“Of course,” Ace said. “We’ll get out of your hair. I’ll come by tomorrow if you want, help assess the damage?”
“Thanks. I imagine we’ll just be making an insurance claim. And they’ll have to send someone out. Best we leave it untouched for now.”
“Fair point. Come by for a drink, though,” Ace said, touching the brim of his ball cap before walking away.
“Guess I better let you get rest, too,” Lydia said, putting her hand on Eli’s shoulder in a decidedly nonsisterly way. “I’ll come by and check in on you tomorrow.”
Eli didn’t protest.
Lydia squeezed Sadie’s shoulder, too, as she walked by her. “I’m happy to check in on you, too.”
That tipped her over into utter misery. Because she didn’t deserve that kindness. Not at all. “Thanks,” she said, her throat raw.
“I’ll go talk to the firemen,” Jack said, “see if there’s anything we need to know. I’ll report back.”
“I’m going to go find Connor,” Kate said, her voice thick as she pulled away from Sadie and walked in the direction of the main house.
That left Sadie and Eli, and a pile of glowing, charred wood, alone in the darkness.
She swallowed and tried again. “Eli, I...”
“We have to be done,” Eli said, cutting her off.
“What?”
“This. Us. It has to... I can’t do this,” he said.
* * *
Eli’s heart twisted into a knot in his chest, but it had to be said. It had to be done. Because yet again, while he’d been out enjoying himself, the whole world had fallen apart. All of this, the time spent with Sadie, had been an illusion.
When he didn’t keep control, the world burned. In this case, literally.
It was just too damn close to his other failures. Too damn close.
“When I’m with you, I forget what I’m doing. I forget other people. I forget myself. No, I don’t forget myself, because myself is all I think of. Myself and my dick, and it can’t happen like this. There is a reason that I’ve lived my life the way that I have. A reason that I can’t ignore for good sex.”
Sadie blinked rapidly, her eyes glossy in the dim light. And his stomach twisted, sick regret forming. But there was nothing else he could do. He needed to stay on top of this stuff and he wasn’t doing it.
His sister had just stood there in tears, his brother watching the one thing he’d held on to since losing his wife burn to nothing.
It was all way too reminiscent of the night when he hadn’t taken the keys. Of the last time Eli had let himself become distracted.
And it didn’t matter what Sadie said, because in the end, this was the result. It didn’t matter if he shouldn’t feel at fault. He did. And it didn’t change the fact that when he wasn’t holding up the world around him, it all seemed to fall apart.
For a second today, he’d thought he could be something different, have something different. And then all this had swooped in and reminded him just why that wasn’t possible.
Why he had to forget their moment in the woods, and every moment before. Why he had to stop wanting more, when more would never be in the cards for him. He knew that. He’d known that before Sadie Miller had blown into his life like a windstorm and rearranged his existence. Made him think that maybe everything he’d believed about his life, about himself, had been a lie.
Which was a whole lot crueler than never having hope had ever been.
For one moment, he’d thought he could do it. Thought he could punch the hell out of a guy who deserved it, thought he could sneak into the woods for a moment alone with the only woman who’d ever driven him that crazy.
Thought he could go to sleep with her every night and wake up with her every morning.
“Good sex, Eli?” she asked. “Really? Good sex? Because I think, I mean, I pretty freaking well think what we have is a lot more than that. I mean, I think we’d both had good sex before we ever met each other, and that...this is something else entirely. What we share is something else.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It can’t happen.” He wanted to lash out. To blame someone other than himself. He was so tired of carrying it all. And this was just another failure. “It seems like when you’re around barns tend to burn down,” he said. “You have a knack for spreading disaster, I guess.”
“Eli, please don’t do this. Not now, not... Please.”
“Sadie, I can’t afford any more distractions,” he said, the words scraping his throat raw. “And that’s all this was. All you are to me is a distraction.”
She stumbled backward and he felt like his heart lurched through his chest to follow her, leaving nothing but a bloody, vacant hole behind. This felt like he thought dying might. But he couldn’t take the words back now.
He wouldn’t.
It was the right thing to do. Other men could have wives and kids. Other men with other lives.
Not him. Never him.
“Well,” she said, her voice thick as she put distance between them. “Don’t let me distract you any longer.”
She turned and walked back in the direction of the B and B, which he only thought of as hers now. What a difference a few weeks made.
But he couldn’t afford the difference, and neither could any of the people who depended on him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
