Brody Read Free Page A

for so long, and my heart still hurt as much today as it had when I’d broken up with him almost three years ago.
    “I won’t make you regret it this time, Ri. I promise you.”
    “Don’t.” I shook my head, feeling helpless and hopeless and confused. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Not again.”
    “Look at me.” He gripped my chin, forcing me to look at him. “Can’t you see what this has been doing to me, trying to live without you? Those days we spent together in Colorado just proved to me how much I need you.”
    “If that’s true, why haven’t you reached out to me? You let me believe that you were over me, over us.”
    “Never.” He kissed me hard and fast, taking my breath away. “I didn’t call because I didn’t think you wanted me to. I didn’t know if you were still with him, or if you’d accepted his proposal.”
    “Why didn’t you ask Jaci or Nex? They could have told you.”
    “I was afraid.”
    Hearing Brody admit he was afraid of something, anything, was shocking.
    “I knew if I found out you’d agreed to marry him, it would just send me deeper into this spiral of depression.”
    That word, depression, scared me. I knew the impact it could have on people’s lives. “What are you talking about?”
    “Ever since we broke up, I’ve been…” His shoulders shook as he took several deep, soundless breaths. “In a really bad place. I wanted you back so badly, I just didn’t know how to reach you. I didn’t know if I could be the man you needed, and I knew it wasn’t fair to come back to you unless I was.”
    I knew he was being sincere. His torment was painfully obvious, especially to someone who knew him as well as I did. “You could have tried to talk to me.”
    “Would you have listened?”
    I lowered my head, unable to answer him. If he’d shown up at my door before, there was a very real possibility I would have sent him away out of self-preservation. “I don’t know.”
    “That’s my point.” He slipped his hand under my hair, his palm resting against my jaw as his eyes held mine. “When we were just sleeping together, I knew it wasn’t what you wanted. It wasn’t enough for you. But I felt like at least I could breathe when you were sleeping in my arms. When I was kissing you, making love to you…” He closed his eyes. “It was the only time I felt alive.”
    I’d wanted to hear him say these things then. Not now. Now it was too late. Wasn’t it?
    “When you ended it, when you told me there was someone else, a part of me died.” When I shook my head, he said, “I’m serious. A part of me died. I feel like I can’t get it back. I can’t find the guy I used to be. Nothing makes me happy anymore.”
    “Not even poker?”
    “No.”
    I never thought I’d hear those words pass his lips. Poker had always been his reason for waking up. Being the best in the world was the only thing that had been on his radar for years.
    “I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t know what I can do to help you.” Before he could respond, I curled my hands around his biceps, pleading with him to understand where I was coming from, what this was doing to me. “I have to protect myself, Brody. You think it’s been easy for me, trying to get over you? It hasn’t. It’s been hell.”
    “And doesn’t that tell you something? The fact that you can’t get over me, that I can’t get over you. Doesn’t that tell you that maybe we shouldn’t be apart at all?”
    “You’re just here because you had nowhere else to go.” It was harsh, but it was also the truth. “You couldn’t show up on your brothers’ doorsteps and drop a bombshell like this in the middle of the night. So you came here, to me, just like you always do when you need a shoulder to cry on.”
    Not that he’d ever literally cried on my shoulder, except when his mother died. But I’d always been his go-to person when he couldn’t talk to his family about something. I was his security