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But no, that didn’t sound like the brash, careless Rowdy I knew. He would simply tell me if he didn’t want to be with me anymore. He wouldn’t care how much it hurt.
“Because…” He finally looked up. At the same time that he finally let me see the truth in his eyes, I connected the dots, remembering what I’d discovered in that tackle box.
“Because you also fucked Jada twenty years ago,” I finished for him. My voice was barely a whisper, so I was surprised he’d heard.
“Yes.”
“And you think you—I’m…um…”
“Yes,” he croaked.
I sucked in as much air as I could after feeling like I’d been punched in the gut. I had a hard enough time coming to terms with the fact thatJoren,of all fucking people, might be my birth father, but this…oh, God please…not this. How could I live with myself knowing that I—
“No,” I cried and shook my head. “It’s not true. Why are you doing this, Owen? You said you loved me.”
“I do love you, baby. I promise that hasn’t changed. Why do you think I pushed you away?”
I didn’t respond. I was too busy searching for signs of myself in his features, but the details of Rowdy’s face slowly blurred away as tears filled my eyes. I didn’t realize I was shaking until Rowdy pulled me into his arms and held me. Slowly, my trembling faded until only my quiet sobs remained.
God couldn’t be this cruel, could he? To let me love and be loved this deeply only to take it anyway in an irrevocable way? Even in death, I would be allowed to love him.Wanthim…
But if Rowdy and I were connected in the way he feared…
Impossible.
“I want you to come home,” Rowdy said as if he’d heard my thoughts and sought to defy them.
The laugh that escaped me was sad and slightly hysterical. I shook my head against his chest even as my hands tightened their hold. “That’s a terrible idea, Owen.”
The reasons I was forbidden to love him didn’t matter. I couldn’t just turn off my feelings.
Did I ever truly love him if I could?
I thought about Sutton and how I had gone numb toward him after he cheated on me. I always thought it was because my grief was too great, but maybe not. I never mourned our relationship. I don’t even think I’d cried for him.
No.
Rowdy and I keeping our distance until we sorted our shit out was the best thing either of us could do.
Living with him, sharing a space, breathing his air…that would be tempting fate, and I wasn’t sure I could live with the consequences.
“I know how it sounds,” he told me, “but I promise it won’t be like that. I know how to keep my hands to myself.” If the circumstances weren’t so fucked, I would have snorted at that because he absolutely didnot. “I just want to take care of you. Be there for you. Keep you safe. No matter what ties bind us, that fact will never change.”
I swallowed. “What are we going to do, Owen?”
“We’re going to get to the bottom of this.” His warm hand rubbed up and down my spine soothingly, and it was all I could do not to close my eyes and forget. “Whatever it takes.”
Whatever it takes…
What would it take exactly?
Nothing but our souls, sanity, morals, and self-respect. And I was willing to risk anything, even my soul, not to walk this earth without this man again.
A shuddered breath left me.
This was so stupid. There was nothing concrete to suggest Rowdy and I couldn’t be together.
Jada couldn’t be sure that I was the daughter she’d given away any more than I could be sure the baby in the photo she’d carried around for twenty years was me—or that Rowdy was the man who’d sired me.
