To Have and to Hold Read Online Free

wanted, but nothing more.
    All those emotions, everything they’d grown to feel together, all those weeks of sliding, slowly, toward each other, so gradually that they hadn’t even been able to admit it at first…
    All those conversations, the “No, we shouldn’t; it would be too awkward and we can’t endanger the girls’ friendship over a passing lust frenzy…”
    All his confessions about what held him back.
    All hers.
    They hadn’t happened to him.
    It was—
    It was as if she’d been alone, as if she’d dreamt those eight amazing weeks, as if she’d invented a fantasy
him
…
    As if
they’d
never happened at all.
    Standing there with the man she’d been planning to spend the rest of her life with, she felt an overwhelming, suffocating loneliness.
    She gave herself a moment to wallow in it, then pushed it aside. She didn’t like to feel sorry for herself. She never had. If there was a solution to be found, if research or hard work or pure stubbornness could yield results, she would
not
dwell on the downside.
    “You have to go to the doctor.”
    “Yeah. I’d figured that much out.”
    “They’ll know more. They’ll be able to tell you if it’s permanent. I mean, people recover from amnesia, right? That’s what happens in the movies. There’s a big a-ha moment, right when there’s some major crisis and he has to remember his past in order to avoid making the same mistake twice, or to apprehend the killer, or whatever.”
    He laughed, but it was a humorless laugh. “Yeah, but don’t they also always have a doctor saying, ‘I don’t know. You could remember in a day, a week, a month, a year, or possibly never’?”
    “Yes,” she admitted, and they were both quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Let’s not borrow trouble. Let’s see what they say.”
    As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wondered if they were presumptuous.
Let’s. Let us. Us.
    Once before in her life, she’d let herself get used to the idea of
us
. Let herself get used to the comfort of
knowing
someone felt the same way about her as she felt about him. And once before, her life had been terribly altered by the discovery that she’d been wrong.
    This was why she’d resisted falling for Hunter in the first place. This was why she’d kept their relationship a secret from the girls all this time. Because you couldn’t count on
us
.
    Hunter had convinced her you could. He’d made her believe it. But he’d been wrong.
    “So we were…?” He inclined his head questioningly.
    “Involved. Yes.”
    “How involved?”
    There was something charmingly male and guileless about the question that made her half smile, despite how lost she felt. Of course, like the thirteen-year-old boy trapped inside him, he wanted to know first off whether they’d slept together. Next, he’d want to know whether he’d been good at it.
    “Very,” she said, remembering their last night together and then wishing she hadn’t as a wave of sadness washed over her.
    For a moment there was something in his eyes. A dark glimmer. And she waited, breathless, for him to say what she hoped to hear.
We could try again.
Or, better yet,
There is something so familiar about the way I feel right now. As if I’m falling all over again.
    But then the look was gone. And all she saw in his rugged, handsome face was regret and guilt.
    —
    Maybe if he weren’t so tired, maybe then he’d have been able to give her what her eyes were pleading for. But ever since he’d been ripped open, he’d felt a thousand years old. It was harder to catch his breath. His blood seemed to surge pell-mell through his veins and arteries, a feeling like an adrenaline rush but for no good reason.
    “Do you believe me?” she whispered.
    Maybe he should have been more cynical, more suspicious, but it hadn’t actually occurred to him that she might be lying. She’d never seemed deceitful. He wasn’t rolling in dough, and he didn’t own anything worth committing fraud