It was the moment I'd dreamed about all of my life, especially in the eight months since I'd met and started dating Kade Hamilton.
Except it wasn't.
It wasn't until I'd heard his proposal that I realized I couldn't possibly accept.
I wanted to; I desperately wanted to say yes – I loved him that much – but with the question actually floating out there, I knew I couldn't.
In refusing him, I would be breaking my heart, but it came to me in a lightning bolt of clarity that if I accepted, he'd be breaking my heart over and over and over again. He didn't mean to and he wouldn't mean to – Kade was one of those rare combinations of total alpha and very tender toward me – but he would hurt me, without question.
The reason was simple: he didn't love me, or if he did, he wasn't in love with me.
Oh, I knew he cared about me. That was never in question. It was just how much he cared that kept me awake at night even as he held me in his arms.
I wasn't his beloved Charlotte, his wife who had died so tragically, so unexpectedly, six years ago. Since I'd become roommates with his sister, Katie, five and a half years ago, I'd heard the heartbreaking story of his loss, as well as the romantic, whirlwind relationship they'd had. The grief the entire family felt was still fresh when I met her, so Katie had told me many stories about the two of them before I'd even met him, years before he and I had become entangled.
He didn't know it, but I knew how he had gathered his family and hers to be hidden on the pier when he'd gone down on one knee and proposed to her as she sat on a bench. I'd actually seen it. Katie had cried as she'd shown me the beautiful proposal video one night when we'd been drinking, stopping it often to comment. Had she had any inkling her brother and I would ever get together, I'm sure she'd never have shown me or talked to me in such intimate detail about their for-the-ages romance. I didn't get the knee, I didn't get a special proposal of my own, merely a shadow of the one he'd made to the woman whom he loved beyond anything. Had he known that I'd seen the video his sister had made from her concealed spot, I'm sure he would have been mortified.
Images flashed through my mind and I realized, had probably realized all along but pushed those thoughts to the side because I loved him so deeply, that everything between us was conducted with the specter of Charlotte looming as the third party in our relationship.
Although, maybe I was actually the third party in their relationship. That seemed more likely.
When he asked me out the first time, that was, or should have been, my first red flag.
We'd been at a party at his sister's house, the third time we'd seen each other, and were chatting on her back porch, our conversation decidedly flirty. The two times we'd seen each other before, there had been glances and eye contact that burned hot.
"Abigail, would you like to go out for dinner next weekend?" He paused and shook his head with a soft smile. "I never thought I'd want to date again after Charlotte, but here I am, asking you out."
My delight that this intelligent, funny, gorgeous man was asking me out eclipsed the unease that skittered briefly down my spine. He was asking me out and mentioning his dead wife in the same breath? I rationalized it as him showing me that I meant enough to tempt him out of mourning five years after his wife had died. Certainly, five years was enough time to be ready to move forward?
After a couple of months of dating, when he'd finally invited me to his home that he and Charlotte had built together, I'd felt uncomfortable with all of the pictures of Charlotte still scattered about. A picture of her on their wedding day sat on the nightstand beside his bed, and a picture of the two of them on the beach, smiling into each other's faces, graced his dresser. Their wedding rings were in a tangled pile on a tiny ceramic plate in front of the picture. That was the night of our one and only argument, if you can even call it that. As he scattered kisses down my neck, he felt me stiffen and asked me what was wrong. When I'd gestured toward the pictures, I tried to explain my discomfort getting romantic with pictures of his wife facing me.
