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that?”
    “Yeah, but you have to understand I said
that only after you had already made it clear to me you wanted to
go. You made the first move, not me.”
    “Well, I don’t get why this is still
relevant,” Shayla told him. “It’s been eight weeks and I honestly
don’t know why you wanted to have dinner with me tonight.”
    Carter wanted to tell her that he missed
her, that he was lonely in that big house without her there and he
was sorry for the way things ended. Instead, he said, “I just
wanted to see you.”
    “Okay, well now that you’ve seen me ,
I’m gonna go.” She stood and threw her purse strap over her
shoulders.
    “Shayla.”
    “What?”
    Carter’s heart wanted him to say things his
mind wouldn’t let him. After all, this was the woman who left him
by writing a mere note, the woman who was moving away in a few
weeks. And it was going against everything he’d ever known to
actually tell a woman that he loved her.
    “What?” she asked again, frowning.
    Carter could see she was anxious to leave,
so instead of making the conversation deeper he said, “If I don’t
see you again before you leave, I want you to know that…” He
paused. Those three words, I love you, were on the tip of his
tongue, but he couldn’t say it, even though he knew, without a
shadow of doubt that he loved her. “I just want you to know that if
you need me for anything, you can call me.”
    “Thanks, but I’ll find a way to make it work
on my own.” With that, Shayla walked away.
    Carter couldn’t find justification in
chasing her. He never chased any woman before and he had no rights
to her. Maybe her moving away was what they both needed but still
it bothered him, having come to that conclusion.

Chapter 5
     
    “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Carter
admitted with bloodshot red eyes as he sat on the couch in Dr.
Westbrook’s office a week later. She was the same doctor he’d taken
Shayla. The doctor Jacob saw before he passed. Now the tables had
turned and he was the patient. Never in a million years did Carter
think he would have to resort to therapy, but the battle going on
in his head and heart had finally erupted into an all out war that
he could no longer mediate.
    Dr. Westbrook watched him hang his head in
despair, interlock his fingers and stare down at the floor. When he
was at her office a few months ago supporting Shayla, Dr. Westbrook
told him that he needed to tell Shayla about his relation to Jacob.
Keeping it a secret that her ex-fiancé was his brother would do
nothing but harm in the long run. It didn’t matter that Jacob had
committed suicide…she still needed to know. “So I take it you
finally told Shayla about Jacob?” Dr. Westbrook said with a look of
satisfaction and crossed her legs.
    “No. I didn’t tell her. I don’t know
how.”
    A surprised look touched her face. “Is that
why you’re here? To get advice on how to tell her?”
    Carter blew a hard breath. “Shayla and I got
into an argument a couple of months ago and she moved out.
Yesterday, I saw her for the first time in eight weeks.”
    “What was the argument about?”
    “Um…” Carter paused, because he didn’t want
to get into that. The problem was, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to
accomplish by seeing the doctor today. He just needed to talk to
somebody. So with beads of sweat on his forehead, he looked at her
and said, “She thought I was seeing someone.”
    Carter remembered the dejected look on
Shayla’s face the night he told her they could be just
friends . His thought pattern at the time was, if Shayla
believed Genevieve was his girlfriend, then her feelings for him
would subside. It was ridiculous for a grown man to play those kind
of games, he knew, but he saw it as a quick way of letting her know
he couldn’t be involved with her. After all, how could he do that
to his brother?
    With raised eyebrows, Dr. Westbrook asked,
“Were you seeing someone?”
    “No.”
    “So what would make her