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She’s stiff in my arms, her hand barely resting on my chest. “I don’t think I like how it feels to rock your world.”
I lean in and brush my lips over hers. “I do,” I murmur. “Too much. That’s the problem.”
The tension in her hands eases, her body slowly softening against mine. “Stop judging me by your past because if I judged you by mine, we wouldn’t be together right now.”
“Duly noted and understood,” I say, easing back to look at her. “I’m sorry.”
“Who wanted your money, Gabe?”
I cut my stare and try like hell to block out the demons clawing a path through my damn heart. Her hand touches my jaw. “It’s okay. Tell me when you’re ready, if you’re ever ready.”
I catch her hand and look at her. “The past is the past. You’re the present. You’re what matters.”
Her gaze searches mine, probing, intense, and I have this sense she’s trying to climb inside me and see all those demons clawing away at me, but finally, she says, “He pretended to like dogs.”
He lied.
She’s been lied to.
I’ve been lied to.
“Whatever you get from me,” I vow, “good or bad, will be honest. That’s a promise.”
She swallows hard. “Says everyone who lies.”
“I’d be insulted by that if I didn’t understand it so well. I hate that you do.”
“I wasn’t trying to insult you.”
“You didn’t,” I assure her. “I’ll earn your trust. I’m up for the hard work.”
Now she cuts her gaze, her lashes lowering as she does, blocking out whatever emotion I’ve stirred that she doesn’t want to feel. I slide a finger under her chin and pull her gaze back to mine. “What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know if I can ever trust anyone again. I don’t know if I even want to try.”
“Another something we have in common,” I say. “Another something I wish you didn’t understand as well as you do. Another something that should make us both walk away, but I’m not, Abbie. And I don’t want you to either. Don’t walk away. Don’t let him get in the way.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” she says. “Translation. Don’t let her, whoever she is, get in the way.”
But she can get in the way, I think, because Abbie’s damn ex knows about her. And my father knows everything about her, which is information I have no doubt he’ll use. My father knows that KM is Kendall, a woman who’s my buried past. A woman who was the devil I destroyed.
An act that was brutal, even if deserved, and I’m not sure Abbie can handle just how vicious I was, and am, when I have to be. And I had to be, but I doubt that’s how she’ll see it. Bottom line: I’m the devil who wants her.
Chapter twenty-one
Abbie
Gabe and I stand in the patient room with Gabbie and her puppies at our feet, a happy little animal family, but we’re focused on each other, on the sins of our past, or the sins committed against us.
But what’s really between us is my ex and his. He knows about mine. He knows who he is, but Gabe doesn’t give me much about his ex, about “her,” whoever she is, but I know she exists. I know she hurt him. I know she’s the reason that he’s single and never been married. It’s a daunting idea. Maybe he still loves her. Maybe he’s damaged. A man who will never want me forever, but in truth, I’m damaged as well. We are two damaged, broken people who have perhaps found each other to heal. In this I find liberation.
I reach up and touch his face. “I don’t need to know your past, Gabe. I don’t need to know who she is.”
He takes my hand. “There’s nothing in my past that does anything but make me want you more, Abbie.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You will,” he promises, his words cryptic, a hint of rawness to his tone, but before I can press for more, Gabbie paws at Gabe’s leg, breaking the spell between us.
