And he wanted it with such a ferocity that it nearly scared him.
And not much scared him.
But he had never been in a situation where he had anything to risk. Jessie had lost a lot in her life. A whole lot. She lost so much, and so he supposed she had always seen life as a risk. And he could appreciate fully that she had put something on the line when she tried to kiss him and he’d rejected her. He felt like an ass. Because he just hadn’t known. He did now. Now that he’d experienced loss. And now that things felt precarious. Like they were on the edge of something. Something he might not be able to get back. He kissed her forehead, and she opened her eyes, looking at him sleepily. “Damien?”
“Yeah. I’m right here.”
“Merry Christmas,” she mumbled.
Then her eyes flew wide. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, hell,” she said. “Hell and damn. Hell and damn and shit.”
“There’s that dirty mouth again.”
“It’s Christmas morning. And Dylan was supposed to get here bright and early. And it’s...” She looked outside. “It’s gone sunup.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Levi is going to be a little bit suspicious if he goes upstairs to wake me up for Christmas morning and I’m not there.”
“Levi knows where you are.”
“He’s going to kill you. He’s going to murder you, and then...” She stopped. “What?”
“I said he knows where you are.”
“No. He can’t. He can’t know where I am. Because that would mean...”
“He came in here yesterday. He saw the shoe.”
“What?”
“You’re starting to sound like a broken record, sweet pea.”
“But there’s no way he can know. Because if he knew, you would be dead.”
“It turns out not. It turns out he respects you as a woman, and respects what you want.”
“No way. Not my brother. My brother is an old-fashioned hard-ass.”
“I had a talk with him.”
“So what, he just knows that we are sleeping together?” She winced. “I mean, that we slept together. Not that we are sleeping together. We just... We did the one time again. Because it was Christmas Eve. And it was the magic of the season and all of that.”
“That wasn’t it for me. And I made that pretty plain to Levi last night. Jessie... I was wrong to reject you back then. And I didn’t really do it to protect you. I thought I did. I did it to protect myself, because I knew that if you ever touched me...that would be it. I knew that it could never be a casual thing. And I was right. It can’t be. Not with you and me. This is real. This thing. And it was... I was on the verge of going out and really trying to make something of myself. And now I have. And you’re not twenty-one. And... I care about you. I always have.”
“No,” she said. “We can’t do that. We can’t do this.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because,” she said, almost sounding panicked. “Because that’s not... That’s not what it was supposed to be. And it can’t be that, anyway.”
“So when you tried to kiss me, you figured what? That I was going to sleep with you and walk away?”
“I hadn’t thought it through. I hadn’t... I hadn’t really considered it. I just knew that I wanted to kiss you. I didn’t want...”