Too Beautiful to Break Read online

  They’d stared at each other—him and Sage—for what seemed like hours, in the back room of that church. Until slowly, so slowly, she’d reached out and took his hand. And like a drowning man being thrown a life preserver, he’d hauled her forward. She’d been stiff as a board at first, but she’d gone more and more slack with each passing second, her head lolling to one side, giving Belmont a place to bury his face.

  “Thank you,” he’d said, astounded to find his pulse returning to normal. “Thank you, Miss Alexander.”

  “Please. It’s Sage,” she’d responded, lighter than a feather. “And…any time, Mr.—”

  “Belmont.”

  They’d both sighed.

  He could still hear it now as he stopped at the bottom of the house’s stoop. Any time. Someone else might have heard those words and recognized them as a pleasantry. Not him. He’d taken them literally, hadn’t he?

  I’m not your perfect Sage. I get angry. I make mistakes.

  The words she’d thrown out last night echoed in his ears like a resounding gong. He’d always known there was more to her—more she kept hidden under the surface—but as someone who hid their past like an ugly secret, he’d kept himself from pressing. Did she think he wouldn’t like what was revealed? Jesus, what he wouldn’t do to put that fear to rest. Now. Today. But his knee-jerk reaction was to sweep her up and make those promises into her hair. Make her feel his dedication by forcing their heartbeats into close quarters. Sage needed more, though. Needed different. So he’d give it to her. He always would.

  Swallowing the lump in his throat, Belmont climbed the stairs, finding the door ajar by an inch. He pushed it open with a slow hand, not wanting to startle anyone inside. The scent of lemon cleaner found his nose, Sage’s hum filling his ears. For a while, all he could do was lean against the doorjamb and watch her move. Urgency built in his chest, demanding he go help and ease her load, but it was fighting against the way she paralyzed him. So beautiful.

  Her hair was on the very top of her head in a ponytail. He’d never seen it like that before. It sprouted in all different directions, like a fistful of flowers picked from the garden. She was wearing his shirt again, the one with Clarkson Salvage over the pocket.

  Pride filled his lungs. If she only knew what it did to him, seeing that logo on her chest. How many hours had he spent becoming an expert at his trade, the drive to be her provider flowing in his bloodstream? Thousands? It was worth every minute of work just to see her in the shirt. The neck was so wide on Sage’s petite figure, her shifting collarbone was on full display as she scrubbed the kitchen island. Which inevitably drew his eye lower to the sway of her breasts.

  A week ago, he would have turned faster than a finger snap and descended the stairs in one giant lunge, needing to get away before the lust had a chance to take hold. But everything was…changing now. And like all change, it made him nervous, because there was a chance he could ruin the tenuous bond between them and not be able to revert back, if things went wrong. If he did things wrong. His body, however, his heart and hands and eyes, were eager. So eager. They had kissed twice now. His fingers had rubbed the slick female flesh he’d never expected to touch. What would happen now? What came next?

  Belmont wished he hadn’t worn the black sweatpants now. He’d thought them appropriate for cleaning, but there was nothing appropriate about the way they…clung. To him. And his predicament wouldn’t get any better with Sage around. Experience told him that.

  “Oh.” Sage jumped backward, dropping the sponge in her hand. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “Good morning,” he said under his breath, striding into the kitchen and gauging Sage’s progress, judging she’d been working alone for about half an hour. “Sorry to startle you. I couldn’t think of a way to get your attention without…” He nodded at the discarded sponge.

  She plucked at the edge of her yellow elbow-high gloves. “Maybe a bird call next time?”

  The corner of Belmont’s mouth lifted. “What would that sound like?”

  Pink bled into her cheeks, but she puckered her lips as if to whistle, then executed a light, trilling chirp. “There. Just like that.”

  Compelled by something heavy down deep in his stomach, Belmont started moving to the left, one slow step at a time, around the kitchen island in Sage’s direction. “I didn’t know you could make sounds like that.”

  “There was a bird that used to nest on my bedroom window. Growing up.” He watched her start to fidget the closer he came, knew he should stop and give her some space, but they were inside this house. This house in which she’d grown up and been unhappy. It was there in the stiffness of her back how difficult it was to stand inside the four crumbling walls, and he could no more stop himself from easing her than he could pause time. “They don’t have the same species in San Diego, as far as I know,” she said in a rush. “Or if it’s there, I’ve never heard it singing.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “The bird?”

  Belmont shook his head. “San Diego.”

  Sage didn’t answer. The sudden stubborn set of her chin told him she wouldn’t be, either. As the lower half of her body came into view, he dug his nails into his palms, hard enough to leave marks. She was wearing shorts. Ones that stopped just south of her bottom. The feel of her pressed against his lap while he pushed her, thrust her, into the shower wall stirred and thickened his cock. The shorts highlighted more than just her backside, though. They revealed Sage’s legs. Legs that made him a little…insane.

  They weren’t as pale as they should be. As far as he knew, she didn’t spend a lot of time at the beach. He’d made enough subtle inquiries to Sage and Peggy to know Sage worked indoors, and most of her time was spent in an office or catering halls or churches. If she’d been spending a lot of time near the ocean, he wouldn’t have been able to relax, wondering if she was wearing enough sunscreen or if she was a strong swimmer. So without the outdoors, why were her legs so tan? It was a question that had burned in his belly for months, ever since he’d caught a glimpse of her thighs as she climbed into the passenger side of Peggy’s Volkswagen Bug. Long before the road trip. And he’d only grown more curious when she’d worn those shoes with the buckle, back in Iowa. Lord, that sleek flex of her calves…

  His abdomen knit tighter than a drum, Belmont paused a foot away and planted one hand on the counter, making sure she saw it. “Tell me what you miss about San Diego.”

  Sage picked up the sponge and started scrubbing again. “The people.”

  “Why?”

  “None of them knew who I’d been before.”

  There was a whole wealth of Louisiana packed into those words, and Belmont could see it had been deliberate. He’d caught touches of the South in her phrasing and cadence before, but never so much or all at once. Knowing she’d been holding such a vital part of herself back was like a fishing pole reeling his heart out through his mouth. “I want to know who you were before. It’s still a part of who you are now.”

  Her nod was jerky. “Maybe. People seldom change so much they’re unrecognizable.” She rolled her lips inward. “I miss my apartment.”

  “I was never inside of it,” he said, kicking himself for stating the obvious. “What did it look like?”

  A fond expression lit up her features. “The bathroom was a robin’s egg blue. The tiles, the sink, everything. The real estate agent apologized for it being ugly, but I used to love taking baths in there.” They traded a look that punched Belmont in the gut. Sage in the bathtub, covered in bubbles. God have mercy. “It was mine. I didn’t care if it was old.”

  “You’ll go back there someday soon. I’ll make sure you get the same apartment.”

  “No, Belmont.” He watched as she gulped in breaths, clearly attempting to keep her cool. He wished she wouldn’t. How many times had he done the opposite around her? “The jig is up. I’m not a wedding planner. I was just a fraud pretending to be one. Pretending this place doesn’t exist. But it does. I
thought maybe I was capable of forgetting how much my parents need me, leaving it all behind, but I’m not.” Her accent was honey-thick, denser than he’d ever heard it. “My leaving made things worse for my parents. Harder. And they’re never going to get better.” She paused in her scrubbing, then went at it again. “I can’t go wear pretty dresses in the sunshine and act like everything is dandy. I took that man’s money so I could afford to leave and it hurt them. I let myself down by forgetting my responsibilities. So this is where I’m staying. Until they don’t need me anymore.”

  In other words, forever. Acid singed his windpipe, the ground seeming to rise up, up to knee level. This is where he didn’t do well. Sensing change on the horizon. But this was so much more than change. This was the loss of Sage. This was potential Armageddon. And that meant he needed to pull his shit together and blow the winds of change in another direction. Some unfamiliar insight told him pushing Sage right now wasn’t the wisest course of action, though. She didn’t need to be cornered or reasoned with. She needed a friend. The new knowledge that his touch made her feel healed made the pull in her direction even more intense. Almost unbearable to deny. But he would. He would.

  “I understand feeling responsible for family, even when the bond seems like it’s fading. Or was never there to begin with. One day you wake up and realize…you were just ignoring the bond. That you let it weaken.”

  “Are you talking about your brother?”

  “Yes.” Aaron’s smirk appeared in his head, just for a second, before dimming. “We were best friends when we were younger, but I locked him out after.” After. He didn’t have to explain. The sympathy that danced across her features meant she knew he was referring to him being trapped in the well. “When I tried to…make progress with him in Iowa, I felt like a fraud, too. Maybe we all do sometimes. For different reasons. But I’ve seen the weddings you planned, Sage. You’re the furthest damn thing from a fraud I know.”

  Her smile was tight, telling him she wasn’t ready to accept what he knew to be true. “How have you seen the weddings? None of your sister’s ever took place.”

  The back of his neck turned hot. “When Peggy asked me to walk her down the aisle, she came with me to get fitted for a tuxedo. You know how she talks and gets excited.” He couldn’t help a small smile, thinking about his youngest sister. “I hadn’t even met you yet, but when she showed me the pictures of what you’d done, I could see you cared. All those details. Not a single thing overlooked or rushed. All real. You’re real.”

  Belmont took a step closer to Sage and her entire body locked up on a gasp, her eyes closing, hands ceasing their scrubbing. Belmont froze, too. She wanted to be held, but he couldn’t give in. Not if it meant they’d be using each other. They had to find sturdier ground first. So he went with his intended goal of retrieving one of the sponges stacked on the other side of the island, bringing it back toward himself without so much as grazing her body. Her breasts.

  Under his shirt.

  They both slipped back into motion slowly at first, cleaning side by side, and picking up speed. Sage seemed deep in thought, but Belmont couldn’t settle his mind on anything but her. Having her close. When he finally spoke again, his voice was far deeper than when he’d walked into the kitchen. “What do you miss about this place?”

  The smile she sent him was mild, but brave. “Nothing, really. I didn’t do a lot of…experiencing when I lived here.” She shrugged one shoulder. “I mostly stayed at home or down in the cottage, if I wasn’t at school.”

  Belmont took an empty bucket out from beneath the sink and began to fill it with warm water. “School activities weren’t my thing, either.” He couldn’t help but feel silly making small talk with Sage, this woman who was the center of his galaxy, when he wanted to be across the kitchen absorbing eye contact from her, whispering nonsense against her neck. But this was normal. She needed normal. And no one else would be giving it to her, save him. “I used to drive Peggy to cheerleading practice and pick Rita up from detention, but I don’t think that counts.” Sage looked sad at the mention of Peggy, so he pushed on. “What about school dances? Did you—”

  His own frown cut him off. Why was he asking her that? He didn’t want to know if she’d spent any amount of time with some kid’s sweaty hands on her. So when Sage answered in the negative, he was simultaneously relieved and upset on her behalf. But it gave him an idea.

  “Will you show me the school later?” He braced himself for her to say no. “I want to see where you grew up. I want to see all the places you spent time.”

  She didn’t look up, but a line formed between her brows. “Why, Belmont?”

  “Because every minute of your life has been important,” he said simply, hoping she understood. I want to learn you. “Every minute was important to me, even though I wasn’t there. I’m here now and I want to see.”

  Finally, hazel eyes turned on him, so deep and inviting, he would have drowned in them if she gave him the slightest encouragement. He swore she was getting ready to tell him she didn’t want to share her past with him. He was braced and ready for it. So his lungs almost exploded with fresh oxygen when she said, “You want to see my room?” instead.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sage’s stomach was a bustling butterfly sanctuary as she moved down the uneven hall, toward her childhood bedroom. Upstairs, she could hear the sleep sounds coming from her parents, familiar in a déjà vu kind of way. In her youth, those sounds had signaled peace. The chance to move around her home without having to witness the sickness surrounding her parents like sticky gray clouds. Without being the focus of an irritable hungover crying jag or tirade.

  She’d never felt anything but alone inside the house, but with Belmont’s steady footsteps thunking behind her on the floorboards, she was…surrounded. That’s how large his energy was. It filled every available space and slipped in between the strands of her hair and beneath her clothes. It bombarded her, replacing her dejection with awareness. He draped her in static, lifting her skin in goose bumps and sensitizing every inch of her body. Before they’d kissed, Belmont had been capable of doing that to her, but those reactions were now multiplied by a thousand. A million.

  And just because they were in silent opposition about him going into the mine didn’t mean he deserved to have so much of her resentment. Right that moment, however, she had nowhere else to place it. She could cast the unwanted emotion out like a fly-fishing line, and his presence was so big, it would probably land on him anyway. She didn’t want to revisit the places that had shaped her. Didn’t want to peel back layers and let people in on her secret: She was nothing but a big old faker. Her wedding planning skills had been a stroke of luck that she’d bolstered by poring over magazines and scouring the Internet. Nothing about her was polished or put together—it was all an act. She would always be that poor Alexander girl.

  Where did the old Sage start and the new one begin? She no longer had the energy to maintain the illusion of glass-half-full wedding planner. Belmont would see the real her if she lowered her guard completely. He saw everything. And while she was darn proud of what she’d accomplished without proper schooling or encouragement, having him acknowledge that she was a fraud would knock her right off the pedestal he’d placed her on.

  So what had she done? Offered to show him her room—the lowest possible pit of despair—just to get her fall from grace out of the way. His presence usually reassured her, but just then, she wanted to turn around and beat his chest with her fists. How dare he come to Sibley and force her to reveal herself? How dare he take away the one thing that could have kept her warm at night? The fact that once upon a time, she’d won the devotion of this extraordinary man.

  How long would it last once he saw her worst?

  Sage knew the exact moment Belmont realized what she was doing, too. His hand landed on her shoulder just outside the door, slowing her to a stop. “Sage,” he said, so close to the back of her head, his breath bathed her neck. “Let’s m
ake a trade.”

  She didn’t want a different plan. Didn’t want more sweetness from him. She just wanted to rip off the Band-Aid, but she answered anyway, in a dull voice. “What do you mean?”

  “A place for a place.” His frustration over having to knit words and explanations together was clear. “You show me something that’s important to you, a place or a thing or a story. And I’ll give you the same.” He paused. “If you want…the same from me.”

  The offer was too tempting to turn down. A chance to get inside Belmont’s head? It was a place long denied to everyone. Maybe once he realized Sage wasn’t perfect, he would change his mind about wanting to know her more, but…she loved this man. Seemed like she’d loved him for a million years. If there was the slightest possibility she could repair what was damaged inside him—with words, with actions—she had to seize it. “I show you my room, you tell me something no one else knows?”

  His swallow was audible. “Yes.”

  Not wanting to give him time to change his mind, Sage turned the rusted brass knob and pushed the door open.

  Since arriving back in Sibley, she hadn’t ventured into the room. There was no reason to. No fond memories remained inside the ten-foot-by-ten-foot space. No pennants from the local sports team or graduation pictures taped to the wall. There was nothing. The black mold that she’d desperately tried to scrub away and hide behind paint had taken over, crawling up the edges toward the ceiling, framing the windows like some macabre outline. Obviously there had been a leak directly upstairs, because a huge chunk of the ceiling had caved in, the torn bulge hanging suspended in the center of the room. Above it, the ceiling beams were visible along with a hole that peeked into the second-floor bathroom.