“I know you’re not weak. A weak person wouldn’t have survived what you did. A weak person wouldn’t be telling me to step off for wanting to baby her too much.”
“I’m not telling you to step off. I enjoy—” She looked straight ahead at where his heart resided in his chest. The organ seemed to sense her gaze and pumped a little harder as if flexing and showing off its muscularity. “It’s just that I don’t want you to feel forced to take care of poor wittle Isween.” She spoke her last words in a pouty-child tone.
“Baby, I don’t look at you like poor wittle Isleen.” He mimicked her tone. Her lips twitched and ticked up by degrees until a full-on smile blazed out at him. “I look at you like a woman who’s been through shit and then got shit on again, and has just walked out of the shit pile, but some of the stink is lingering.”
She giggled, the sound a symphony to his ears. “Are you saying I stink?”
“I’m saying it might be awhile until you find your new normal. I know what it’s like to have normal destroyed. After the lightning strike, I was lost and adrift and desperate to adapt.”
She came to him, wrapping her arms around his waist and hugging him tight. Holy fuck, she felt so perfect, so destined, so inevitable. There was no resisting her. That’s what scared the shit out of him.
“Why did you really want me to leave?” She spoke against the fabric of his shirt, the heat of her breath a caress. “What do you feel about the Fearless and Bear thing? About us? And what about Camille?”
And damn. She’d just shoved the elephant in the room into his arms. His choices were to keep quiet and lug the bastard around or answer her questions and set it down. He stepped back from her, needing the distance to formulate coherent thought. He ran a hand through his hair, then scratched the top of his head—pure delay tactic. Jesus. Was he really this much of a coward? Not normally.
The temperature seemed to be ratcheting higher and higher until it felt like he stood on the outer ring of hell—only it wasn’t his AC suddenly taking a dump, it was his own damned wimpiness at having to talk about his feelings.
Might as well answer the easiest question first. “Camille is a non-issue. We fucked. That’s it. There was never a relationship. No matter what she or her fucktard of a brother say.”
Isleen narrowed her eyes at him, like he might not be telling her the truth. “Kent said you’ve been with her a decade.”
“We’ve fucked for a decade. She never made any relationship demands. On the surface, she seemed fine with our arrangement, but I heard her thoughts—knew she wanted more, and I knew I’d never give it to her. It makes me an asshole for not stopping it when she wanted more. I own that.”
“Is that what you’re doing with me? Just wanting a fuck? How do I know you’re not going to get tired of me at some point, dump me like a dirty diaper, and move on to someone else?”
The wrongness of her words knocked him back a step. “I would never do that to you.”
“Did you say the same thing to Camille? That you’d never do that to her?” Her face wore an odd expression of both suspicion and longing to trust him.
“With my history, you’ve got no reason to believe me, but I would never do that to you. With you, everything is different. I’m different.” And here his feelings were, lining up and getting ready to shoot out of his mouth. “The Fearless and Bear thing feels right in a way that isn’t based on logic but resides somewhere on the level of gut feeling and instinct. I don’t know how I feel about that. I enjoy touching you. I want to be close to you. I feel something for you that I’ve never felt for another woman. I want more of you. I want all of you.” He hoped she got what he meant. “But if it means, in the end, that I’ll turn out like Dad? No way. I’d rather walk away right now while I am still me.”
She listened to every word he said, never blinking, never looking away, just focusing all her attention on him. Wasn’t being the object of her focus sexy as hell? She made him feel seen and heard in a way he’d never experienced.
“So you’d rather hurt me than be hurt.” Her voice carried a concrete certainty.
“No.” Her very words were abhorrent to his ears. “God, no. I’d never hurt you.”
“What do you think is going to happen to me if you walk away and leave me like Gran left your Dad?”
“Hadn’t thought about it like that.” The idea of her being like his dad had been—and it being his fault—made his heart almost rupture.
“Maybe we need to think about it like that. If we both have the power to kill each other’s souls, then we need to figure out how to trust each other.”
Trust. When had he ever trusted anyone besides Roweena? She’d been the only person in his life who’d never let him down or cast him off like yesterday’s dirty underwear.