Total pages in book: 174
Estimated words: 172061 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 860(@200wpm)___ 688(@250wpm)___ 574(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 172061 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 860(@200wpm)___ 688(@250wpm)___ 574(@300wpm)
Daisy tapped the fingers of her left hand over my chest. My mother’s ring a circle of significance.
“What happened between last night and today?” she finally whispered, those fingertips traipsing tenderly over my chest.
I hugged her a little tighter, and I pressed my mouth to her crown. “You. You happened, Little Wallflower. Because only you have the power to change everything.”
I inhaled a steadying breath. “I spent last night out on that couch, lying there wide awake. Thinking about you on the other side of the door. At war with how much I loved you and feeling like I could never be worthy of you. Caught in the shame of the things I’ve done, all while knowing I was meant to stand for you…”
I wound a lock of her hair around my finger. Blood charging through my body. Spirit moaning.
I needed to tell her. Admit everything. Lay myself bare.
Fear skittered free and fast. What would she do? What would she think? Would she leave me after I just got her?
The confession pushed up my throat, but I couldn’t find a way to expel it. One day. One day soon.
I forced out, “I figured after the way I treated you last night, you wouldn’t show. You’d come to your senses and decide I wasn’t worth the pain that I inflicted. But then you came through those courtroom doors…”
My chest tightened. “And fuck, Daisy, I knew I was looking at my entire life, and if I was ever going to live it in any way, it was time to claim it, that was if you’d have me.”
Her soft floral scent drifted around me. An embrace. Her hair in my face and her spirit wrapping me whole. “Did you think I’d actually deny you, Cash Cunningham?”
“You should.” There was almost a grin that hitched at the edge of my mouth.
“Never,” she whispered back. “Because you were meant for me, just like I was meant for you.”
Silence drifted around us for a long moment before she finally pushed into the darkness that hovered in the periphery. “You left because you blamed yourself.”
She didn’t even phrase it a question, taking us back to the fight we had last night. What she so clearly heard when I made the admission.
My mind flashed through what happened that day so long ago. Blipped through the memories of who I became on the flip of a dime. The viciousness that I had become.
“If I made a different decision, I could have stopped it. But I chose pride over circumstance.”
I could feel Daisy hesitating before she pressed into the past. “Matthew was really in trouble?”
Grief gripped hold. “Yeah. I thought he was full of shit. Trying to manipulate me. Turned out he was involved in horrible things.”
He wasn’t the only one.
I could feel the furrow of her brow, her hesitation to even utter it. “It wasn’t an accident?”
I knew for all these years that’s what she thought. It’s what everyone in that town would have believed.
Rage flitted through my insides. “No, Daisy. It wasn’t an accident.”
Ancient sorrows wound through her being. “Cash…but the news said…” I could feel it when the sinking realization hit the pit of her stomach. “You didn’t go to the police with what you knew.”
“Wasn’t necessary because I took care of it.”
She took a moment to grapple with that statement.
The fact that I was the one who meted justice. Horror clawed through my conscience. But had I taken it too far?
“And then…you ran.” She didn’t need to state the part where I left her behind doing it.
Pain gripped my soul. “My hands were tainted. I knew what I did. I chose my path.”
“You still had your scholarship.”
“There was no fucking chance I was playing football again. I was no longer that Cash Cunningham. I’d become me.”
“No, Cash.” Her delicate fingers traipsed over the tattoos on my chest as she peeked up at me. “Your heart was broken.”
“I didn’t deserve for it to be broken. Not when I was responsible for it.”
Her head barely shook, and her voice turned the softest it’d ever been. “Matthew is the one who was responsible, Cash.”
“I made the conscious choice.”
“You couldn’t have known. Couldn’t have known what Matthew got himself into. Couldn’t have imagined what would happen.”
“But it did.”
“And you left me.” The words tremored off her tongue.
It hit me like a blunt force trauma.
The fact that I was responsible for that, too.
“Guess I broke both of our hearts.”
“You saved me, Cash. And you almost gave your life trying to save the rest of your family.”
“But I wasn’t enough.”
She tucked herself closer.
“You are enough, Cash. Because you’re good and full of love, even though you somehow think that you’re a bad person. But to me, that person you see doesn’t exist. You said I’m blinded, but I think it’s you who can’t see clearly. You who can’t see clearly when it comes to yourself.”