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She rolled her eyes. “Everything is healthy, and I’m active. I can exert myself all I want.”

But she did decide to move on to something more low-key after that.

“Pottery,” she said, moving over to the room that had been set up with a pottery wheel and all of the supplies, along with video tutorials, which she watched impatiently, and Adonis watched intently; she could practically see him committing certain details to memory, and filing them away. Because of course he would do everything exactly as it was supposed to be done, which she supposed was why he excelled at so much.

“You don’t seem like a rule follower,” she said.

“You have to learn the rules in order to break them effectively,” he said. He picked up a lump of clay and set it down on his pottery wheel, and she copied his movements.

“Is that the secret?”

“I find that it is,” he said. “And I arrived at that conclusion because in my life, there were a great many things that happened that were in defiance of all rules and natural order. Rules are important. Everything in its place.”

There was something about those words that seemed layered. Important.

“There is a natural order to things. A way that must be observed. And when people don’t observe it, everything goes to hell. That’s how children end up on the street. It’s how men end up running crime empires. Hurting other people, not caring at all.”

“True. But this is pottery.”

“It’s a solid principle regardless.”

She stared at her lump of clay, but she found that it didn’t keep her attention. She continually looked back at him. At the way that he concentrated on it, his large hands moving slowly over his project, forming a shape. He was such a careful, wonderful man. One who had always been there for her, but one who contained a wildness. An edge that obviously disturbed him. One that he didn’t think was right, and he must think was the result of what he had been through.

Her heart felt like it was going to burst.

And maybe she shouldn’t say this now. Maybe they should learn the rules of marriage first. Maybe she should let everything settle. Go step-by-step, but she found that she couldn’t. Because he might’ve learned how to be methodical from all that they’d been through. But what she had learned was that if she threw herself at the mercy of the storm, Adonis would be there for her. He always had been. Maybe what he really needed was for someone to trust him. To care about him enough to put herself on the line for him.

“Adonis,” she said. “I love you.”

He stopped moving. And she felt like the world had fallen apart.

Chapter Fourteen

Adonis thought that his heart might explode. No one had ever said that to him before. He had never, ever had those words directed at him. Not even one time. Not as a child, not as a teenager and never as a man.

“Esme… You can’t mean that.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Because no one does.”

She stood up from where she sat next to the pottery wheel, and she knelt down before him, grabbing hold of his hands, not caring that they were covered in clay, holding on to him tightly. “I do,” she said. “I have. Forever. But what that means to me has changed. I love you. I love you so much, I just want you to be happy. With me. I want us to be together. I… I’m madly in love with you. I love you when you’re rough, and I love you when you’re mean. I love you when you’re lovely, and when you make love to me. And when you put me on all fours on the floor, and when you kiss me sweetly in the garden, when you do all this stuff…for me. You did it for me. Because I’m trying so hard to uncover all of the things inside of you, and I thought that maybe I could do it with this, and you went along with it for me, even though I know this is killing you. Even though I know that you think it’s dumb. I love you.”

“But you wouldn’t,” he said, the words torn from him.

“What do you mean, I wouldn’t?”

“If you knew. Everything. Esme, I’m trying so hard to leave all of it behind. But there are things in my past, things that broke me, and I don’t want you to know, because if you do, it’s all you’ll see when you look at me.”

“That’s not true. When I look at you I see you. I don’t see a prizefighter or a thief, or a boy who ran drugs. I see the man who protected me. The man who met two vulnerable siblings who had just been thrown out on the street, and you didn’t take advantage of us. You cared for us. Adonis, I see you. All of you. And whatever you did doesn’t matter.”

“It’s not what I did,” he said. “It’s what was done to me. And I can’t get rid of the memories, the feelings that I have about myself, there. It is what I see when I look in the mirror. And I do my very best to put a mask on every single day, one that isn’t that.”

“Tell me.”

“Can’t we just have this? Can we be this? Just let me have my secrets. Let me keep myself protected.”

“You’re not protected,” she said. “You’re not protected, it’s killing you. Because you think that there’s something, anything that would cause me to reject you.”