Page 87 of Puppy Love

“And you?” she couldn’t help asking. “Why didn’t you leave?”

His eyes glittered. “I’m a Parks too, or hadn’t you noticed?”

Oh, she’d noticed, all right. She knew it down to her bones. Unlike him, however, she didn’t see it as a character flaw. Sure, Wallace’s stubborn refusal to change so much as a board in that farmhouse was nothing short of perverse, and she couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to be an eight-year-old Harrison, scared and hurt and abandoned by his mother, but Wallace had done an admirable job with what he’d been given.

Just look at the evidence—it was standing in front of her, glowering and grim and glorious. It was a six-foot bear of a man who’d fought incredibly hard for everything he had. Sure, the walls around his heart were so thick they were impenetrable by all but a tiny scrap of a puppy who’d managed to wriggle her way in, but he hadn’t been wrong to put those walls up.

That heart had been worth protecting.

“Your daddidlook happy,” she said, extending a hand toward Harrison.

He didn’t take it. Although Bubbles had found her foothold, Sophie’s path was not as easy.

“I know it’s hard to see it from where you’re standing, but things change. People change. Maybe she’s different. Maybe she came back to make amends.”

“That’s not how it works,” Harrison said. He crossed his arms, making it impossible for her to break through. “Sheshatteredthat man, Sophie. Smashed him to pieces. And now she’s just playing around with the shards.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe she—”

He shook his head. “She doesn’t want the house. You said it yourself. Too many bad memories. And she doesn’t want me either. If I hadn’t walked through the door and found her there, how many days would have gone by before I found out? How many weeks?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but Harrison interrupted by pushing himself from the barn door until he loomed over her.

When he spoke, however, his voice was gentle. His gaze was even more so.

“I know what you want from me,” he said. “I know what you want to hear. You want me to say that somewhere, deep inside, I still care about her. That I believe in forgiveness and second chances. That if my dad is capable of reversing twenty-two years of heartbreak and is willing to open his heart to the possibility of love, then I should be too.”

Sophie nodded. For once,shewas the one who couldn’t find the words. That was exactly what she wanted. The Harrison Parks who’d showed her that attic space—who’d fallen to his knees in front of her and refused to get up until he’d tasted the deepest parts of her—that was a man she could love.

That was a man shedidlove.

But they couldn’t spend the next sixty years hiding away from the world. Slipping past Harrison’s walls and into his heart was everything she’d imagined it would be, but she couldn’tlivethere.

“Well, I can’t,” Harrison said. “Iwantto—you have no idea how much—but I can’t.”

He sounded so beaten, so small, that her heart stopped.

“Don’t look at me like that, Sophie,” he said, his voice breaking. “You knew who I was going into this. I told you. I warned you.”

That was true. Hehadwarned her, listed his flaws like he was reading off the worst job application known to mankind. But what he’d forgotten to include, what he couldn’t even see, was all that was great inside of him.

So she did it for him.

“You’re brave,” she said, ticking off one finger. “Scarybrave, and in this weird kind of way where you won’t even acknowledge it. Honestly, I don’t know if you can. But most people don’t just give up everything and spend months at a time fighting huge, dangerous forest fires. That’s not a normal state of being.”

“Sophie,don’t—”

“You’re kind.” She ticked off another. “Oh, I know you try your best to hide it, but not even a magician could get the whole of your heart tucked away. You’re kind to animals, to your friends, to me. Jessica upheld your original story, you know. She told me that you were so tough on her, you made her cry during training…but then she also told me that you made sure she was the one who got to keep fighting fires after her boyfriend left her. I’m sorry, Harrison, but that was a kind thing to do.”

“It wasn’t like that—”

“You’re generous.” She bit her lip and flushed at the memory of their lovemaking mere hours before. “And I don’t just mean in bed, though that’s definitely true. I mean as a person. As a human being. As someone who opened his home to me without a word of protest—and right when I needed it most.”

“You have to stop.” Harrison’s hands came crashing down, clutching at her upper arms in desperation. “I know I gave you permission to push me, but I’m rescinding it now. No more. Not another word.”

“Harrison, you can’t—”

His hold on her didn’t lessen, his eyes as hard as granite. “I can and I did. No more pushing, no more playing. The game is over.”