Slow Burn

by K. Bromberg

  He closes the few feet between us and reaches out to move a strand of hair off my face. “You know I’d do anything for you, right?”

  The promise in his words and the look I can see in his shadowed eyes reinforces everything I feel about him. I lean forward and press my lips to his, the taste of him pushing back thoughts of where we’re headed next because right now it’s just Becks and I.

  His hands slide up my torso, nerves humming to life from his touch, despite the fatigue. They move over to cup my breasts, causing bittersweet tears to sting my eyes as he leans down and brushes a reverent kiss on each of them through my shirt.

  When he lifts his eyes back up to mine, I can see the emotion glistening there, can feel his love palpable and real as it reverberates in the space between us. “Sweet Haddie,” he murmurs as he leans forward to brush those devastating lips of his against mine again, “I love you.”

  Every part of my being sighs at the words he doesn’t need to say because he shows me so handily those feelings in everything he does for me. “I love you too.” And when he leans back and looks in my eyes, I know he sees it reflected back at him.

  He pulls me into his arms and just holds me tight. I memorize everything about him right now: the feeling of safety, the sense that everything is going to be okay. The little things I can hold on to later when I’m doubting my decisions for putting him through this. And then my mind recalls a lost promise.

  “Hey, Country?”

  “Mm-hmm?” he murmurs into the crown of my head.

  “You said you’d do anything for me, right?”

  “Yes,” he answers, drawing the word out as he tries to figure out where I’m going with this.

  I look up at him, sure there’s a devilish smirk on my face. “You never fulfilled a certain three-day rule, you know.”

  He raises his eyebrows at me, working his tongue in his cheek. “Which one might that be?” He feigns innocence.

  “Well, you did call me, so …” I trail my finger down the bare skin at his throat, my teeth working my bottom lip and my body on high alert as it waits in anticipation for what I know he won’t deny me.

  He looks over my shoulder at the wall behind me, his playful grin flashing his intent. “If you insist …” he groans at the same time he reaches out to me. Our hands and bodies collide in a frenzy of removing clothes and roaming mouths and unsated need.

  “We have to be at the hospital soon,” he murmurs as he lifts me up so that my legs are around his hips and my back is against the wall.

  “Time is precious, Daniels. Waste it wisely.”

  Epilogue

  BECKS

  1 year later

  It’s the same dream I’ve had on and off over the past year. I know it’s a dream, but I can never seem to shake it or the harsh reality it throws in my face like a bucket of ice water.

  The cemetery is quiet despite the sound of her calling to me, pleading to be found. I search endlessly, trying to find her, but know I’m not going to. Unless you count my warm fingertips against her name etched in cold granite, just like the love she scored into my heart.

  It’s an odd place, so peaceful yet so very cruel to rip away the ones you love. For her to be here this young after suffering so horribly is something I can’t think about much. She fought the fight no doubt, but that right hook of hers just wasn’t strong enough in the end.

  I’m starting to run now, knowing she needs me to find her before it’s too late. Just one more touch, one more glance, one last kiss, before she disappears forever. This is my favorite and most hated part of the dream because I want her to be there and I don’t want her to. Such a no-win situation.

  Fuck the person who said to love and lose is better than to not love at all.

  How cruel is it to still love and know you’ll never see them again except for in dreams.

  I see her blond hair blowing in the breeze on the other side of the tree where she always sits to wait for me. Our one last rendezvous, touch, kiss … memory. I reach out to touch that golden hair of hers and—

  Rex’s bark pulls me from the dream just at the best part when I get to touch her. I groan out a curse, my body physically shaking from the realness of the reverie. No matter how many times I have it, the dream still rocks me to the core and causes me to think about what-ifs and what-could-have-beens.

  My heart’s pounding still as I squeeze my eyes shut to guard them from the blinding sun and my damn mother and her no-blinds-at-the-farmhouse policy. I reach out to the space beside me, and when I find it empty, I sit up immediately.

  It’s one thing to have the dream and believe the whole time I’m in its confines that it’s real, but it’s another to wake up and the immediate reminder how it’s not real isn’t in her spot. When I can’t physically reach out and touch her to reaffirm that she’s here and whole, the riot of emotions the dream causes doesn’t fade as quickly.

  I scrub my hands over my face, trying to scrape the dream from my memory. The constant reminder of how goddamn lucky I am. I shove up out of the bed, my mind wondering if my plans for later today are what’s dredged the dream back up when I haven’t had it for several weeks.

  On my way to the hallway, I slide open the top dresser drawer and feel in there to make sure it’s safe and sound. My hand connects with the sharp edges of the square container, and I breathe a bit easier, all the while my nerves hum.

  I make my way into the bathroom, take care of business, and brush my teeth before shuffling down the hallway toward the first indulgence I plan on having this morning, coffee.

  There will be many more indulgences today but of the noncaffeine variety.

  I turn the corner into the kitchen and déjà vu of our first time here hits me. So many things have changed over the past year, but at the same time, so much has stayed the same.

  She still steals my breath with her courage, her fiery spirit, her unyielding love, her beauty inside and out.

  Haddie stands at the window, her athletic body, thinner now as she tries to gain back the muscle she’s lost with treatment, haloed by the morning sunlight. Her hair is short, the regrowth finally long enough to be cut and styled for the first time last week. She was so excited by the fact, but I watch as her fingers play absently with it at the nape of her neck and know she’s still unsure, regardless of how sexy she is, rocking the pixie cut.

  I remember her laughter as I told her that, lucky me, I get to take a new woman to bed with me every couple months as the hairstyles change. I’ll say anything to ease the lines of worry from her face.

  The thought makes me smile as I watch her. We’ve been to hell and back in this past year—gone through more things than any new relationship should ever be tested with—but look at us…. We’re stronger than ever.

  She finally stopped pushing.

  And started accepting I was in it for the long haul.

  “Good morning,” I murmur, my voice catching in my throat as the dream comes flooding back to me. She turns slowly to face me, tears streaming down her face in silence, cell phone clutched in her hand.

  My heart drops through my stomach as my eyes flicker back and forth, hoping against hope what I fear isn’t true. I brought her out here so that she’d be occupied instead of sitting at home and fretting endlessly about the results of the latest scans and tests. The typical four-to five-day wait being the hardest thing to endure in this whole process.

  For her and me.

  It’s brutal, watching the one you love hope and try to remain positive after enduring rounds of chemo and now radiation to get their hopes dashed and spirit crushed when they’re told the cancer is still there, still eating away at them bit by bit, day by day. It may have shrunk or not advanced, but it’s still there.

  It’s hard to fight the uphill battle with renewed vigor each time you have to start it over.

  I move to her, tears burning the back of my throat and my chest physically hurting as I watch her sob, so overwhelmed by emotion that she can’t speak. I p
ull her smaller frame into my arms, careful not to squeeze her too hard against my chest since she’s still sore from the first procedure she had last week to prepare her for possible reconstructive surgery.

  “Becks.” She says my name, but I just keep shushing her, trying to soothe her and accept the resignation that we’re going to have to start the cycle all over again. Lose the hair she’s just grown back.

  “Becks!” The way she says my name this time pulls me from my thoughts and I look down as she leans back.

  I take in the tears streaming down her face, but then I notice the smile spreading over those lips of hers. I force a swallow down my throat, afraid to hope that smile means what I think it means. My heart pounds and my head shakes back and forth as she nods her head up and down, answering the question in my eyes.

  “Are you serious?”

  Her smile is so wide now, the laughter bubbles up and the sound consumes me, overrides all of the fear and worry—her shadow I’ve carried on my shoulders over the past year—and tells them they have no place here anymore.

  “It’s gone,” she says, her body vibrating with excitement, with life, with a future. “The scans are clear.”

  I hear a whoop and don’t even realize it’s my own voice as I lift her up gently and whirl her around in excitement. Then I try to process everything as I press my lips to hers over and over and find that I can’t.

  I can only focus on one thing right now, and that is how much I love and admire this woman in front of me. How I can’t live without her.

  We just went a full twelve rounds and finally got the knockout.

  She starts giggling as I proceed to kiss her over and over, the only way I can speak right now after the heart attack I almost had, thinking the results were the opposite.

  She pushes me away, trying to speak. “I just got the call before you came out…. I was processing it all. I couldn’t speak. I’m sorry for scaring you.”

  “Oh, baby,” I tell her, framing her face and lacing it with kisses, the taste of salt on my tongue from our tears of joy a welcome change.

  And then my mind clicks.

  “Hold on. I’ll be right back!” I tell her as I bolt from the kitchen.

  HADDIE

  Disbelief owns my battered body right now, but it’s the most welcome feeling in the world. I’m grateful for Becks giving me a moment so that I can try to process the unbelievable. So I can grasp that I beat this.

  Holy fucking shit!

  The adrenaline hits, and even though Rex is still barking outside to come in, I’m trembling so much, I lean against the wall and slide down to the floor.

  I close my eyes momentarily, seeing Lexi’s face when I do, and I silently thank her for helping me. My dandelion sister, who used to blow wishes into the wind and hope one day one would come back for her.

  Mine just came back. I got the more time I asked for.

  My mind switches gears to try to remember more details of the doctor’s call but don’t remember much after all clear and no evidence of disease remains. I pinch the skin on my thighs, hoping it’s not a dream because if it is, I don’t want to wake up from it.

  I need to call my parents and Rylee and Danny, but my hands are having trouble hitting the screen from their trembling. I’m trying again—my mind going five thousand miles an hour—when Becks returns.

  I let my phone drop in my lap as I try to brush the tears from my face, knowing it’s going to do no good. I earned these tears. When I glance up to him standing in front of me, he has this look on his face, eyes intense and full of love, that makes my breath falter.

  “What?” I ask him, suddenly self-conscious under his scrutiny of my short hair and bandaged chest so that I start to cross my arms over it.

  “Uh-uh,” he says as he lowers himself to the ground beside me and takes my hands in his so that I can’t cover myself up. “Don’t you dare cover up that beautiful body of yours.”

  I roll my eyes and get that lift of his eyebrows in reprimand, which causes me to smirk. He leans forward and brushes a soft kiss to my lips before settling on the floor next to me. He blows out a breath before nodding his head in complete acceptance—of what, I have no idea.

  “Today I had planned for your family and Ry and Colton to head on out here and have a barbecue. I had grand plans of entertainment and fun to keep your mind occupied and free of the shadow.” I smile at him and his thoughtfulness. He’s so damn good to me. “I had plans for a bonfire down by the pond. Friends, family … surround you with love so that I could do something…. I had it all planned perfectly.” He looks down at our joined hands and laughs softly. “But as we’ve both learned over the past year, sometimes fate has different plans for us.”

  I snort at the truth in that statement. At how cancer tested me. At how HaLex should have failed with my preoccupation with my treatment, but how instead Danny stepped forward and offered to help, and now it’s thriving and in demand. At how I broke my own rules and tied those strings I didn’t want into double knots around the heart of the man in front of me.

  “That’s so sweet of you. We can still have them over, have a celebration instead,” I tell him, mistaking his fixation on our joined hands as one of disappointment.

  He slowly lifts his eyes to meet mine, and that soft smile on his lips owns my heart like I never could have imagined before. “What’s the one thing we’ve learned through all of this?” he asks me.

  “That cancer sucks ass.”

  He throws his head back and laughs loudly, the sound so welcome to my ears when he’s been so worried himself over the scans. “Well, that’s true, but that wasn’t what I was going for.”

  “Um … that wall sex is definitely hot.” I say, my fingers walking their way up his bare chest, my thoughts turning to how I want to be festive with Becks.

  “You are incorrigible!” he says, grabbing my wrists and holding them in his grip, humor in his voice and his pants beginning to tent. At least I know it’s a possibility. “But very right again. And maybe if you can be serious for a second, we can have some very hot wall sex in a few minutes.” He raises an eyebrow at me and mixes it with that cocksure smirk of his, and I know he’s just thrown down a challenge that I will willingly accept.

  “So I answer the question right, I get wall sex?” He nods, causing my libido to stir to life and my mind to scatter, trying to figure out what the answer could be.

  “Hm. Let’s see…. You like rules.”

  “And you like to break them, you smart-ass.”

  “I need help, Mr. Daniels, because you mentioned wall sex, and now all I can think about is you pinning me over there”—I point to the wall behind him—“and you sliding your rock-hard—”

  “You’re distracting me.” He laughs as he leans forward and presses another kiss to my lips, his tongue lingering with mine for just a moment before he leans back, the gravity in his eyes again. “What’s the one rule we’ve lived by this whole year? Our motto?”

  I angle my head to look at him and wonder how Lex’s motto that we’ve adopted as ours holds any relevance when it seems we have all the time in the world now.

  “Time is precious. Waste it wisely,” I tell him, a ghost of a smile on my lips at how that advice in the voice mail she left me—that I still listen to—has come full circle in this moment.

  “Exactly,” Becks murmurs. “If that’s our motto, then we need to wise up here…. I don’t want to waste another precious moment without you as mine, Haddie Montgomery.”

  I begin to tell him he already has me when it hits me. My hands begin to tremble again, but this time for a very different reason. I watch as he reaches into his pants pocket and produces a black box, which I never even noticed because I was so stunned at my good news. I suck in a breath, his words and the sight causing my mind to leap ahead to what he’s about to do.

  And I’m not sure where I want to look more: at the box as it’s opened or at his eyes as he asks me. I look up because I’m only going to get one chance t
o catch this moment—this look in his eyes—and I’ll have forever to look at the ring on my finger.

  I laugh nervously, realizing he’d better be asking me to marry him because I just mentally agreed.

  “We’ve been to hell and back, and I love you more for every single step of that journey. I only hope you feel half of what I feel when you look at me, when you love me, or when you laugh with me. The world stops for me—time stands still—when I put my arms around you. I love that feeling, and I love that I’ve only ever felt that way with you. I want to be the first thing you touch in the morning and the last thing you taste at night before you dream. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Had…. I want to stop wasting that precious time. Will you marry me?”

  I launch myself at Becks with a shriek, our bodies colliding and falling backward as I rain kisses all over his face, repeating how much I love him again and again. Somewhere in my barrage of expressed love, he manages to hold my hand still enough to slide the oval-shaped diamond solitaire onto my ring finger.

  “Is that a yes?” he laughs out as I straddle his hips and lean down to kiss him again, my lips on his. Smile, kiss, smile, repeat cycle.

  “Yes!” I cry out at him, my heart so full of love and the future that all I can think about is that this gorgeous, caring, wonderful, sexy man beneath me really wants feisty, tell-it-like-it-is me to be his.

  My city to his country.

  I lean forward and press my lips to his again, slipping my tongue between them, my hips grinding against his out of pure physical response. He groans at the sensation, and I start laughing.

  Wall sex is hot.

  But just-got-engaged-sex-on-the-kitchen-floor is even better.

  Why waste time maneuvering to the wall? It’s a precious thing after all.

  You saw how they fell in love.

  Now see how Becks and Haddie first met.

  Turn the page for a bonus scene!