“I want to be here for this child because I will be damned if I caused the kind of pain that my own parents did. Okay? Is that good enough for you? It scars you. And I don’t want to leave any scars like that. The one thing that I ever wanted... I don’t want much, Violet. I let go of a lot of things a long time ago. But what I want is to not salt the ground that kid is going to walk on before he ever takes his first step, okay? Because that’s how it was for us. Everything was harder. From the beginning. We grew up with a dad who didn’t care about us. Mothers who abandoned us. We didn’t know what functional family looked like except staring out at the other people that live here. Thank God we got to see it. But then I always wondered why we couldn’t have it. Why it wasn’t for us. I don’t ever want that. Not for my child.”
“Will you love him?” That question stuck in her throat.
“I love my family, Violet. I’m capable of love.”
“Oh. I thought you were sort of... Didn’t believe in it.”
He laughed, and the sound was so bitter it pierced her soul. “I believe in love. It’s real. It can kill you. It can save you. It’s a hell of a thing. Not wanting to have a child in my life because I didn’t want to have to care that much is not the same as not being able to.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling like all the air had been squeezed out of her lungs.
“Does that satisfy you?”
“I don’t know.”
Because it was clear that there was more to his story than he was telling her. It was clear that there was more to Wolf than she had realized. The answer was in those eyes, and she knew it. And it hurt. It burned.
He wasn’t going to tell her. That was the thing. He wasn’t going to give her any information that he didn’t have to. That much was clear. Wolf Garrett didn’t want to be known.
And she didn’t know if she had... She didn’t know if she had the emotional wherewithal to try and push through all of this. Because she didn’t know what she would find on the other side. She didn’t know what lay at the depths of who he was. And she felt... Well, every inch a decade younger than him and short of a lot of experience.
She hadn’t felt this gap. Not when things were light and easy and she was getting to know him. Not when she was kissing him. And not today when she had been cleaning the house. Switching their beds. No, then she had felt industrious. She had felt responsible. She had felt like she had everything under control. But right now she just felt...like she was at sea.
“It’ll have to,” he said. “For now. Thanks again for dinner. I’ve got to wash up and get ready for bed. Morning comes early around here. As you know. You don’t need to get up and make me breakfast.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I wasn’t going to.”
“You don’t have to make dinner, either. We’ll probably go to my brother’s house tomorrow.”
Violet didn’t know if she was ready for that. She didn’t know if she was ready to meet his family. She wanted to hide here. She wanted to hide here and figure out her own emotions, and she had no idea what they were doing, quite frankly.
“I guess.” She would wait and see how she felt tomorrow. There would be leftover chili, and she could have that if nothing else.
He walked out of the room, leaving her to her own devices. A few minutes later she heard the shower turn on, and she tried not to imagine him. Naked with the water pouring down his body. She didn’t have a right to picture him that way. Because they were starting over. They were not the people who had shared those intimacies.
Not anymore.
They were not the Wolf and Violet who had gotten themselves into this situation. They had to be the Wolf and Violet who can actually handle the situation, and that was going to be difficult. But it was better. Because those people hadn’t known what they were doing or how to proceed. Those people hadn’t known they were going to have to deal with each other long-term. She had been naive, far too naive to deal with a man like him. And he had been fake.
That was the bottom line. He hadn’t been truthful with her. And he could say that he was, that he had told her that he was going to leave, and then did. But he had also played the part of lighthearted charmer, and he wasn’t that at all. There was a quiet intensity to him that she couldn’t pin down. Emotion that ran far deeper than he was comfortable conveying. She was going to have to be strong enough, savvy enough, to handle that. And he was going to have to drop his guard eventually. Because the alternative was... Well, it wasn’t awesome.
She sat there on the couch, holding her bowl of chili until he got out of the shower. She heard the door close to the bathroom, heard his footsteps down the hall, then heard his bedroom door close. She closed her eyes.
“What the fuck?”
She heard his voice muffled through the bedroom door.
“I made some changes,” she shouted.
She heard the door open, and he charged out. With a towel wrapped around his lean hips, his broad chest bare and just as appealing to her as he had been back when she had been new, innocent Violet, who had thought that the two of them were embarking on an incredible, sensual journey, not this rocky road through their own personal hell. Unfortunately, she just couldn’t be unaffected by him. It was very irritating.
His face was like thunder, and still handsome. “You stole my bed.”
She smiled broadly. Sweetly. Meanly. “I didn’t think that I should be the one to have to sleep onthat.”
“So you... You moved it?”
“Yes.” She looked down at her hands as if she was examining her fingernails. “There was a lot of assembly required. It was a ton of work.”