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“I’m going to the pool,” I announce.
Adam’s gaze lifts and meets mine. “Good decision. Turn around and go out the back door through the main living area.”
That’s all I need to hear. I rotate, and I’m on the other side of the house, exiting in no time. In a flash, I’m inside those manicured bushes, kicking off my shoes and tearing away my cover-up. I step to the end of the pool and wade into the chilly water, shivering with the temperature, but praying Damion is watching me and that he will come to me. I’m all the way to my neck when my gaze lands on the cottage in the gap of scrubs at the end of the pool.
There were other vehicles when we drove up. We are not alone.
Damion’s here.
And he’s choosing not to come to me. I swim back to the edge of the pool, and frustration starts to form inside me. So many times he walked away from me, and he can’t give me this one time when grief was controlling me. I walk up the steps and sit on the edge, willing Damion to show up, my mind traveling back in time yet again as I remember the last time he tried to walk away. And why? Because of his father.
“You don’t fucking know, Alana. People disappear when they cross him, and I made a few of the calls to Caleb to make it happen.”
“So you implied. I get it. I already said I get it.”
“You’re doing what I did. You’re pretending it doesn’t really matter. You're pretending it’s not what you think.I pretendedbeing the messenger didn’t matter, but it did.” He presses his hand to his face and drops it, a bitter laugh sliding from his lips. “Ironically, it was the guy who I helped him drive to suicide that finally woke me up. He fucking did it in front of me, shot himself, and I blinked, and his blood was all over me. I couldn’t pretend that wasn’t real. Fuck. I need to go out for a while.” He turns, offering me his back, his shoulders knotted beneath his tee.
At this point, everything he’s spoken in the last two minutes is exploding in my mind in mini little blasts of information, but none of it shocks me. His father is a brutal monster, and Damion had already warned me this was coming. He faces me, lets me see the suffering in his eyes. “I’ll be back later.” He starts walking.
I’m gutted by the level of pain I see in his eyes—the soul-deep pain tearing at him and now me—but it’s that very reaction that tells me he’s the same man I fell in love with years ago. Who I still love now, but I’m also furious with him. He’s walking away. He’s leaving. Damn him. “I thought you weren’t doing this again, Damion,” I shout after him. “Every time you just walk away. That’s what’s tearing us apart. I told you I wouldn’t move in with you if you were going to do this, and yet, here we are, one night in, and you're leaving again.”
He whirls on me, not as far away as I’d thought, his emotions dark and suffocating in their intensity. “What part of you’re better off without me do you not get? I tried to leave you alone, Alana. I stayed away. You should have fucking married someone else.”
I recoil and hug myself. “Okay. Yes. Okay.” Tears prickle in my eyes, and I hurt. I hurt so very badly, the way only he can hurt me.
He curses, and then he’s in front of me, pulling me to him, and his touch is fire—the friction between us flames. “That’s not what I want,” he says, his voice a gravelly, rough baritone. “It’s not what I haveever wanted,but did you not hear what I told you? I’m not a good person, Alana. Why the hell are you not the one walking to the door?”
“Because I love you, and I don’t think love is logical. I also know you’re not your father. You want to make things right, so do it. Make things right. And stop walking away, damn it. Just stop!” The words are all but ripped from my throat by way of my emotions.
His hands come down on my face, and he tilts my gaze to his. “I’m standing right here. I’m right here, Alana.”
“But you wanted to walk away.”
“I didn’t want to look in your eyes after I told you what I’d done. I didn’t want to see the rejection.” He presses his forehead to mine. “I’m not the boy next door anymore.”
Tension uncurls in my belly with his confession, and my fingers curl on his jaw. “You are to me,” I whisper.
He pulls back to stare down at me, his fingers fanning my face, and the torment I’d seen in him moments before has gone nowhere. “I don’t deserve you.” With this declaration, his mouth closes over mine, and I moan with the deep stroke of tongue, gone too soon as he tears his mouth from mine. “I’m not good for you.”
“Those words are destructive. You know that, right? They drive us apart.”
“I want to be your hero, baby, but the stakes are high. You have to know that.”
My fingers ball in the soft cotton of his t-shirt. “There’s a way to fix this. There’s always a way.”
“Not as long as he’s alive. That’s the cold, hard truth.”
I jolt back to the present. He’s going to kill his father. And that’s exactly why he’s not coming to me. The same reason I didn’t want him close to me. I didn’t want him to stop me from doing what I needed to do. He doesn’t want me to stop him from killing his father. But he’s telling himself it’s because I hurt him. He’s telling himself lies, just like I was telling myself lies.
I push to my feet and step out of the pool, suddenly aware that I don’t have a towel and that I don’t even care. I slide my shoes back on, grab my cover-up, but don’t bother pulling it on, carrying it with me as I all but run toward that cottage. I’m through the shrubs in a blink and standing at the door when a small part of my mind warns that I could be offering my half-naked self to someone else, but everything inside me says this is Damion.
The door opens, and Damion is standing there, still in his suit, his expression colder than the water, but I’m not dissuaded. “You walked away from me so many times to ‘protect’ me, as you called it, and I do it one time and you shut me out? How is that fair? And I love you too much to ever hate you, but being pissed at you like I am right now is another story. I’m pissed at you. I’m so very pissed at you. Why would you let me—”
He grabs me and pulls me to him, and then glances over his shoulder. “Leave,” he orders to whoever is with him.
A moment later, he’s pulled me inside, shut the door, and folded me close. “Why would I let you what, Alana?”
Chapter Seven
