One More Time (Paradise Bay Book 2) by Ella Linden

One More Time (Paradise Bay Book 2) by Ella Linden

Author:Ella Linden [Linden, Ella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance
Publisher: Peitho Press
Published: 2017-02-25T06:00:00+00:00


Chapter Nine

While the pizza baked, Iris went to work washing the greens and preparing the salad. Carter had offered to do it, but she preferred to keep herself busy. Carter perched on one of the stools on the other side of the kitchen island and watched as she worked.

The awkward silence between them had just kind of stretched and deepened, and she wished she could get back to the light-hearted flirting they’d managed earlier, but being here, surrounded by memories and broken dreams, made that so much more difficult than she’d expected.

She glanced up at him, meeting baby blue eyes, then quickly looked back down again.

“It’s weird, huh?” he asked quietly, and she nodded.

“It’s weird and quiet. I thought we were getting over the weirdness back there. I didn’t realize how kind of morbid this would feel.”

“Morbid,” he said flatly.

She shrugged.

He sighed and she chanced a glanced up at him. He was looking down at his hands. “It’s only morbid if we really think whatever we had is dead. I don’t think that. Do you?”

“I’d like to think not.”

He was still watching her, and she took a breath and went on. “Do you remember how many arguments we had, standing right in these very spots? Do you remember how many times you stalked out of here, going to work on something, rather than listen to me anymore?”

“Do you remember how many times you laughed so hard you cried? Or how many times we sat here, well past when we should have been asleep, talking about nothing at all? Because I remember a lot more of that than arguments.”

“There were way more arguments,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Maybe. But I remember the other times better.”

She studied him. “Really?”

“Really.” Then he grimaced. “But you remember the other times more?”

She shrugged. “At the end, it was mostly arguing. Or silence.”

“Yeah.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “I wasn’t paying attention. Or I just assumed we were stronger than we really were. It never even crossed my mind that you’d leave me.” Then he let out a bitter laugh. “But, like you said, I was doing a good job of closing myself off from whatever I didn’t want to deal with.”

Iris didn’t know what to say. She finished tossing the salad, then went to work mixing up a vinaigrette as she thought over his words. She froze and looked at him.

“What?”

“All the stuff that went on that year… you’d just lost your dad, your mom moved away, you took over here, Scott started the brewery, you totally changed everything as far as running the farm, I moved in… damn it.”

“I’m not following.”

“You took one crazy, life-changing hit after another in a span of a few months. And I know you deal with things by being quiet and working it through… I am a clueless bitch.”

“Would you stop that?” he said, eyes blazing. “You are the furthest thing from either of those. I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“Carter, the more life threw at you, the quieter you got, and I only added to the insanity nagging you to be different.



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