Something flickered in Gill’s expression, but Lathan was too amped to try to interpret it.
Gill raised his fist in the air. For a moment, Lathan thought it was an invitation for the fight to continue, but Gill fixed him with a middle finger. This time, there was no disguised meaning, no humor in the gesture. A fuck-you full of anger. Gill walked out the door.
Lathan turned on Honey. “For fuck’s sake, woman. Do I look like I need help?” He spread his arms wide.
“I’m not going to watch someone I love be thumped on. And you’re a…if you can’t accept help from a girl.”
He missed a word, but got the gist.
“I’m plenty big enough to handle Gill on my own. A good ass-stompin’ wouldn’t have killed either of us. I don’t want you getting hurt. Especially on my behalf.”
His brain must’ve been operating in delay mode because her words from a few moments before finally got absorbed. When someone I love. She’d said she loved him. Loved him. Fucking loved him.
His heart pumped up two sizes. A smile cracked across his face. He saw her confusion at his abrupt change. No way was he going to tell her why he was really smiling. Didn’t want her to clarify or, worse, take those beautiful words away from him. “You’re pretty fearless. You know that?”
“I’ve had to be.” She didn’t say his name, but Junior hovered, an invisible specter between them.
An instinctual urge, so ingrained that it wasn’t even on the level of thought, rose up inside him. “I’ll kill Junior if he ever tries to hurt you again.”
“Sit down.” She pointed at a chair and watched him until he complied. Anything she wanted from him was hers. She wet a clean dishcloth. He opened his mouth to tell her not to mess with the blood, that he’d take care of it, but she walked right past it to stand in front of him.
She moved into the open vee of his legs. Her scent folded around him. He ripped off his gloves, spared a fleeting thought of wonder for the fact that Gill had punched him skin to skin and he’d had no reaction from the contact, then settled his hands on her hips.
She grabbed his chin and tilted it upward to bring his gaze to hers. “Hold still.” She wiped the blood off his face and neck with the washcloth. He couldn’t breathe, but he didn’t need to. He had something more important than oxygen. He had her taking care of him. Something no one else had ever been able to do.
He couldn’t let anyone take care of him. Touch was a good-bye to reality, something he couldn’t tolerate. But this, with her—Holy Jesus—he felt special. Loved.
If he was less of a man, he might’ve fucking bawled like a baby. But he was no baby and she definitely wasn’t his momma.
“This is going to sting.”
She pressed the cold cloth against the split in his lip, but he felt no pain. She and pain couldn’t coexist. That’s why his lip no longer hurt, why her touch had the power to calm him, why the SMs couldn’t survive in her presence. She was his miracle.
She bit her bottom lip as she worked on cleaning him up, but the scar at the corner of her mouth still tilted jauntily upward. A beautiful imperfection. He touched the line briefly. The raised ridge felt wrong in a way that went beyond words.
“How’d you get this?” he asked.
The lavender scent of her sadness engulfed them. Without answering, she walked back to the sink.
“I shouldn’t have asked.” He spoke the words to her back.
She returned to the vee between his legs and applied the newly cold rag to his lip. “I got in trouble for telling a lie.”
“Someone hit you? Junior?” Should’ve known.
She turned the cloth over and pressed the cold side against his lip. “My mom.”
“Your mom? How old were you?”
“Five.”
Five. Just five years old. What kind of lie could a kid—a little girl—tell that warranted being hit? “What happened?”
“I told her about Junior.”
He wished he hadn’t read the words right. “You were only five when Junior started…” He trailed off. Couldn’t let her know how much he knew. “What kind of fucked-up mother would hit her own daughter for telling the truth? ’Cause that’s what it was. The truth.”
“Apparently, my mom.” He couldn’t hear the sadness in her voice, but he could smell it and see it in the clouds over her dazzling eyes. “I used to wish I could jump back to the moment before I told Mom. And not tell her. It was like from that moment on, she hated me. All I ever wanted was for her to love me as much as she loved Junior.”
Lathan didn’t possess any words of consolation. He just put his hands back on her hips and held on tight.
A blush, fresh and new as bud in spring, dusted her cheeks. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”
“You can tell me anything. Everything. You know that, don’t you? Nothing you say to me will ever change…” He gestured between them to indicate their connection and stared into her eyes, willing her to open up, to tell him her pain. He wouldn’t feel so bad about already knowing and hiding it from her, if she just out-and-out confided in him.
“Are you hungry? We didn’t exactly have time for breakfast this morning.”
The abrupt subject change meant she didn’t trust him. And why should she? Just because he felt connected to her didn’t mean she felt the same way about him. “I’ll make us something.”
“I’ll do it. It’ll be fun to cook in a kitchen instead of using a hotplate or a microwave.” The smile on her face wavered. “Unless you don’t want me messing around in your kitchen.”
“Everything I own is yours.” He gestured to indicate his entire home. “I want you to feel that way.”
Surprise flared in her eyes, diminishing the clouds.
Might as well lay it all out there. He ate the way he ate. Couldn’t change it. Couldn’t hide it. And if she thought he was a freak… No, he didn’t want to go there. “But, I’m particular about my food. Really particular.”
“Gill said you didn’t do dairy.”
“What else did he tell you?” He better not have mentioned the SMs. No, of course he didn’t. She was still here.