She made a noise in her throat. “Are you sure you don’t want to keep it? It’s beautiful.”

I laughed drily. “It’s not mine. I don’t belong here, and we both know beauty isn’t everything. Besides, the numbers the lawyer was throwing around weren’t too shabby. I can pay off the medical bills I still owe. I can give you enough money to pay off grad school.” She lifted her head in surprise and gaped at me. I grinned at her. “I can buy into this new business Rome asked me to partner with him on. I can fix up the Nova. I can look at buying my own bar and moving out of my crappy apartment. It’s enough money to really start over with a clean slate.”

“Wow … all that for a bunch of weeds?”

I laughed. “You’ve been out of the country for too long. You’re a bona fide city girl now.”

She shrugged. “True enough, but I still wear my boots with pride.” We shared a grin and she told me with so much heart that it made my chest ache, “I just want you to do whatever is going to make you happy.”

That was exactly what I had told her when she said she was going to leave Denver and move to Austin so she could have more time with Jet.

“I had a shot at happy. It didn’t really work out for me.”

She sighed again and got to her feet as I rose to my own. I picked up the plain urn that was sitting on the steps next to my feet and lifted an eyebrow at her. She nodded solemnly and followed me as I started walking toward one of the tobacco fields.

“You can’t just leave things with Royal the way they are, Asa. You both deserve better than that, and she’s smart. Once her heart stops hurting so bad, she’s going to start putting the pieces together on her own.”

We did deserve better, and maybe Royal would figure it all out in time, but I didn’t have an answer on how to fix it while that time passed, so I just looped an arm around Ayden’s shoulders as we walked silently into one of the fields to shut the door on the past and all the bad things and demons that lived there in the dark—for good. There was no more before and after. There was only this moment; although it sucked and felt terrible, it was still the only moment I wanted to be in.

CHAPTER 18

Royal

My first instinct was to show up on Asa’s doorstep five seconds after he left me and demand answers all while knocking him into next week. My second instinct was to curl up in a ball and cry my eyes out for days, because even if this was just another one of his twisty games, I was done playing with him. So I split the difference and called him every single day for a week, praying he would answer and alternately hoping he would just show up at my door with a brilliant excuse full of pretty words that would set things right. I did all of that while hiding out at Dominic’s apartment or sequestered in my bed with Saint at my side trying to talk me off the ledge. None of my emotional upheaval was helped by the fact my mother was suddenly all over me trying to earn a mom-of-the-year award. I couldn’t turn around without her asking me how I was, without her telling me there were a million fish in the sea, without her telling me that a guy like Asa wasn’t worth a second of my time let alone a single bit of sorrow. She was trying to distract me but all she succeeded in doing was annoying the hell out of me.

I was frantic and furious, mostly because I knew something had happened, something I didn’t understand. Something had forced him to walk away from me, and I needed to know what that something was if I was ever going to have a chance to come to terms with the fact that Asa had purposely ripped my heart out of my chest and handed it back to me.

When it became glaringly obvious that Asa wasn’t going to answer any of my calls, I cried my last tear and decided I was done. Done worrying about what his reasons were. Done trying to justify his actions for whatever they were. Done hurting over a man that had only ever promised to hurt me from the very start. He had kept his word all right.

I shoved everything I was feeling up into a tiny little ball and did my best to ignore it while I threw myself into work. I forgot to eat. I forgot to keep in touch with Dom. I forgot to go to the gym. All I did was work and go home, work and go home, and then work some more. My new partner asked me a hundred times if I was okay and I just waved him off. Luckily, around the same time that I decided to be an emotionless android, Barrett and I got handpicked by our lieutenant to be on a special task force to investigate a series of break-ins involving all of the different medical marijuana dispensaries that had cropped up in Denver since the drug had been legalized across the state. It was a perfect excuse for me to shut out everything else and brush everyone off when they were checking up on me. I just lost myself in work and pretended like I had never even heard of Asa Cross.

It was all working great … well, aside from the fact that I was giving myself an ulcer, waking up in the middle of the night with tears running down my face, and my heart squeezing so hard that it felt like there was a fist around it. I was faking it well enough that my mom finally backed off and Dom stopped threatening to move onto my couch until I snapped out of my funk. The lie that I was fine fell from my lips as easily as the truth anymore. I told it so much that when I was awake I could almost believe it myself.

I had a rhythm of denial and deflection all in place, resigned to that being how the rest of my existence was going to be, when Saint popped by one night after work with a bottle of wine and some startling news. She told me over the first glass that Nash had paid Asa a visit and reported back that the blond bartender looked and sounded horrible. Over the second glass she informed me that Cora had let it slip that Rome had forced Asa to take a few days off work because he was in such a sorry state, and it was over the third that she let it be known that Asa’s dad had died in prison, so he had gone back to Kentucky for a week to settle the man’s estate. She also mentioned that tonight was his first night back at the Bar, so a bunch of the guys had headed down that way to check up on him. I had only taken a few sips from my first drink because I was so caught up in any tidbit of information she had about my whiskey-eyed charmer that I forgot I was even holding a full glass in my hand.

I was so stunned by the news about Asa’s dad that I almost dropped the glass from my suddenly nerveless fingers. I didn’t want to feel for him. I didn’t want sympathy and the need to see if he was okay to fill me all the way up on the inside, but it did. We polished off the bottle and Saint gave me a hug and told me it was all right to hurt for someone I still loved, which made me want to break the arctic freeze I had surrounded myself in and start crying and being hysterical all over again. It took about half a minute from the time she walked back across the hall to her own apartment for me to grab my keys, which were thankfully in the right spot for once, and head out to the 4Runner. I was operating on autopilot. Asa had given no indication that he wanted to see me, that he cared one way or the other that we had split up, but everything inside of me was drawing me back to him. It seemed like he was always going to be the magnetic north my compass was pointed at.