But Cassie was crying—and not the happy kind of tears.
“Oh, okay,” he said, backing up. “What’s going on?”
“I can’t live like this.” She shook her head, her tears tracking down her cheeks. She swiped at them, sniffling and smearing her makeup. He didn’t care. She was beautiful and perfect, no matter what she looked like.
“Like what?” he asked, though the stabbing pain through his chest told him what she’d meant.
“With the secrets. I can’t do it.”
“Hey.” He took her hands in his. “We’re consenting adults.”
“It’s still forbidden.” She shook her head and backed up, out of his reach. “I need this job.”
Jon wasn’t sure if the air still had oxygen in it or not. His lungs screamed, and surely he’d suffocate in just a few seconds. “What are you saying?”
“We have to end this,” she said, her voice growing stronger. “Never speak of it. Maybe in a few months or a year—”
“A few months or a year?” Jon asked, his own emotions spiraling up and out of control. He shook his head. “No, Cassie. You don’t have to do this.”
“I’ve been thinking about it all day. There’s no other solution.” She wiped her face again and spun away from him. “And you really should’ve answered your stupid phone.”
He clenched his teeth together to keep his retort inside. Her entertainment center had put him behind. So had the surprise he’d been designing and building for her, but he didn’t want to tell her that.
“So this is your final decision.” He leaned against the wall in the hopes that her breaking up with him was no big deal. “Can you at least look at me, please?”
She faced him, a perfect storm brewing in her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m in love with you,” he said.
Her eyes widened, and she shook her head again. “No, you’ve always been enamored with the secrecy of us. You love that, not me.”
“You’re wrong.” His jaw twitched, because he was clenching it so hard. But he wasn’t going to say it again. He hadn’t even meant to say it the first time.
“I have to go,” she said, marching back toward the front door. “Move, Goliath. She stepped past the dog after partially kneeing him in her haste. She yanked open the door as a sob filled the air, and then she was gone.
Jon stood there and watched the front door drift back toward closed while his dog barked at something out in the darkness. Numb and unable to get his mind to work, he didn’t have the heart to tell his dog to be quiet.
* * *
Weeks later, the cherry blossoms were just starting to scent the air as Jon walked out to Phoenix’s cabin. He’d gone several times a week since Cassie’s sudden and final departure from his life.
He’d spent a lot of time walking along the shores of Forbidden Lake as winter thawed and spring dawned, awakening the trees and the birds. They sang to him, but not even the beloved sound of waves against the shore brought him happiness.
He wondered if he’d ever feel normal again, or if he’d continue to get up each morning, drink day-old coffee from the night before, and stumble into his shop. His designs were suffering, and every project was taking twice as long as it usually did. Sometimes three times as long. He’d lost several customers, and while he didn’t really need the money, if he didn’t have work to keep his mind occupied, he obsessed about Cassie.
Cassie, and how he could get her back.
Cassie, and the thrill of kissing her.
Cassie, and the way his whole heart ached for her.
No, the waves couldn’t soothe away that kind of hurt.
“Knock, knock,” he said as he entered the cabin through the front door.
“Hey,” Phoenix practically yelled. He stood at the back door, and he tucked his shirt back into his pants as Jon entered. He’d definitely interrupted something, but he wasn’t sure what. He scanned the cabin as if he’d find someone else there, but the only other person who ever came out here was the grocery delivery guy.
“How’s the new cabin going?” he asked, yanking open the fridge and bending over to get something out of it, effectively concealing his face from Jon.
“Good enough,” Jon said. “I just came from the site. I’ve got the foundation and framework done. It’ll be ready by the tourist season.” He accepted the can of soda from his brother and sank onto a barstool. “I’m not sure why Dad needs another cabin. We have thirty already.”
“Well, it’s one more, and that’s another couple hundred dollars per night.” Phoenix joined him at the other end of the bar. “Talk to Cassie?”
“Nope.” Jon popped the P on the word and asked, “You seeing anyone?”
Phoenix started to laugh, but it held a note of falseness in it. “Are you serious?”
Jon shook his head, letting a smile drift across his mouth. “I guess not. Where would you meet someone, right? You never go anywhere.”
“Hey, I go to work,” he said.
“Name the last woman you talked to.”
“Mom.”
“That you weren’t related to,” Jon said as Phoenix answered.
They laughed again, and Jon stared down at his open soda can. “I miss her so much.”
“You should just go over to her house. You know where she lives.”
“No, I’m not doing that again.” Jon had been through every scenario. Showing up at her house. Showing up during her office hours. Showing up to class. He’d done none of it. He couldn’t stand to see her when she wore fear in her expression. Couldn’t stand to talk to her with other students around. Couldn’t afford to put her in danger of losing her new full-time job.
He wouldn’t do any of those things. So his only option had been texting, and she’d shut him out completely. Not a single response. Cassie was headstrong and smart, and she’d probably blocked his number. That was what he would’ve done, simply so he wouldn’t have to delete all her messages every night.
“Hang in there, bro,” Phoenix said. “Even the heart heals with time.”
“Yeah?” Jon asked. “Is yours almost whole then?”
Phoenix shrugged and lifted his drink to his lips. Jon took that as a no, and his fiancée had left years ago.
Years.
Jon wasn’t sure he could live in this level of misery for that long, no matter how much diet soda he had. No matter how many projects he had to distract him. No matter how many miles he walked along the beach.
“Are you going to pass your class?” Phoenix asked. “You’re not going anymore, right?”
“I still have an A,” Jon said, his thoughts momentarily derailing toward Colton. Had the guy missed Jon at all? Would anyone, if he just stopped showing up to things the way Phoenix had?
He thought of the cottage Cassie had stocked with food and supplies. Jon could move in there, run his shop through texts and calls, maybe a video chat if absolutely necessary. He could get groceries delivered too. Live off the grid, the same way his brother did.
Phoenix got up and clapped Jon on the back. “Hang in there. You get up and you go to work and you talk to someone. It gets better.”
“Who do you talk to?” he asked.
“You,” Phoenix said with a smile. “I’m going to shower. Stay as long as you want.” He glanced at his phone as he entered the hall, and Jon sat at the counter for a few minutes, listening to the spray of the shower.
He checked his phone again, insanely thinking that maybe Cassie had texted him in the twenty minutes since he’d last looked.
Nope.
Nothing.
From no one.
Jon didn’t want to stay in this remote cabin, so he got up, yelled goodbye to his brother, and went back to the construction site along the lakeshore to get his truck. He couldn’t go home, where only his giant mastiff waited for him.
So he grabbed the dog and went down the road to his parents’ house. With any luck, they’d let him stay the night, even if they didn’t like the w
ay Goliath drooled.
Chapter Thirteen
Twenty-six days. That was how long it took for Jon to stop texting her. In the beginning, he’d sent dozens of messages per day. He’d called a few times too. As the time passed, the messages decreased, but they didn’t stop until day twenty-seven.
Cassie cried again when she hadn’t for a while.
Ten days, to be exact. She was now measuring everything in days. Sometimes hours. She hadn’t seen Jon since breaking up with him in his cabin, and she was actually surprised he’d stopped coming to his culinary class on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.
Colton had asked about him, and Cassie had said she wasn’t sure where he was and why he’d stopped coming. Sometimes a situation called for lying, she’d reasoned. She’d been so careful in her relationship with Jon, but she didn’t feel like she’d ever flat-out lied. Even during the interview, she’d told most of the truth.
Was not telling the whole truth considered lying?
She wasn’t sure, and she was tired of thinking about it. About Jon. About a solution that simply didn’t exist. She couldn’t have the full-time professorship and Jon, she simply couldn’t.
“And you were stupid for thinking you could,” she said to herself as she mixed yeast and milk together to make the shop’s famous square glazed doughnuts.
“You are not going to believe what happened yesterday morning.” Addy breezed through the back door, her arms laden with a box of baking ingredients. She deposited on the nearest stainless steel counter and faced Cassie, her eyes aglow.
“What?” Cassie asked. “Wait, let me guess.” She took in Addy’s sloppy ponytail and dazzling eyes with the dark bags underneath them. “You were out too late last night, because…Carlson asked you out.”
“Yes!” Addy grabbed onto Cassie’s doughy hands and jumped up and down. “And it was so awesome. Like magic. He took me out to Starlight with the Blossoms at one of the orchards, and there was music, and food, and dancing.” She twirled in the kitchen, seemingly oblivious to the industrial space around her. “And then he kissed me, and said he’d been coming into the shop for months, trying to work up the courage to ask me out.”
She giggled and pressed her eyes closed as she began to hum.
Cassie watched her, Addy’s happiness and glee so infectious that Cassie couldn’t help smiling. “So I’ll get all the doughnuts done if you think you can focus long enough to do the tarts.”
“Tarts,” Addy said distantly, and Cassie focused on moving faster. Making fillings and frostings two or three at a time so she didn’t have room to think about Jon and focus on how unhappy she was without the possibility of seeing him that day.
And now, she probably wouldn’t hear from him either. She waited until the last moment before bed before she deleted his texts, and it had cut deep last night that she hadn’t had anything to erase.
Four hours, she told herself. She could get the shop stocked for the day in the next four hours. Then she’d get home, get the twins to school, and head in for her last regular classes of the semester. Next week was finals, and then she’d have a couple of weeks off before the summer term started.
She hadn’t been out to the cottage in the woods in weeks and weeks, and she thought about taking the twins out of school and heading out there for the break between semesters. Maybe she just needed some free time and fresh air to get things clear in her head.
She told herself that, but she knew deep down that everything was already lined up in her mind. She couldn’t be with Jon and keep it a secret, not if she wanted the full-time job at the university and a stable life for her brothers.
Family had won out over her heart again. Or maybe they were so integral to her heart that she’d chosen right. She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she existed in a fog that never lifted. Never allowed the sun to shine through. Never even allowed her a glimpse of hope ahead.
She did make it through the next four hours. She went home. She got the twins to school, and she went into her office at the college. The motions went by with the minutes, and then she could go home again.
One day became two, and then three, and by day four, Cassie thought she could go all day without checking her phone to make sure Jon hadn’t messaged. But she was wrong, and she constantly checked just to make sure.
Another weekend came, and then March faded into April. She mourned the loss of the cottage in the woods, and she stole away after her last final to visit the place where she’d spent so much time.
In the middle of the day and with the cherry trees in full bloom now, she didn’t think it likely that Jon would be around the orchards. She hadn’t dared ask around about him, and besides, she didn’t have anyone to ask. Addy was preoccupied with her new relationship with Carlson, and she’d never actually told the twins who she was dating.
The cottage was exactly as she remembered. Even the scent of bacon still hung in the air, and she wrapped her arms around herself as she took a deep breath of this place where she’d met Jon so often.
She loved the comfort that existed in this small room, and she craved the same serenity she’d enjoyed during her time with Jon. But she knew, even if they got back together, things wouldn’t be the same. They never were, once priorities had been established. And Cassie had put him right where he’d feared she would.
Those blasted tears heated her eyes again, making them scratchy and reminding her of how tired she was. Maybe she could lay down just for a few minutes. The twins wouldn’t be home from school for a couple of hours, and this cottage sat at the end of a road.
She grabbed a granola bar from her stock of snacks and wandered down the hall to the bedroom she’d claimed as her own. Her eyes immediately caught on the card propped against the lamp, and while she hadn’t seen a lot of Jon’s handwriting, she instinctively knew the envelope was from him.
Picking it up, she pressed it to her chest and collapsed onto the bed. Just having something he’d touched in her possession made her heart happier, and Cassie needed to find a way to fix her mistake.
There had to be something she hadn’t thought of before. Some way for her to have Jon and her job and her family. Somehow to honor the promise she’d made to her mother and honor the feelings in her heart.
She just couldn’t see it. Couldn’t find the right path….
She woke to pure darkness around her, and her phone buzzing somewhere nearby. Panic gripped her heart with icy fingers, and she scrambled up, her fingers flailing for the lamp switch. She knocked it sideways, grabbed onto it to steady it, and finally snapped the light on.
Groaning, she squeezed her eyes shut and shielded them with the back of her hand. Her phone stopped buzzing, and that sent another jolt of fear through her.
“Kyle,” she whispered. “Lars.” They’d be so worried about her. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going, because she’d been planning to be home before them, as usual. But by the color of the sky, she was hours late.
She snatched her phone from the spot on the bed where it had fallen, and saw she’d missed nine calls, almost all of them from Kyle. One from Lars. And one from an unknown number.
She tapped on Kyle’s name, as he’d just called, and when the line picked up, she heard Button yapping as she said, “I’m so sorry. I fell asleep, and I’m on my way—”
“He’s here,” Kyle said. “Don’t come home, Cass! He’s here.” A snarl came through the line, more of Button’s yapping, and then a sharp, cracking sound like the phone had hit the floor. Kyle continued to yell, but Cassie couldn’t make out the words.
Fear turned into pure horror, because she knew who “he” was.
Larry had found them.
It hadn’t even been six months, but Larry had found them.
Cassie’s mind raced, and she couldn’t seize onto one single thought in order to take action.
More scuffling came through the line, and then Lars’s panicked whisper said, “We’re still at home. He’s been here for hours. He wants you
here. Made us call you a bunch of times. Don’t come back, Cassie. We’re fine with him.”
Then the line went dead.
A wail started in the back of her throat, and she stared at the phone, sure she’d just been pranked. In the cruelest way. But her phone showed that she’d been on the call for thirty-four seconds, and when the screen went dark, she flew into motion.
She dialed Willie in Chicago and barked, “Did you know Larry left the city?”
“What? No.”
“Call the police. Give them an anonymous tip. Something. Anything to get them over to his place. Then tell them you know where I am, and you’re worried about me and the boys.”
“Cass, is he there?”
Tears blinded her, making it hard for her to get the door open. She struggled but finally got it, flying out into the night. “Yes,” she said. “Hurry, Wills.” She hung up and immediately placed another call.
This time to the last person on earth she wanted to bother, but the only person she knew would come, no questions asked.
“Hello?”
“Jon,” she said. “Are you home? I need your help.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jon felt Cassie’s panic all the way down in his own toes. His boots squelched in the mud as he walked through the orchard.
“I’m not home,” he said. “I’m in the orchards.” Before he’d even finished, she rushed on, her voice full of air as she panted.
“Larry’s here. I wasn’t home with the twins. I’m on my way there now.”
“I’ll come,” he said without even thinking.
“Thanks. Gotta go.” The line went dead before he could say anything else. He paused and looked at his phone. Had that just happened?
Her face—her oh-so-beautiful face—sat on his screen for a few seconds before darkening. So she really had called. His own adrenaline had spiked toward the treetops when he’d seen her name on his phone.
Larry’s here.
Jon shoved his phone in his pocket and started running through the muck in the orchards. His father had wanted him to check on their picking huts and make sure they were ready for the summer, though the cherry harvest was still months away. It was amazing what damage Mother Nature could do during the fall and winter, and Jon had spent the day making repairs on two huts, and then making notes for a few more.
Flirting With Danger (Rebels 0f Forbidden Lake Book 1) Page 8
