She wanted to strangle him and crush her mouth against his and force him to be real with her. Her hope that time would bring down the wall separating them lay in ashes at her feet. She hadn’t handled that well just now, but if this was going to work, he had to open himself up to her! And maybe he never would. And what had she just done?

She loved him, yet she’d driven him away. She couldn’t let him go—

Even right this minute.

She genuinely could not let him go.

She yanked open the door to find that he was already storming back toward her, the black sky his backdrop, features set. He entered her foyer, and she slammed the door for the second time in the space of a minute. This time, instead of shutting him out, she’d shut him in.

They faced off.

“Are you going to leave Misty River?” she demanded.

“What?”

“You’re going to leave, aren’t you?”

“I am never going to leave.” He spoke each word distinctly. “If Misty River is where you live, it will always—always—be where I live, too.”

Surprise stilled some of her inner chaos. “It will?”

“Yes. I love you,” he said almost savagely. “I love you, Finley. You’re my breath. And so I felt like I was suffocating when I thought that you might not wake up. If you die, I will die. So if I’m protective of you, that’s why.”

Her . . . her brain couldn’t catch up with the pace of his words and the raw emotion surrounding each one.

“I don’t deserve you,” he said. “And I don’t expect you to love me back. I know that you’ll never love anyone the way you loved Chase—”

She pressed a fingertip to his lips. It seemed she was crying. She took a moment to inhale, then removed her finger from his mouth. “You’re right. I’ll never love anyone the way I loved Chase. But I do love Luke the way I love Luke. When I loved Chase, I was a younger, sweeter, more naïve person. A person unscathed by grief. I’m a different person now. And this person loves you. To the bottom of my heart. With everything I am. I love you.”

His face smoothed with shock.

“From the time I was a girl,” she continued, “all the way through to this present moment, I’ve been making my way to you. I’ll love you for every single day I have left.”

A pocket of silence.

Slowly, he took her into his arms and angled his gaze down to her.

“I love you.” He said it like a promise, then communicated the depth of that promise through a kiss—vulnerable and endlessly passionate. Soon her heart was thundering.

At last, no wall between them. His control had cracked. Her worries had been vanquished.