‘Of course it wasn’t inevitable,’ she said, her face alight with panic and indignation. ‘We had a choice and we took the wrong one. Again.’
I had to stifle a harsh laugh at her naivety, even though I found it strangely endearing. Surely she could not have slept with many men since me, if she didn’t know how rare was the chemistry we shared?
‘It wasn’t the wrong choice then,’ I said. ‘Because it gave us our son.’
And as far as I was concerned it wasn’t the wrong choice now either. I wanted her, I had wanted her for five years, and I was through trying to avoid it. Especially as I could suddenly see my avoidance had as much to do with my fear of fatherhood as it did with my fear of losing control with her.
I could see I had struck her dumb, so I continued.
‘I was scared,’ I said, forcing the words out past the lump of denial in my throat. I hated to admit a weakness, hated to admit I’d ever been afraid, but for once it made sense to let her see this was much more of a struggle than I had let on. ‘Scared of being a father. That’s the other reason I avoided contacting you.’
She didn’t say anything, her eyes going wide and making her look even more delicious.
My erection throbbed under the loose sweats but I ignored it. We would not have a repeat performance tonight, not until she had come to terms with the idea.
If I wanted to have Belle again—and I now knew I did—I needed to get past my fear of fatherhood.
‘I never intended to have a child and I’m fairly sure, given my past record, I will be incredibly bad at it.’
‘Your...’ She swallowed, her eyes shadowed with a grief I didn’t understand. ‘Your past record? You mean you have other children?’
‘Dio, no!’ I barked out a strained laugh. ‘You are the only woman I have failed to protect so spectacularly,’ I murmured.
You are also the only woman who has made me forget everything but the driving need to be inside you.
I bit off the admission. That would not continue to be the case once we had fed this hunger. Nothing ever lasted, especially not physical desire—it was transient, fleeting—but for us, I suspected, the intensity was increased by all the other commitments we shared, to the dead and to the living, to the past and the future.
There was no way to disentangle ourselves unless we faced the truth instead of running from it. We’d both done our fair share of that—she’d had a child and refused to tell me of his existence for five years, but I had also refused to see the truth about my own brother and refused to meet my son.
We had both been cowards about so much. The only way forward now was to be brave. And, if that meant admitting weaknesses I did not wish to admit so I could work past them, so be it.
Facing those realities meant I would be able to feed this hunger instead of trying to deny it, which was one hell of an incentive to stop running.
‘Then what past record are you talking about?’ she asked.
‘I failed my brother. I failed you,’ I said, forcing the words past the guilt which I had deflected and denied for so long. ‘I do not wish to fail the boy too...’
CHAPTER NINE
Belle
I ST
ARED AT Alexi and blinked furiously to hold back the sting of tears at his honesty—and the hopelessness I suspected lay behind it.
Did he really believe he would be a bad father? He hadn’t failed Remy, and he hadn’t really failed me. He’d been cruel to me that day, but he’d been grief-stricken at the time—we both had.
But, as the emotion closed my throat, I knew I couldn’t have this discussion now. My sex was still tender, my face alight with shame and shock and my pulse had accelerated to a mile a minute.
I needed to get away from him, from here, to take stock, to make sure I didn’t fall into his arms again—and unleash all those destructive emotions that had tripped me up before.
I was terrified of my feelings for him—confused as they were. They felt too strong to be merely echoes of my former childish adoration.
I couldn’t afford to fall in love with him again. Alexi had always been a hard man to love. I hadn’t realised it as a girl, blinded by all the qualities I adored—his protectiveness, his dominance, his determination. But I could see now how destructive those qualities could be for me, as well as how attractive.
I’d never known my own father, who had died soon after I was born, and as a result I’d spent my childhood looking for male approval. The more unattainable Alexi had become, the more I’d wanted him. He was just as unattainable now. I needed to figure out how to handle discovering my body was still enthralled by him, and only him.
And I needed to figure it out quickly, before I told Cai who Alexi was.