I staggered under her condemnation and the mental image of her tumbling naked on her bed. “Fuck, Della.”
I didn’t know what I cursed at. The brutal honesty of her latest confession or the barbaric, almost primitive need to climb on top of her and force her to believe me. To crawl inside her body and soul and growl into her ear while I took her violently. ‘See? I am telling the truth. I do love you. I love you so much you make me goddamn insane.’
But I shook away the dark brutality, taking my turn to be the sinner with secrets. “Regardless of what you think, I am in love with you, Della. And I stayed away because I-I—”
“What? Tell me!” she screamed, her sudden outburst ratcheting up my temper to uncontrollable levels. She’d successfully threaded lust with rage, and it was a cocktail I no longer had any power over.
“I wasn’t ready, okay?! Fuck, I don’t think I’ll ever be ready to accept that I’ve fallen in love with the child I stole. That even now, I struggle seeing you as Della, grown-up and filled out, an adult in your own right, and not buckle beneath the image of you when you were five years old with your beautiful blonde hair and fascination with your ribbon.”
I dug my hands into my scalp. “It makes me sick, okay? It makes me want to burn out my eyes for ever seeing you naked as a kid or hugging you when you were a teen. It makes me want to cut off my own cock for ever getting hard around you, for all the inappropriate thoughts I had about you, for despising the boys you dated, for wanting to die knowing you let another fuck you when all I ever wanted was the freedom to love you in that way.”
My temper cindered into exhaustion, leaving me breathless. I shrugged brokenly with palms spread in surrender. “How can I admit such things to you, Ribbon? How can I stand here and confess that I’ve jerked off to images of you? That when you were still innocent, still untouched, still so fucking young, I was using other women to somehow find a way to remain honourable and not crawl into your bed? Do you know how many times my willpower almost failed? Do you know how many dreams I’ve had? How many times I’ve had you in my arms and on my lips, only to wake up and find it was all a fantasy?
“It was everything I could do to hide such things from myself, but you…I could never tell you because I couldn’t stand for you to think of me as a monster. For you to see me as others’ would. A paedophile. A beast. A twisted-up son of a bitch who would rather put himself first than the child he’d sworn his life to.”
My breathing came ragged as she took a hesitant step toward me.
However, this time, instead of disbelief, there was a sliver of something, a fledgling hint of hope, an aura of satisfaction of finally, finally hearing my truth. “How long?”
I shook my head. That was one secret I wanted to take to my grave.
But she came closer, her towel slipping farther, her eyes getting softer. “How long, Ren?”
“It seems like forever,” I moaned, shaking my head again, begging her to let it go.
Her fingers fluttered on my overly hot forearm. Sweat covered me from fighting and declaring. My energy was gone. I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my entire life, but still, she didn’t let it go.
“Please…I need to know.”
I looked up, flinching at just tasting the words. My tongue burned with wanting to lie, to add on a few years, to not make myself such a child-stealing savage. But she’d been honest with me, and now, it was my turn to be honest with her.
Hesitantly, I raised my hand, cupping her cheek for the second time, grazing my thumb once again over the delicate bones that swooped up toward stunning blue eyes. This time, she didn’t jerk away, and I stared so damn long into her that I became lightheaded and terrified.
My voice was barely a whisper as I admitted, “Since you kissed me.”
She tilted her head, biting her lip as if her emotions threatened to drag her under, but not before she got her final answer. “Which time? The kiss that drove you away or the kiss in the stable at Cherry River?”
I closed my eyes.
I’d been given an opportunity to hide the worst of my transgressions. I could say it was the kiss she’d given me when she was seventeen—so close to eighteen that it was no longer illegal to fall in love with a minor.
But…I couldn’t do it.
Tonight had been a truth-tearing hurricane, and I had no choice but to murmur, “When you were thirteen.” I sighed with every sickness and shame I’d carried for five interminably long years. “The night you woke me up kissing me.”
“Oh.”
One tiny sound as she jerked and fell.
I wasn’t prepared for the way she crumpled. The way her legs gave up supporting her. The way her body shoved aside her anger and tumbled pliant and welcoming into my arms. And I definitely wasn’t prepared for the way her eyes welled with a different kind of tear.
A tear full of heartache and years of hiding; a glistening, glittering joy that infected my heart until I felt forgiven. Understood. Redeemed.
Somehow, without saying a word, she gave me absolute absolution.
“I thought you hated me for that.”
“I did.” I pressed my forehead to hers, needing to be close, needing to sit down. “But not for reasons I made you think. Not for reasons I made myself believe.”
“You saw me that night? Truly saw me.”
“I saw that my feelings toward you were changing. That there was something unsaid between us. Something that wasn’t allowed. Something that only grew bigger and more incessant as we grew older.”
“Is this real?” she breathed. “Did you honestly just say you fell in love with me the night I fell in love with you?”
My knees quaked as I backed toward her bed, holding her tight and forcing her to trip with me. “I think I fell in love with you the day I returned for you in that house where I’d left you as a baby. The moment you saw me, you crawled so fast. You knew you were mine, and I was yours, even then. I’d never had anyone be so excited to see me. So innocent with their affection. So trusting that I’d keep her safe.”
I sat down heavily. The instant the mattress held my depleted weight, Della spread her legs and climbed onto my lap, her towel opening indecently, revealing naked heat-flushed skin that I desperately wanted to drink.
But I forced myself to keep my eyes on hers, adoring the way her legs wrapped around my back and her arms looped around my neck and our foreheads remained glued together, our eyes so close, our lips so near.
This was all so new, and yet, so heartbreakingly familiar.
This was Della.
She was my home.
“I’m not saying I fell in love with you in this kind of way,” I murmured as our lips inched closer. “I’m saying there are so many ways I fell in love with you. Most of them pure and utterly unconditional, but that night in the stable, the night you entered my dreams and made me plummet…that night was different.”
Her chest rose and fell, her nipples pink and tight in my peripheral vision as her towel fell away, draping damply over my arms where I hugged her.
She breathed quicker, harder, as our mouths crept ever closer, quietly, tentatively, afraid that any moment this perfection would shatter, and we’d wake from yet another life-tormenting dream.
“I’m sorry I made it impossible for you to stay,” she whispered, looking deep, deep into my eyes, all that trust and affection and connection back in place.
She was home, just like me.
She’d returned to being the girl I would kill for and the woman who had every power to kill me. Only this time, there were no shields. No blockage of honesty. No slurry of lies. The way she looked at me was unlike anything she’d done before.
I’d caught glimpses, sure. The nights in the forest after she’d run away. The moments before I’d head out for a shallow night of pleasure with unknown women. The seconds before I’d climb into bed and she’d stare at me from the corridor as I turned out the lights.