Page 21 of By All Accounts
As much as I didn’t want to dwell on the past, I was certain Finn wanted to do it a hundred times less. We could have this breath, this reprieve. That was, after all, what my home had always been to him before.
CHAPTER 8
SOPHIE
The unspoken history between Daniel and Finn was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. They moved around each other like they’d shared space more than once, but both of them flinched if the other got too close. The table between us felt more like a hindrance than a help, and for once I wasn’t sure how to move things forward.
“Respectfully, I don’t think we can table it,” I said. Two sets of eyes turned on me, one piercing blue and the other a familiar, rich brown. “Or if we can, I don’t want to.”
“Yeah.” Daniel leaned back and scrubbed a hand down his face. “That’s fair.”
Across from us, Finn took a substantial swallow of wine, his gaze flickering toward the bottle, to Daniel, to me.
“The day I met you, I told you I wasn’t my best self,” Finn said carefully.
“And I told you I could be persistent.”
Finn sighed and turned himself toward Daniel. “The day I met you, I didn’t tell you I wasn’t my best self, but?—”
“You weren’t,” Daniel said gently.
Finn shook his head and stared at his wine, and from the corner of my eye, I saw Daniel’s hold on his facialexpression begin to crack. My future husband—in his heart—was a caretaker and a pleaser. It was one of the things that made him such a phenomenal lover and breathtaking partner. He put me above himself in most cases, put everyone around him on a pedestal he should have claimed for himself. I knew him well enough to know he looked at Finn and wanted to fix him.
“I’m still not, but I’m more myself than I was before, and maybe this is…” Finn trailed off, took a drink, and looked everywhere but at Daniel. “Maybe this is an opportunity for us to have a second chance at meeting for the first time.”
Oh.
I’d been right about this man, but also so very wrong. I’d looked at Finn when we were at the paint store, shoulder to shoulder with chips in hand, and I thought I’d had a read on him. It was easy to tell he had some baggage in hand, that he was guarded and wary, but self-aware enough to recognize both things about himself. He’dwarned meabout it, and it hadn’t scared me then. It didn’t scare me now.
But Daniel?
“I don’t think we can just pretend there’s no history between us,” he said.
“I didn’t…” Finn stopped himself, again. Drank some more wine, forced himself to look my fiancé in the eye before he said, “No, you’re right. That is exactly what I meant.”
Daniel let out an exhale that almost sounded like it very much wanted to be a laugh. “I know.”
“Okay.” Finn tapped his hands against the table, held his right one out for Daniel like he wanted a handshake. “My name is Finn Covington.”
“Daniel Boyd.” They shook hands, then Daniel returned his to my thigh.
“I hear you’re engaged?” Finn swallowed hard, his blue stare flickering toward mine.
“This is Sophie,” Daniel said, smiling in my direction. He squeezed my leg and I held my hand out for Finn. He took it gently in his, and leaned close enough to brush his lips across my knuckles.
“It’s very good to meet you.” He glanced up at me, lips still warm against my fingers. “You look like someone I just met last weekend. She helped me pick the new paint color for my office.”
“Did she do good?”
Finn pulled away, let go of my hand. “It looks better than the last color,” he said.
“Sulking Room Pink is a little pretentious.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, flashing a quick smile before returning to himself again. “So, like I said…Finn Covington. I’m thirty-six, I’ve got four, maybe five brothers, maybe more. I work in finance, it’s horribly boring, and my last relationship was a married couple who thought fucking meandfuckingwithme would be the thing that saved them from divorce.”
He finished the rest of his wine and shoved the glass toward the center of the table, his shoulders heaving with a deep inhale. Without a word, Daniel grabbed the bottle and dumped the rest of the contents into Finn’s glass. Finn gave him a grateful smile, another thing I imagined Daniel had—at some point—become familiar with.
“I loved them both, in my own way. Maybe more than I should have. And because of that, I was not good at breaking it off when I needed to. When they came back to me, I let them. When they left, I let them. When they came back again, together or separately…” He went quiet again, swallowing the rest of the sentence off with some more wine.
