Page 187 of Unleashed
"Please, Ace. Don't do this."
"It's not me doing this, Harper. It's you. You're choosing."
"I don't have a choice!"
"You do. You always have a choice. And every time, you choose the thing that isn't me."
That one stops me cold. Because it sounds true. From where he's standing, it is true. He doesn't know about the video. He doesn't know about the blackmail. He doesn't know that every word coming out of my mouth is a lie designed to protect him from something worse than heartbreak.
All he sees is the woman he loves choosing a deal over a future. Again. For the second time in their lives.
And I can't tell him otherwise. Not without putting a gun in his hand and pointing it at Hudson and watching everything burn.
Because right now, Hudson has the power over me.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Ace
Everything crashes over me at once.
The image of Harper in a white dress. Walking down an aisle toward a man she doesn't love. Saying words that should be mine. A ring on her finger that isn't the one I've been carrying since I was seventeen, sketching it in the margins of notebooks, planning how I'd get down on one knee on the ranch where we grew up and ask her to be mine forever.
Instead, she will become Harper Blake.
And the dream I've held on to, the one that kept me alive through years of silence and the grief of losing my father and the loneliness of sleeping alone, becomes a joke. A punchline to a story that was never funny. Because she will have done all of it with another man first. The dress. The vows. The kiss. The name.
First times that were supposed to be ours.
I can't cope with that. The knowledge sits in my chest like a blade turned sideways, and every breath pushes it deeper.
I don't need her to do this for my family. We don’t need Gianna's favors or whatever deal she's convinced herself willsave us. I just need her. I need her beside me so I can breathe again.
After Paulie. After Dad. After nearly losing Wyatt a few months ago. I am hanging on by a thread so thin I can feel it fraying every time the wind changes.
And every time I get close to something that feels like happiness, something rips it away. She did this to me before, just left me standing in this same town with my heart in my hands and nothing to do with it but bleed.
I can't live on a tightrope anymore, waiting for the stars to align. They aren't going to. And maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe the universe keeps pulling her away because keeping her close to me means keeping her close to the danger. The war we're about to start.
Maybe keeping her safe means keeping her away from me.
And maybe that's the thing I have to accept, even if it kills me.
"Your choice, Goldie." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "It's me or him. You walk down that aisle, there is no turning back. If you do that, I won’t let you back into my heart."
The tears cascade down her cheeks, falling freely. Her whole body is trembling. It takes every piece of strength left in me not to cross this room and kiss them away the way I always have. The way I thought I always would.
The silence hangs in the air. The longest silence of my life. Longer than eight seconds on the back of any bull. Longer than the years she was gone.
"I have to marry Hudson, Ace. That's my answer. But it doesn’t need to be the end of us."
The words hit me square in the center of my chest. A bullet I didn't dodge. The air leaves my lungs and doesn't come back. My vision blurs. My knees almost go, right there, in her childhoodbedroom, standing in front of the woman I've loved since I was sixteen years old.
"That's your choice?" My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Your business deal is more important than our future?"
She shakes her head. "I told you. I'm coming back."
"No, Harper." I take a step back. "You are not coming back to me. Not this time."
