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Closing my eyes, I try to sound neutral and hide my rising panic as I reveal my secret to him. “I read some of your old family diaries.”
He stiffens under me, his entire body going rigid and his hands stalling.
A few seconds tick by before he finally resumes his ministrations.
“Did you now?”
His question sounds innocent, but the underlying tension in his voice makes my chest tighten as I glance up at him to gauge how angry he is.
Those usually hard gray eyes don’t hold any anger, though.
Just concern.
And I know why.
He said he didn’t read all of them, but he must know what some of them contain if he’s the one who keeps all the current records. There isn’t any way he could be ignorant of this part of his family’s history and still run the Barker organization.
I hold his gaze and swallow through my dry throat. “I know what Rosewood is.”
His jaw hardens, and he feathers his fingertips over my cheek. “Do you?”
I nod.
For days, I’ve been anticipating his reaction to this, preparing myself for The Beast’s return with an overly aggressive response to me prying into the very thing he warned me to stay out of. But his almost eerie calm is scarier than any possibility I had worked up in my head.
This man doesn’t do calm.
He’s always tense. Always coiled so tightly that he seems verging on explosion. No doubt how he earned his nickname.
What the hell changed?
If I broach the subject, something tells me this momentary bubble will burst and we’ll be right back to arguing and pushing at each other to get a rise.
Better to try to get what answers I can while he seems open to it.
“Rosewood is a family. They came over from England with yours originally all those years ago.”
When he doesn’t respond, I continue with what I’ve learned from the various volumes I’ve managed to consume the last few days.
“It seems from the diaries that your two families were pretty closely entwined.”
He looks away, staring up at the ceiling, but his hand resumes slowly tunneling through my locks, the soothing motion making me relax again even though his mood might swing the other direction. “Something like that.”
“But I don’t know them or recognize the name. Are they here in the mountains or in Helena? Are you still allied with them? Is that what my father did? Somehow crossed the Rosewoods and you’ve come to their defense?”
Weston dips his head to make eye contact with me again. “You’re asking a lot of questions, Beauty. Is that what this was all about?”
I freeze at his question, the implication of it, that he somehow thinks I seduced him to try to get answers he wouldn’t otherwise give me.
Shit.
It never occurred to me that he might leap to that conclusion, but now, seeing it from his perspective, I can see how he went there.
I shake my head. “No, of course not. I just…”
“You just thought that while you had me naked in bed with my hard cock pressed against your ass this morning that it would be a good time to try to drag some answers from me?”
He raises a silver brow.
