“I’ll take that as a confirmation that I wasn’t the only one having trouble staying away?”

Leaning back enough so I could look in his stormy gray eyes, I couldn’t even be embarrassed about my assault on him. He was still gripping me to him tight enough to let me know he needed me close, but not so hard that it was painful.

“I think we’re gonna find out real soon that neither of us is the only one feeling a certain way about the other,” I whispered, and a smile pulled at my lips. “I felt like I didn’t know what to talk to you about. I kept thinking how was I supposed to start a conversation with you when I can’t find the happy medium between getting to know you and already knowing that I need you.”

His lips tilted up into a soft smile, and one of his hands left my waist to brush loose hair from my face. “You need me.” It wasn’t a question, but I nodded my head anyway. “This is what I’ve been needing. You, exactly where you are now, reassuring me I’m not crazy for what I feel for you and what we’re about to go through.”

My hands slid from his neck down to the black undershirt covering the lean muscles of his chest. “If you’re crazy, then I’m right there with you . . . but I think we need to figure out what exactly it is we’re about to go through.” His smile fell, but acceptance settled over his features as I continued. “Because I don’t know what we are, what we’re going to be, what we’re doing—and I need to. Despite my feelings for you, Brody, this whole situation is terrifying for me. And with how hard it already is to stay away from you . . . well, I can’t go into this blindly. I can’t just know that we want each other and be okay with it—we need to talk about what that means for us.”

“I agree,” he mumbled as he twisted more of my hair away. “But first, there’s something that’s been bothering me. What’s your name?”

My eyebrows pinched together, and I automatically answered, “KC.”

“But those are just initials.”

“Yeah, but that’s what everyone calls me.” It felt like I was going to throw up once I knew what he was asking, and though I knew how stupid that was, I couldn’t shake that sinking feeling. No one in Oregon knew my name. But Brody’s different, I kept telling myself.

“I don’t want to call you what everyone else calls you. Not when I’ve already admitted things I probably never should have said out loud. Not when I’m about to ask you for so much more and hope like hell that you don’t think I’m crazy for wanting something I shouldn’t be allowed to have. So, please, what’s your name?”

“Kamryn,” I whispered, then cleared my throat to say, louder, “My name’s Kamryn.”

“Thank you.” That crooked smile crossed his face as he pushed me back toward the opposite counter near the sink and placed his hands on the counter on either side of me, caging me in. Dipping his head, his gray eyes looked directly into mine as his soft voice filled the space between us. “I have been thinking about my life, my situation, and you ever since I ran into you at my brother’s house. No matter how you think about this, it seems wrong, and I know it won’t be easy for us—and if you’ll go through this with me, I’m so sorry for putting you through this in advance. But I need you to know some things before I even ask you to do this.”

“Okay,” I said warily, waiting for him to continue.

“Kamryn, I need you to know that I don’t do this. I’m not this guy. I’ve been faithful to my wife even though we’ve had a shitty marriage. I need you to know that I haven’t slept in the same bed as her for almost five years, we’ve been married for almost six, and the first year of our marriage I was away in the Army. Even still, I have always been faithful to her and never even given another woman a second glance . . . until you.”

“I don’t . . .” I trailed off, shaking my head quickly. “I don’t understand why you’re married to her then. Jace and Kinlee said she was horrible, and with what you just said, I just don’t . . . it doesn’t make sense.”

“Olivia and I have been together since high school. When I left for the Army after we graduated, we stayed together for two completely different reasons. For me, it was convenient to have someone when I visited home. For her, she liked dating someone her parents hated. But it was just a title, and someone to fool around with when I was here, nothing more. Then she got pregnant, and I figured if I was man enough to get her pregnant, I was man enough to marry her.”

My stomach clenched and dread filled me. I couldn’t do this to a child, I couldn’t break up a kid’s parents.

“I wasn’t going to let her go through that alone. But that entire first year after we got married she wouldn’t even see me, and she wouldn’t let me see our son until I left the military and bought a house for us. Once that happened, we shared a bed for a few months, but we still didn’t share a bed most of that time. After those first few months of living together, we went to separate rooms, and it’s been that way since.”

“You have a kid?” I breathed.

A dark look fell over Brody’s face, and he slowly shook his head back and forth. “No, I don’t.”

The pain and hardness in his voice had my body tightening, and I knew it was a sensitive subject for him. Whatever had happened, it was clear that Brody wasn’t ready to tell me. “Then if you don’t have any kids, why are you still with her?”

“Because I married her, and there’s been a lot of hard times for us. I couldn’t just leave her.”

A harsh breath left me, and my eyebrows slammed down. “Then once again, Brody, what is the point of all this? If you’ve stayed married to someone like her, and just admitted to me you couldn’t leave her before, why are you here? Why are we doing this—whatever this is? I don’t know what I was expecting from you, but from what you said the other day, it wasn’t this. I’m sorry, but I’m not okay with being someone’s mistress!”

“Kamryn, no! You’re not getting it. Yes, I stayed with her even though my life has been hell over the last five years since I’ve been back in Oregon, but I thought it was my punishment, and it was a punishment I would have gladly paid for the rest of my life if I’d never met you. But I did.”

“Punishment?” I whispered, my voice barely audible.

Brody continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Kamryn, if—if I’m not the only one feeling this, needing this, then I’ll leave Olivia to be with you, and not once for the rest of my life will I regret my decision in doing that. But it’s going to take time. Olivia has some issues, and there are things I have to work through with her first to make sure she’ll be okay when I do leave. She spends most of her time with her parents anyway, but I just need to make sure she’ll go to them rather than do something stupid. Her family is vicious, so we’ll need to be quiet until I can file for divorce. I know this is asking a lot of you—to be patient with me before we can be completely together. If you can’t do that and you want to wait until I’m already divorced, then we’ll wait. But if not, I told you on Monday, this isn’t going to be an affair, for me this is all or nothing.”

My mouth opened, but no words came out as I stared into his sincere gray eyes. I believed he wasn’t the type of guy to normally do this, and if he said he was all in, then there wasn’t a part of me that worried he was lying to me about leaving Olivia. I still didn’t want to be the person who broke up someone’s marriage, but I had to agree wholeheartedly with what he’d said earlier this week . . . I would be insane to walk away from this.

The old Kamryn would have run in the opposite direction as fast as she could, and I knew Barbara and Kinlee would never approve, but I also knew that going through life and never again feeling the way he made me feel would be the opposite of living. No matter how happy I’d been here in Jeston before I met him, I could never go back to the way I’d been.