He rubbed his nose against mine. “I warned you that I’m not good for people.”
Not liking that comment at all, I said, “That’s bullshit. We both have strong personalities so we’ll clash from time to time. That doesn’t mean you’re not good for me, or vice versa. Being dominant and decisive isn’t bad. You’re also very protective and supportive, which I appreciate. Tonight, though, you were too protective and too big, bad alpha.”
He sighed. “Okay. I’ll work on it. But we’re good now?”
“We’re good.”
His arms locked around me and he pressed a gentle, apologetic kiss on my mouth. “Seeing those bruises on your face makes me want to punch something. Sam wouldn’t have hit you that hard if she’d known you’d bruise. Baby, about what you did to her—”
“Let’s not talk about it. It doesn’t matter.”
“Imani, you called blood to you. That kind of matters.”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
He rubbed my back. “Can’t say I blame you for being freaked out.” He pressed a gentle kiss to my temple. “Okay, I’ll drop it.”
I released a heavy breath. “I need a shower.”
“Come on.” He led me to the bathroom.
“I can shower myself.”
“Of course you can. But I want to take care of you. Don’t fight me on it. I need it.”
Sighing, I allowed him to take care of me—massaging my head, shoulders, and arms until all my tension had left me and I was close to boneless.
As he dabbed me dry with a towel, I asked, “What were your other two relationships like?”
He paused. “You sure you want to hear about my past?”
“I want to understand what makes you think you’re not good for people.” That dumb idea had to have come from somewhere.
His hands resumed drying me off. “There was a girl I dated in high school. Back then, I was thinking with my dick more than anything else, so I didn’t see that she was trying to lead me around by it. Kylie didn’t want me to enlist, but I’d made up my mind. She said she’d wait for me. She wrote to me a lot while I was away, always included all kinds of soppy declarations. When I got back, it was to find that she’d moved in with another guy.”
I gaped. “She was living with someone else?”
“In the letters, she hadn’t given me even a hint of this. She’d been seeing him since a month after I left. She hadn’t told me, because she’d wanted to enjoy my shock; she’d wanted to punish me for leaving her.”
I rubbed his chest. “Butch, that wasn’t your fault or—”
“This is just the background, baby. That wasn’t one of the relationships I was talking about.” He sighed. “I didn’t like that she’d played me or that she’d cheated, but after being in a fucking war zone…the whole thing just seemed trivial. And considering she was a little wacked, I was glad to see the back of her. So instead of losing my shit, I walked away. I wasn’t interested in a girl who played games. But Kylie didn’t like that.”
I’d bet she didn’t.
“Maybe she’d expected me to fight for her or something. I know her parents were divorced and they spent most of her life in and out of court, fighting for custody and changes to the court agreement. Maybe that had messed her up. All I know is, she then decided to make my life hell.”
“I hate her already.” I kissed his chest. “Tell me the rest.”
“Any time I was with a girl for more than a night, Kylie would try to chase them away. Most of the time, it worked. If it didn’t, Kylie would step up her game.”
Following him into the bedroom, I asked, “Chase them away how?”
Dropping his towel, he pulled on a pair of pants. “She’d start with telling them lies about me; she’d say things like I was a drug addict or a serial cheater. Other times she’d claim I was actually her boyfriend, and even the father of her unborn—and of course fictional—child.”
“Oh. My. God.” I slipped on a vest and shorts as I added, “What a total bitch.”
“It didn’t even matter to her that she was still living with that guy, who either didn’t know what she was doing or just didn’t care. It didn’t matter that she was also sleeping with other guys. No, she’d decided my life was gonna be hell because I left her.”
“Sounds like this wasn’t about you at all. You said her parents were divorced, so one of them must have left home. That had to have hurt. Then they’d spent all those years fighting over her. Maybe she liked that kind of attention and thought that was what love was. But when you left her just like one of her parents did, you didn’t fight for her. I mean, she told lies about you—I’ll bet that was one of the court tactics her parents used.”
He shrugged. “Only Kylie knows why she behaved that way.”
“You said she stepped up her game if the lies didn’t work. What did she do to the girls?”