Offering to let her go—even temporarily—was the hardest thing he’d ever done, but he knew it was for the best. She couldn’t give this her all while looking over her shoulder and worrying about letting him down.
She sat back, her expression stunned. “I thought you might be mad, that you might tell me to make a choice—you or the job—but I didn’t expect you to break up with me. Am I supposed to be thrilled that you didn’t give me an ultimatum?”
Boone frowned at her anger. “I’m doing this for you, so you’re free to do something you obviously want to do.”
“No, you’re telling me to go and do this, but to count you out. You’re picking up your marbles and going home. How manipulative is that?”
Talk about an unfair accusation. “I am not trying to manipulate you,” Boone argued. “I’m trying to be fair.”
“What’s fair about losing you before we even give this a try?” she demanded, on her feet and pacing. “Were you just looking for a way to end this? Is it too complicated for you? Well, guess what, Boone? Life gets complicated from time to time. You don’t manage it by making some fake magnanimous gesture.”
He regarded her with confusion. Okay, he was merely a man, but he’d thought he was doing the right thing here. Breaking up sure as hell wasn’t what he wanted. He’d figured he’d give her a few months, let her tackle this new job with her full attention, then they’d give their relationship another shot. Obviously she didn’t see it that way—exactly as he hadn’t seen her departure as temporary years ago. Clearly, though, this had gone way off the tracks, and he needed to get the conversation pointed in the right direction.
“Okay, sweetheart, settle down,” he pleaded. “Let’s back up the train a minute. Obviously I got off at the wrong station, the same way I did ten years ago. Let’s try to be real clear. How did you see this working?”
“Not like this!” she practically shouted as she paced past him yet again, then whirled around and marched in the other direction, the color in her cheeks high.
Boone managed to grab her hand. “Sit, please. Let’s figure this out.”
“What’s left to figure out?” she inquired sarcastically. “Things weren’t going your way, I wasn’t giving up my life to come here, so you bailed.”
Boone closed his eyes, wishing there were some sort of script he could follow. Wasn’t this exactly what had happened ten years ago? They’d come at their situation from different directions, misunderstood things and wound up with a permanent separation, rather than the temporary break she thought she’d requested.
“I swear I didn’t mean it like that,” he told her. “No more than you meant that ten years ago. It’s as if we’ve switched roles. I’m only suggesting a time-out. You’re apparently envisioning an ending.”
“Well, that’s what I heard,” she replied.
“Then let’s try again. Tell me how you saw this working,” he requested.
She gave him a helpless look that tore at his heart.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Phone calls, getting together on weekends, whatever. It’s what we’d talked about when we first got back together.”
Boone nodded. “It was,” he agreed. “I guess what we hadn’t talked about was how long that was going to last or how it would eventually be resolved. Did you think it would go on that way forever?”
She sighed, then sat next to him. “I honestly didn’t realize it, but apparently that’s exactly what I was thinking.” She met his gaze. “But you didn’t?”
“I didn’t,” he admitted. “I thought our timetables would start to mesh better, not get worse.”
“And we’d live here,” she guessed.
Even as he nodded, he saw that it was a selfish assumption to have made.
She looked into his eyes. “So, what happens now, Boone?”
“I think we both need to think this through some more, figure out what we’re willing to sacrifice to make this work.” He touched her cheek again. “But not this job, Emily. No matter what, I don’t want you to give up this chance to do something you care so much about. Maybe it’s a good thing that we’ll be apart for a while. I don’t think so clearly when you’re around. All I can focus on is how much I want to make love to you, to keep you right here with me forever.”
She drew in a deep breath, then settled closer to him, leaning against his shoulder. “Yeah, being close does muddy up rational thought, doesn’t it?” She fell silent, then glanced at him. “Of course, not everything in life should be entirely rational.”
He smiled. “My thought exactly. I think a moment exactly like this one was in the back of my mind when I pushed so hard for a quick marriage. If you’d gone along with that, we’d have had no choice but to work through this.”
“Oh, you dreamer,” she accused lightly. “That’s precisely when too many people wind up divorced when things get hard.”
“Not us,” he said with conviction.
“And yet you were the one who ten minutes ago wanted to call it quits.”
“Not quits,” he protested. “Just a break to figure things out.”
“No breaks,” she said with determination. “We work on this one day at a time. I am going to take that job, Boone, because I feel I absolutely have to do it, but that doesn’t mean for a single second that I’m giving up on us.”
“Then I guess I can’t give up, either,” he said. “Not even temporarily. When will you start?”
“After the first of the year.”
“And you’ll be back here for Christmas?”
“Absolutely. I intend to try to make it for B.J.’s Christmas pageant, then stick around through New Year’s.”
“Then we’ll make the most of every day we have,” he promised.
He still wasn’t a hundred percent convinced
