Pulling away from the kiss, she blinks her eyes open. A bitter laugh cutting in.
“Oh, you’re good. Try that on someone else. I can’t do this with you. Why can’t you understand that?”
A vein of anger rushes in. This woman is going to be the death of me.
Goddamn her.
“You need to be a bit more specific than I can’t. You can do anything you want, Victoria. All you have to do is let go of whatever the hell you’re afraid of.”
“I don’t want to let go. This is my life you are trying to dictate. You don’t have a say in anything when it comes to me.”
“If you’re determined to live a lie, then no, I guess I don’t. You can tuck your head in the sand all you want. You can hide behind whatever shield you’ve built around your heart, but you can never hide behind the truth. If I didn’t believe there was something between us, I sure as fuck wouldn’t be standing here.”
Her chest rises and falls, and I can’t help myself this time. My glance drifts to her cleavage. She closes her eyes, billows out an exasperated breath, and when they open, the fire is gone. In its place is a bone-chilling glare.
Just like that, Victoria is shuttering herself in, locking her true feelings away.
“Take a good, long look, asshole. If you plan on living here, that’s all you’ll be doing since I’ll never let you touch me again.”
She’s lying.
As they say, eyes never lie, even when the lips do, and hers are full of them.
“There’s another lie, angel. How many more should I let you tell before I spank the habit out of you?”
She laughs out a sad, troubling sound. It causes my chest to tighten.
“How many times do I have to tell you that you aren’t the boss of me? That you don’t own me? I might be physically attracted to you, but that’s as far as it will ever go. I don’t need your help to heal. I don’t need a man like you.”
A man like me. Yeah, that subject about my past is closed. I won’t touch on it again until she tells me why she slept with me when she doesn’t trust me. I already know why. It’s her I’m trying to get caught up.
“I see you hurting. I see you’re afraid. Holding your grief inside isn’t healthy. Let me hold on to some of it. Give in to me.”
”Give in to you? I did that once, and now you’re hounding me like some stalker,” she counters, causing my chest to tighten more. “You and I never began. We are nothing.”
Fucking hell. She’s going to gut me before I get her to open up.
So be it.
“That’s the biggest lie you’ve told. We began the day we met. It just took us twenty-some years to figure out there’s something between us. Don’t stand there and feed me lines of bullshit anymore. You fed me enough of them already today. You want to know how it feels to belong to me and me to you. You’re just too much of a chickenshit to take a step.”
Every inch of her goes rigid. All I can think in this very second is how she’s so beautiful when she’s caught off guard.
And that’s what we are. We’re both caught off guard by the connection we’ve always had deciding to join us as one, and then she lost her family. And then she went into protective mode. Doing all she can to hold everyone together while she weeps on the inside.
But she’s punishing herself for something that will be explosive. Something I’ve wanted for such a long time; I didn’t realize how much until she blew my mind.
Victoria stole my breath clear out of my lungs the first night she hung out at Lane and Sienna’s. Sure, it was a primal attraction at first. The way those curvy hips of hers swayed when she walked. I wanted to latch on to them while I fucked her in every position possible.
Soft, delicate, and I loved how she felt when my hands finally wrapped around them. There’s something about her hips that drives me insane. She tranced me to the point I couldn’t get enough of her. I wanted more even after I fucked us both into the farthest part of the galaxy. But that isn’t all I want.
I want everything from her.
Heart and soul and mind.
“You are drowning in so much grief and sorrow you can’t see the man standing in front of you. A man who cares. A man who sees his equal. A man who sees passion, a man who felt it when I kissed and ravished you. A man who desperately wants to bring out the woman you’ve hidden away—the woman who wants me as bad as I do her. You belong to me. I won’t give up, no matter what you say or do. Why don’t you be honest for once in your life, Victoria? Honest with yourself. Honest with me. Let yourself feel.”
I’ve all but dropped my heart at her feet. Pretty confident she’d stomp on it about now if I did. I can take it because this beautiful woman who has been under my skin for as long as I’ve been under hers is a risk I want to take. A chance of getting to know everything there is to know about her.
”You want honest, well here it is. You barged into my life like a hurricane. You think you can control me. Fix me. You can’t. When did you turn into a therapist? Should I start paying you by the hour for the shitty way you are trying to help me? You’re used to being paid, aren’t you? I deserve someone who treats me with respect, not someone who wants to change me and turn my world inside out. You don’t get to decide what I want or what I need. Or how I feel. If you
