“After I knew you knew what you mean to me. After you agreed to stay here with me. After I saved your mother so you believed I would.”
Her fingers curl on my chest. “You want me to stay?”
My hand comes down on her face, tilting her gaze to mine. “Yes. I do. I know this is happening fast, Harper, and I’m not an easy man to understand or live with. This savant thing is hell. I’m hell sometimes in ways you don’t know yet, but I don’t want to do this without you.”
“Do what without me?”
“Everything. Anything.” My voice lowers, a tremble in the depth of my words that I can’t control. “Stay with me.”
Harper stares up at me, searching my face, probing as if she’s looking straight through to my soul, looking for answers. Looking for a reason to stay with me. “Stay because I can’t live another day, let alone another six years, without you,” I add softly. “Stay because I hope like hell you feel the same.” And with that confession, I wait, I hold my breath, and pray that she doesn't walk away from me and us.
CHAPTER TWO
Harper
Eric and I stand in that alcove of the window in his office, the warmth of our bodies doing nothing to wash away the coldness of what he’d planned to do to me and the Kingston empire. “You tried to ruin me,” I whisper. “I don’t even know what to do with that information.” I lean against the stone wall behind me, needing the extra support as I search his handsome face, probing his blue eyes that tell a story I need desperately to understand. “Is this all a lie? Are we—”
“No. God, no. We’re not a lie.” He steps toward me and presses a hand to the wall just above my head, but he doesn’t touch me. I want him to touch me. I want to push him away. I’m a conflicted mess where this man is concerned.
“Nothing I have told you is a lie, Harper.”
“You tried—”
“If I wanted to ruin you, you have to know I would have. I stopped before I went too far.”
“You intended to. You made plans. You met with bankers.”
“But I didn’t do it.”
“You should have told me on your own. Not because that message I was given at the hospital forced you to. Not because I overhead your conversation with Grayson.”
“What you overheard was pieces of a bigger picture, not the full picture. It’s been a crazy few days. I would have told you.”
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“Grayson didn’t believe you were going to tell me.”
“Grayson doesn’t know all that’s transpired the past few days. He doesn’t know how much either of us have had to digest. He doesn’t understand the extent of this war which we’re in together. Together, Harper, and fuck, I want to touch you right now, but I feel like you don’t want me to. I would have told you. I swear to you on my mother’s memory, God rest her soul.”
“No.” My hands come down on his chest, heat and emotion spiking between us with the connection. “No, don’t do that. Don’t swear on your mother’s memory. I believe you. I have to believe you would have told me because any other place my mind goes is not a good place. I don’t want to believe that you saw my visit as a way to attack the family.”
“I was done with them,” he replies, his voice a snap of barely contained anger. “I went back for you. I saved that damn family for you.”
“Saved them from yourself?”
“Yes. You saved them from me. If we’re going to be honest here, you saved them from me more than once, at least where my father’s concerned.”
“How do I believe I have that power? Why would I have that power?” I shake my head. “I don’t know how I have that power.”
“And yet you do. There are only three people in my life who have ever been able to pull me back when I’m charging forward: my mother, Grayson, and you.”
“I want to be able to do that for you, but we just talked about trust on the plane. You say you would have told me—”
“I would have.” His words are low, rough, emotion-laden in ways he doesn’t do emotion except with me.
“But you didn’t want to. You didn’t trust me and what I’d do with that information. That was clear in what you said to Grayson. You didn’t trust me or us. I need us to be more than that or I can’t do this.”
“When this family gets out from between us, we will be.”