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Shit. He hated seeing her like that. "Sofia?"
She turned her head sharply. "You called me Sofia. Not Sascha."
He nodded. "I'm beginning to see you as Sofia now. Sascha was a teenager. You're more than that now. You're a mom, a survivor, smart, protective, and strong. So, Sofia."
She bit her lip. "Sascha is the one you fell for, right? So that means that you're not interested? I mean, that's fine, I'm not either—"
"Hey." He put his hand on her arm. "It was a compliment. And do you really want to open that door of whether I'm interested in you? Because I will walk right through it, but I'm not sure you're ready for it." He kept his voice low, as non-threatening as possible, but he also let her hear the undercurrent in his voice, that a lack of interest was not his current mental state.
She looked at him, and her eyes widened when she saw the expression on his face. "Oh."
He grinned. "Yeah. Oh."
She looked back across the horizon, but a small smile was playing at the corners of her mouth. "Okay."
His smile widened. She hadn't told him to back off. The door was open, and he was going to walk through…just as soon as they got through this conversation. "Talk to me, Sofia. What happened that night?"
She slanted a glance at him. "You remember that night?"
Did he remember? "I recall very clearly going back to your hotel room and making love four times over the course of the night. It was incredible. I was all in, and I told you I loved you. You said you loved me. Then, in the morning, you woke up…" He paused, trying to figure out the best way to say it.
"On a rampage of meanness?"
He inclined his head. "I was going to say losing your shit, but yeah, that works. Then you kicked me out, and when I went back a few hours later, you had packed up your stuff and left. You'd bribed the hotel owner not to tell me anything, because you told him you feared for your life and you were on the run from me. He actually called the cops on me, and Brody had to bail me out." He didn't go into what had happened when he'd gotten pulled back into the system that he'd run from as a foster kid. It had taken Brody months to get him extricated from their claws again.
The memories made him tense, and he took a breath, unwilling to hold onto an experience from so long ago.
She looked at him sharply. "Oh, God. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I just…he assumed…and I let him."
"So, you didn't think I was going to hurt you? That you had to fear for your safety around me?" He had to ask it. The thought had weighed on him all this time, wondering if he'd done something to make her feel scared.
Sofia spun toward him and grabbed his arm. "No, God. No. Keegan. I promise you, I'd never felt so safe in my life. I loved being with you. I loved our night together. I loved everything about it. I just, I was so afraid that I'd stay with you if I had the chance, so I had to do whatever it took to get free before I was trapped."
"Trapped," he repeated. "There's that word again. If you thought so highly of me, why would you fear I'd trap you?" But even as he asked it, some of the weight that had been on his shoulders for a decade and a half faded away. She hadn't actually been afraid of him.
Jesus. The relief was staggering.
"No. I would trap myself." She tossed the blanket aside and got up, pacing restlessly away from him before she turned to face him. "My dad was a bad guy," she said. "My mom left him when I was a teenager, but his shadow was always over us."
Fuck. He didn't like that at all. "Is he still alive?" Was he the one she was running from?
"I don't know." She shrugged. "But all my mom wanted for me was to go to college. To have a career where I earned enough money to be independent. To never have to be with a man because I couldn't afford to take care of myself."
He nodded. "I agree."
"I had a full ride to Harvard, and I was on my way there when you and I met. I was driving cross country, but I didn't want to go." She looked at him. "I didn't want to go east. I didn't want to be a part of an old, traditional institution. But my mom had just died, and I'd promised her. I couldn't let her down."
He swore under his breath. "I'm so sorry you lost her."
Sofia nodded. "I had to keep my promise, but you…" She gestured at him. "You were so tempting. You lived this life of freedom and no rules. I wanted to stay with you, Keegan."
His gut turned over. "Really?"
She nodded. "But for what? You were a homeless runaway living under a bridge. I had a full ride at college and a promise to my mom. I owed it to her to make a better choice than that. So, I left the only way I knew how, and that was to try to destroy what we had." The guilt hit Sofia hard and deep. She'd forgotten how it had felt that night. "I thought I was going to break both of us," she whispered. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it. I just… I couldn’t trap myself."
Keegan understood now. The trap hadn't been him. It had been her. "I get it."
"Do you?"
