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There’s something terrifying about how simple it is to him. No argument I could make would matter. Rhys has already stripped everything down to the only fact he cares about: I came back. Dad may have been the reason, desperation may have driven me here, but my reasons mean nothing to a man who has already decided that returning was enough.
His hand moves to the back of my neck, keeping me facing him when my eyes drift toward the doors. I could hate him for this. I could spend the rest of my life resenting him for deciding that my choice belongs to him now, and I know without asking that it wouldn’t change anything. Rhys would keep me anyway, without guilt, without hesitation, without needing me to forgive him for it.
I should shove him away, but my hands remain at my sides as something far worse than anger works its way through me.
Despite what an animal he can be, I do love him.
The realization is so ugly that I want to bury it before I can understand it. Everyone can leave, and eventually everyone does. Dad is gone. The cottage is empty. Everything I once believed would remain exactly where I left it has disappeared.
Yet Rhys looks at me like death itself would have to pry me from his hands.
It’s wrong. I know it’s wrong, and knowing doesn’t stop some damaged part of me from finding comfort in the certainty of him. Rhys doesn’t need me to be easy to love. He doesn’t need me to stop grieving or forgive him or even want what he wants. I could hate him forever, and I know he would simply make room for my hatred beside everything else and keep me anyway.
My fingers close around the front of his shirt.
Rhys goes completely still. He doesn’t decide what happens next.
I do.
I pull him toward me and kiss him. Whatever restraint he was exercising disappears, his grip tightening when I drag myself closer. I cling to his shirt and kiss him harder, pouring grief and anger and loneliness into something that doesn’t require me to understand why I’m doing it.
When his mouth finally pulls away, he keeps me close, his face only inches from mine. Neither of us moves.
“You’re still not leaving.”
I close my eyes and let the last of my resistance go. Partly because I have no choice and partly because he is the Beast I chose.
47
Rhys
A few months later.
“Rhys, look.”
If it’s the fucking cherry tree again, I’m going to rip it right out of the soil.
Boone grins up at me from where he’s crouched beside the basil, one hand buried among the thick green leaves and the other waving impatiently for me to come closer. “Look at this.”
“I am looking.”
“No, you’re looking at me. Look here.”
I sigh and cross the greenhouse, stopping beside him and following his finger toward one of the tomato plants climbing its support. A tiny green tomato hangs under a cluster of yellow flowers, hardly larger than the end of my thumb.
“It made a tomato,” Boone says, looking absurdly delighted.
“I believe that is generally what tomato plants do.”
“But I planted this one.” He reaches toward it but stops just short of touching the tiny fruit, careful not to disturb it. “It was barely anything two days ago, and now look at it.”
“I see it.”
Boone looks up at me with a smile so wide that I find myself staring at him instead of the fucking tomato. There was a time when I thought I would never see this again. I remember standing alone in this greenhouse after taking him back to the village, surrounded by everything he had touched and planted and rearranged. The knowledge that there would never again be a Boone kneeling in the dirt of my castle, excited over some ridiculous little thing that had grown half an inch overnight, was dreadful.
I had hated the silence.
I simply hadn’t known enough to call it loneliness.
