even though you should have. From here on out, we share all family stuff, okay?”
“Okay. Speaking of . . . Annika the PR whiz might’ve created a silver lining out of the Kierkegaard situation. When your mother told her what happened, she was outraged, mostly because she hadn’t been there.”
He frowned. “Now that you mention it, I never asked why Brady, Lennox and Annika weren’t at the LI shindig.”
“Because Annika was at the h
ospital with them. Evidently Lennox got really sick and Brady freaked out. He hauled her to the ER and called Annika, who immediately showed up and jumped to the conclusion that Lennox was pregnant. Which pissed Lennox off, because she’s not pregnant; she just had food poisoning. But thankfully Annika didn’t call Selka with the news she might be a grandma because can you imagine how mad your mom would be if that was yanked away from her?”
Walker stared at me with the oddest expression.
“What?”
“You’re in the Lund family gossip loop now.”
I grinned. “Isn’t it great?”
His slow-blooming smile was a thing of beauty. “Yeah, babe, it is.”
“Anyway, Annika has created this whole PR campaign for me. ‘Trinity Amelia’s artwork is deemed too edgy and controversial for local art galleries’ or something along those lines. She claims my work will be even more in demand. Isn’t that crazy?”
“Very.” Walker lowered his mouth to mine, kissing me with the seductiveness I’d grown to crave. As much as I wanted to surrender to him, I also knew that once we were in his bed we wouldn’t leave it the rest of the day.
I forced myself to break the kiss.
He growled. “Come back here.”
“You’re distracting me.”
“That’s the plan. I plan on distracting you to the point you don’t know your own name.”
Gulp.
Walker whispered, “It’s time to fuck and make up.”
“Umm . . . don’t you mean ‘kiss and make up’?”
“Nope. We’re starting a new tradition.”
My mind blanked.
And the sexy man kept it blank for the next three hours as he proved just what an awesome tradition it was . . . four times.
—
I kissed Walker’s damp pectoral and attempted to roll to my side of the bed.
He clamped a big hand on my ass and said, “Where are you going?”
“To the neutral zone. We need to finish talking.”
He sighed.
I disentangled from him. “I need at least five feet between me and your lips during this discussion.”
“You get five minutes to say what you need to. Then my lips are gonna be back where they belong.”
“Where’s that?”
His wicked smile caused my heart to trip. “All over you.”
Swoon.
He sat up and glanced at the clock on the nightstand. “Meter is running, babe.”
“All right.”
“Hold up. First, you want to tell me why you showed up at my house with a sledgehammer and your cat?”
And about twenty cans of paint. But he hadn’t seen that yet. “How’d you know about that?”
“Mom told my intervention crew—my brothers and cousins—that showed up at the lake today.”
“That’s where you’ve been the past few days? Chilling at the lake?” I kicked myself for not thinking of that.
“We do our soul-searching in different places. On the water is mine.”
“Since I couldn’t get ahold of you, I brought everything with me, including Buttons. You know, as a sign I was here to stay.”
“That cat is in my house?”
“Ah. I think so. I haven’t seen her since the piano delivery guys were here. Anyway, I didn’t bring a sledgehammer. It’s a rubber mallet for the paint can lids because I found my next project.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“You.”
That blue-eyed gaze hooked mine.
“I mean, your house. I’m painting the living room and then we’ll buy real furniture. After that, I’m working on the kitchen. Since you own a restoration company, I assume you can get the staircase updated and redo the big window and alcove up on the landing before I start up there.”
“How long will that take?”
“Years, probably. So you’d better get used to—eep!” Walker plucked me up and settled me on his lap so we were face-to-face.
“Is this your way of moving in with me?”
“This is my way of telling you I love you and I want this to be our home. So let me do that for you. For us.”
He rested his forehead to mine. “That sounds like heaven, having you here with me, in my life, in my bed every day for the rest of our lives.”
“Well, I will have to go back to my place to work since that’s where my studio is, but I’m sure most nights I’ll make it back here—”
“No. You will be with me all nights. I’ll build you a brand-new studio on the back corner with all the bells and whistles and whatever you want in it.”
“But that’ll take time and I can’t not have a studio for a few months.”
“Fine. We’ll move into your house while the renovations are being done and your studio is being built. Then, as soon as it’s finished, we’ll move back in here and sell your place.” He kissed me twice. “Because now that I have you, sweetheart, I ain’t ever letting you go. I’ve been waiting for you . . . for what seems like forever.”
“Same goes. You don’t think . . . this happened too fast?”
“What? Falling in love? Or us moving in together?”
“Both, I guess.”
“No, baby. It happened when it was supposed to happen. When we both needed it to happen.”
There was my sweet, sweet man. “So no regrets about me kissing you in the bar that night?”
“None.”
“I was thinking it’ll be a great story we can tell our kids someday.”
“Babe. I love the way you think.”
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What You Need
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