The door to Brogan’s hotel room slammed shut so hard I could hear the noise echoing down the hallway. He sent the room key sliding across the desk and marched over to the mini bar. Cans and bottles smashed around and then went flying across the room until he finally found what he was looking for.

He held up a small liquor bottle filled with vodka in his trembling hands.

“Brogan.” Alarm shot through me. “Please, don’t,” I begged him, feeling my heart thunder in my chest.

His eyes narrowed, pinning me with a murderous look. “I’ve been sober for two years. Two fucking years. Do you know how hard that was? I just got my second bronze sobriety chip two weeks ago at a meeting in Tulsa.” His hands started to slowly twist the lid off the bottle.

“Put the bottle down!” I yelled, having no control over my voice.

His entire body shook with rage. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. Don’t act like you fucking care because your words mean shit to me right now.”

Screaming didn’t seem to help, so I quieted my voice, hoping to calm him down. “I get that you’re pissed and want to lash out at me right now, but that little bottle of vodka isn’t going to help you.”

He threw the bottle across the desk, knocking over a few plastic cups, sending them to the floor. “Why?” His voice was pained. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you keep him away from me for all these years?”

“Can we sit down, please? It’s not as simple as you make it sound. There is so much I need to explain to you.”

“Well, I’m all fucking ears, so start fucking explaining.” He slammed his body into the rolling chair and threw his face in his hands.

My legs trembled as I walked over to the king-sized bed and sat down on the end, opposite of Brogan. I closed my eyes and tried to bring memories from eight years ago back into focus. I went through the timeline and tried to work myself up to what I could say that would make this better for him.

“We were in a bad place, Brogan. I felt like I had no choice. I loved you so much, but you were changing right before my eyes. The drinking, the partying, and the girls that you claimed were nobodies…” A tear fell from my eyes. “It was too much.”

“I never fucked other girls when we were together,” he said in an almost convincing tone, but I knew better.

A frown pulled across my face, remembering the many nights that I had to go pick him up because he was too shit-faced to drive. Did he not remember how many times I caught him kissing a random girl or the hushed phone calls he would take in the other room?

“Why would you lie about it now?” I asked, calling him out. “I don’t understand. I know why you lied all those years ago, but you have no reason to lie now.”

He slammed his palms down on the wooden desk. “Because I didn’t. I fooled around and did some stupid shit, but I never fucked another girl when I was with you. I had my limits.”

I scoffed and tried to rein in my anger. I was here to beg and plead for his forgiveness. Fighting with him and debating over his past infidelities wasn’t going to help.

“I want you to put yourself in my shoes for a second. I caught you numerous times in situations that I’m pretty sure, if the tables were turned, you would not have been okay with. There were probably a dozen times where you climbed into bed with me smelling like cheap booze and even cheaper women.” He flinched, and I paused to take a breath. “Maybe you didn’t have sex with those girls, but you still cheated.” I shook my head. “It wasn’t just about that, though. It was about the choices you were making and the life that you were living. It wasn’t good. It was toxic.”

It was bad enough loving him and knowing that he was giving parts of himself to another woman. In the end what destroyed us was the drugs and the partying. He became a danger to himself and to those around him.

He pointed his finger at me. “I’ll give you that. I admit that I lost sight of what was important, but maybe you need to climb into my shoes for a minute, sister. When my band started to become more well-known, and we moved up from dive bars to bigger venues, I fell deeper and deeper into that lifestyle. I did some things that I’m not proud of. I even did things that were reckless.” His hands shook. He looked wired and keyed up. He looked like he was itching to have a drink, and I couldn’t have felt worse if I tried. Tearing through our painful past wasn’t easy. “However, that didn’t give you the right to hide the fact that I had a child with you.”

Guilt consumed me because he was right. I hung my head in shame. “I know.”

“When did you find out you were pregnant?” His question had me lifting my head. “Did you know that you were pregnant with my kid when I asked you to go to Nashville with me?”

He was referring to the day that I broke up with him. The day that I set him free, so I could find my own way to happiness. As much as I loved him, there was no way I was willing to give everything up for a man who was barely holding it together.

After we ended things, I was sick for weeks. At first, I thought I was just sick over our breakup, but eventually, I knew it was more. It only took one quick trip to Walgreens to confirm that I was pregnant.

“No. It was a little over a month after you left when I found out.”

He let out a sigh of relief as if my answer mattered to him. Would I have handled things differently? I’m not sure I could answer that. All I knew was that it felt like I had no choice.

“I went to Nashville to tell you.”

His head jerked to the side. “What are you talking about?”

I closed my eyes while my mind traveled back to the night, relaying a memory that I wished I could forget. It was the night that sealed our fate.

“Your band was playing at the Mercy Lounge. I had driven nine hours that day and was exhausted by the time I got there, so I checked into a cheap hotel and took a nap. I figured it would give you time to finish your set, and I would meet up with you after the concert.”

“I remember playing there.” His face pinched in concentration. “You’re going to have to refresh my memory because I don’t remember you ever showing up after the concert.”

Oh, I remembered perfectly. I remembered the smell of cigarette smoke and body sweat lingering the dark, dingy hallway. I remembered the song that was playing on stage and the loud voices and beer bottles scattered everywhere I turned. And I’ll never forget the way my heart felt when I walked into that room and saw him on the couch with those two groupies. I remembered it all.

“You never saw me.”

He leaned forward and rested his arms on his legs. “Forgive me for being dense here, but I’m confused. Can you please get to the point where I can understand why you didn’t tell me you were pregnant with my kid?”

“I found you backstage, Brogan. Six weeks after we broke up and I found you with two damn whores.” My voice was mixed with fury and disbelief. “Did you really want me crashing your little party of three? What was I supposed to do, walk over and hand you the yellow baby booties that I had in my purse and interrupt your blow job? Or should it have been when your face was buried between the legs of the other slut? Tell me when?”

I watched all the color drain from his face. “You saw that?”

“Oh, you remember now? Good, because I’ll never be able to forget.”

He plowed his hands through his hair. “I was so fucked up. I went from being a nobody singer to a country star in three point five seconds flat. I was struggling with our breakup, trying to manage all the pressure.” My heart squeezed at the thought of him having to deal with all that on his own. “The drugs helped me deal with everything, made me forget how much it hurt that you were gone.” His eyes found mine. “I’m sorry you saw that, but that doesn’t give you the right to do what you did. To decide whether or not I would ever get to know my son.”

Tears burned my eyes. The doubt and the remorse that I’ve carried around with me hit me full force.

“I know that now. I’m sorry, I am so sorry, but I was trying to protect our baby. The life you were living back then wasn’t the ideal world to raise a child in, Brogan.”

He looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “Who the hell are you to decide that on your own? He’s my goddamned son too!” he shouted, throwing his hands up in the air. “This is bullshit. I’ve missed almost eight years with my kid all because your feelings got hurt. Because you were fucking jealous.”

I snapped, eight years of anger came rolling off of me. “Fuck you!” I spat, standing up and meeting his glare. “I did what I thought was best for our child.”

“What was best?” He laughed. “Are you kidding me? Explain to me how lying to him and keeping him away from his father all these years was best for him?”

“I watched your career in the beginning, and I listened to the radio. I know about the multi DWIs, the three trips to rehab. The family you almost killed when you flipped your Ferrari off the side of the highway. I kept waiting and waiting for you to turn your life around, but behind every top ten single there would be another disaster.”

His jaw ticked, and I thought I saw steam coming out of his ears. “I don’t care what the industry rags reported or what you thought of me. I’ve had my shit together for the past two years. Your excuses aren’t good enough.”

I could have continued to fight with him, to defend my decisions, my actions, but he was right. I made a mistake, a big one, and I’ve never felt so fearful in my entire life. I knew someday my secret would come out, and now it was time to beg for forgiveness.

“I know you hate me. And you have every right to feel hurt. I realize now that I handled things wrong, but please, I’m begging you, don’t take him from me.”

My sobs ripped through me, tearing apart my insides. “Please, Brogan, I can’t lose him. I will do anything. Anything.” I broke down and fell to my knees. It finally hit me that this was really happening. I did this. I ruined everything. And now I could lose my son.

Tanner was my entire existence. My reason for living. There is no way I would be able to endure losing him and still come out on the other side. It would kill me, and I would sell my soul to keep him. I struggled to catch my breath as devastation crashed around me. I didn’t know what to do or where to turn.

Brogan walked over and kneeled in front of me. His strong hand pressed against my face. “Is that what you think?” His voice was much softer. “That I’m going to take him from you?”

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was sob. Brogan pulled me into his arms and held me tight while my tears soaked his chest.

His arms felt strange, yet comforting at the same time. His chest was wider than I remembered, his arms were bigger, and the sound of his voice was deeper—all the reminders that we were both kids when this happened. But the scent of his soap was the same. The way he curled his fingers into the back of my hair and held me to his chest reminded of all the times he’d held me like this before everything changed. For a split second, I wanted to go back in time. To when we were just two, young teenagers without a care in the world.

“There were so many times I wanted to tell you, but I was scared. I was scared that you would hate me and want to hurt me. I was scared about how you would react.”

He pulled back with his strong hands framing my face .“I could never hate you.” He gently rubbed his thumbs back and forth along my cheeks. “Not even if I tried.” His eyes glistened with unshed tears. “We have a son?”

I wiped my eyes and stared into the face of the man who still lived in a little corner of my heart. “We do. And he’s amazing.”

He inhaled deeply. “I would have been there for you. I would have stopped everything. Regardless of what you think of me, I would have put the two of you first.”

“Brogan, you might have tried, but let’s be honest. You were so caught up in that life I’m not so sure that would have been true.”

He cringed. “You can’t believe that.”

“I have no choice but to believe that. It’s so easy to look back now and pretend that we both would have done things differently. Do you honestly believe that I would have chosen to raise Tanner on my own if I thought that there was another way?”

He threw his head in his hands and gripped the ends of his hair. I stood, and brushed my hand over his back as his shoulders shook. “Brogan, you were a sick man back then. There is nothing that I would have wanted more than to have you by my side, but you weren’t ready to be a father back then. You could barely take care of yourself, let alone a baby.”

He sniffed and rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his shirt. “But I’ve been sober for two years now. You could have told me.”

God, it felt like I was being stabbed. Sliced open. He looked so vulnerable, and all I wanted to do was to protect him, which was ironic because I was the one who hurt him.

“I was terrified of what you would do once you found out. I had no one, Brogan. Tanner is all I had. I was petrified of losing him. Afraid of how your lifestyle would damage him. But never, not once, did I ever doubt that you would love him.” I placed my hand over his heart. “There is so much good in here, and I know that you will show him that side of you. You weren’t ready to give him that back then, but I think you’re ready now.”

He hissed in a breath and stared into my eyes. “You named him Tanner? You know that was my grandfather’s name?”

“Yes. I remembered. Your grandfather was a wonderful man and someone very special to you. I wanted him to have something of you, other than your DNA.”

Guilt spiked inside of me as more tears fell. “I am so sorry. I’m sure my words don’t mean much to you right now, but I’ll do whatever I can to make things right between us.”

The muscle pulsed in his jaw. “Do you mean that?”

“Of course, I do.” As long as it didn’t cost me custody of my son, I would do whatever it took.

“Then come back to me.”

What did he just say?

I blinked, convinced I heard him wrong. “Excuse me, say that again?”

“I’ve never stopped loving you.” He slid his hands up my arms and rested them on my shoulders. “You were always there in the back of my mind, no matter where I was or who I was with. It’s always been you.”

My body jerked back in shock, causing his hands to fall to my sides. “Brogan, what are you saying exactly?”

He leaned in, erasing the space between us. His breath hovered over my mouth. His lips inched closer to mine. “You have always been the one for me. No one else, and now that I know about Tanner, I can’t let you go.”

I didn’t want him to say what I think he was saying. I didn’t want to have to reject him, not after the moment we just shared.

There was a time where Brogan was everything to me. But my heart belonged to someone else now.

“What about Sienna?” I asked, holding my breath and praying like hell that this was all a mistake. That his words were coming out wrong. Because this could not have gotten any more complicated.

He looked up at the ceiling but didn’t back away. “I love her. I do. But she’s not you.”

He was crazy. He was just ready to kill me ten minutes ago, and now he was in love with me again? “Brogan, I’m not the same person I was back then. You don’t know me any more than I know you. Yes, we still share a connection, and yes, you will always hold a special place in my heart, but we aren’t those two crazy kids who fell in love years ago. Most of all, we’re both in love with other people.”

His mouth pulled tight. “Is this about the guy from the restaurant?”

“His name is Jack.”

He picked up my left hand and held it in the air. “There’s no ring on here. How serious can it be?”

I stared at him, seeing the determination in his eyes. I needed to clear things up really quick. I couldn’t let him get the wrong idea. “It’s serious.”

He cocked his head to the side and clenched his jaw. “He looked awfully cozy with my son earlier. That’s going to be a big problem for me.”

Be careful, I reminded myself. I needed to choose my words carefully. I didn’t want to hurt him or cause him any more pain.

“This is going to be very confusing for Tanner. That’s all on me,” I said. “Jack had no idea about you. You can’t blame him for any of this. He’s not going to be a problem. I promise you that. Let’s focus on what’s best for our son and go from there.”

“I’m going to get to know my son. I will be a part of his life.” He scrubbed a hand over his face and settled his gaze back on me. “Your boyfriend is going to have to step aside because I’m taking back what should have been mine all along.”

Panic started to bubble up inside me. “I want you to be a part of Tanner’s life. But if you’re talking about me, we ended a long time ago.”

“Have you ever listened to my music?”

I shook my head and swallowed. “I know I inspired a few songs, but it doesn’t change things between us.”

He placed his hands on my cheeks and stared at me. “Do me a favor. Listen to the words—really listen. Then come back and tell me that it doesn’t change anything. And in the meantime, I’ll try not to be offended by your comment.”

He walked across the room and leaned against the wall. I looked away, feeling my heart ache in places that I never knew I had. There was no doubt that he believed his words to be true, and that’s the part that killed me.

I stepped toward the man who was such a big part of my past. There was so much history between us, much of it painful. “I can’t even imagine what you’re feeling right now. I want to be honest with you though. You were the first man I ever loved, but you’re not the only one anymore.”

His eyes snapped to mine as I fumbled through my words. “What we had was special, and I need you to know that I would never intentionally hurt you, but we can’t go back to what we had.”

“I know that!” he exclaimed. “But we can move forward.”

I shook my head and slid my eyes shut. “No, we can’t, Brogan. We both moved on and found love again with other people. What you and I had was special, but there is a reason why we failed.” I let out a deep breath. “No matter what’s happened though, I don’t regret a single second of our time together. You gave me a gift and we created something that represented the best parts of both of us. We will always be connected because of Tanner. But that’s where it stops.”

He roughed his hands through his hair as if my words had injured him. “I don’t want to continue to hear all about how you moved on. I refuse to believe that there is no chance for us, but I’ll let it go for now.”

I let out a shaky breath. My words should have been enough to end the discussion, but I felt like he was setting us for another fight. “Fair enough.”

“Tell me about Tanner, because I have a shit ton of questions.”

“I’ll try to answer them as best as I can. Where do you want me to start?”

“From the beginning.”

He took my hand in his and led me to the love seat by the window. I started from the top and explained how I had to drop out of school and move back in with my parents. How I lied to everyone about who the father was. I told him about how happy and sad I felt the minute they placed Tanner in my arms. How I wished he could have been there. How alone I felt. How hard it was. We both cried over all the things he’s missed out on.

It hurt recalling all of the firsts that he never got to be a part of, but I pushed through the pain knowing that I owed him everything. It was hard, and it was raw, and nothing I could ever say, no memory I could share, no picture I could show him, would ever make up for the years he lost.

The conversation turned lighter as we talked about the present. His eyes lit up when we talked about Tanner’s love for baseball and his new starting pitcher role.

“No shit. He’s a chip right off the old block.” His eyes were filled with pride. Brogan had led his high school team to the state championship all four years he played. He was so talented that he was scouted out and offered a free ride to play for Coastal Carolina. But he got injured his sophomore year of college, and that’s when he started to focus on his music.

I laughed. “I thought you would like to know that.”

“I would love to see him play. When’s his next game?”

“I haven’t gotten the schedule yet, but I’ll let you know.”

“I’ll be there.”

I played with my hands and stared down at the floor. “I’m going to talk to him tomorrow after his practice. I just need some time to figure out what I’m going to say.”

“Good. Because I really want to meet him.” He got up and walked from one side of the room to the other. He crossed his arms around his chest. “Also, you should know that from here on out I’m going to be taking care of you both. You can quit your job and do whatever you want.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You can go back to school. Volunteer, whatever makes you happy, but you will never worry about money again.”

I closed my eyes and leaned my head back. Most women would love to hear those words and never worry about paying bills again. But that wasn’t me. It never has been and never will be. If there is one thing I refused to lose, it was my independence.

“If you want to take care of Tanner, you can set up some sort of trust, but I don’t need your money.”

“You’re the mother of my child, and you can bet your ass I will provide for the both of you.”

I forgot how controlling he could be. He was always a take-charge kind of person. No doubt that this personality trait has put him along the path that he’s on today. It takes a thick skin to survive in that business. I had to remind myself that things could be going much worse.

“Fine. Kids today are expensive. And your kid eats enough for two people and grows like a weed, so I’m always replacing his clothes. If you want to contribute toward those things, then I won’t stop you.”

He blew out a deep breath and smiled down at me. I felt a shift in the air, causing my skin to prickle with nerves.

One rough, calloused hand slid up along my neck and landed in my hair. The other reached out and traced along my jaw. I closed my eyes, and all thoughts froze when his mouth met mine. His lips were soft and warm, familiar but different. His grip was strong, and his breaths were needy. There was a push and pull that charged between us. Years of love and guilt, and a magnitude of memories hovered over us. The second his tongue tried to push between my lips, I knew it was wrong.

I shoved him away, breaking free of the spell that I was under.

“Brogan, I’m sorry. I can’t.” My thoughts were somewhere between confusion and sadness, making me feel guiltier than hell.

What the hell did I just do?

The look in his eyes was somber. Our new reality finally catching up to us. “It’s really over between us, isn’t it?”

I weighed my words carefully. The last thing I wanted to do was cause him any more pain. “It’s been over for a long time.”

He closed his eyes and then hung his head. I didn’t want things to be awkward, especially since we’d made so much progress.

I placed my hand on his shoulder. “We got caught up in the moment.” I stared into his eyes, trying to offer him whatever comfort I could. “That’s all that was, Brogan. A moment. You and I were friends long before we were lovers. Let me be your friend. Let me help you get to know your son.”

He gave my hand a squeeze. “Okay.”