Romanticizing every gesture.
Inserting herself into the space she wanted to be in. She wanted to be special to him. She wanted... She wanted to be special, and in the absence of that, she was feeling pretty content exploiting his traditionalism, and his willingness to make a commitment, and she knew that meant that more decision-making was ahead for her.
Because with all this revelation, with all this self-honesty, came the need for her to do something about it.
Whether it was sad or not, she wanted to be here. She wanted to be with him. She was drawn to him like she had never been drawn to another person. And she was fascinated by this place. By the possibility of this life around her.
And if she left tonight, it wouldn’t change the fact that Wolf was the father of her child. But he was the first man she had ever wanted, which was much more important than his being the first man she had slept with. He was the first man she had even wanted to be with. He was the first man to take those feelings in her and make them something irresistible. And he had broken her heart. But without saying he loved her, without giving her any kind of emotional anything, he had started to piece it back together with his actions.
Wolf represented security. She could see that clearly, right then.
And security was actually what she wanted. More than anything, it seemed, because she was willing to contort and twist to make this work in the name of security.
But what did he want? And how did she give it to him? Maybe it didn’t matter. But it felt like it did. It felt like it mattered an awful lot.
He came back and sat next to her, and she tried to smile.
“What?”
And that simple question made something warm filter through her body. Because he noticed that something was wrong. And it did seem like he cared.
“Is everybody being nice to you?”
“Everyone is being very nice to me,” she said. “This is a wonderful place. I can see why it means so much to you.”
She thought back to her earlier revelations about him. And he would do his duty. It mattered to him. Because at his core he was no rebel at all. Because he was a man who worked the family land even though his family legacy had never been anything for him but pain. Because he was a man who stayed. At least, when he needed to be.
They stayed a while longer. Then they got into the truck and started driving back home. It was dark, and the headlights of the truck provided the narrow beam of illumination. On the next curve. But nothing farther ahead. And that was much how she felt her whole life was at this moment. She could get just to the next curve. But what lay beyond that, she didn’t know. And it could be something lethal, or something easy.
“Wolf,” she said. “Who’s Breanna?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WELL,HELL. SAWYERHADtold him. He had warned him that he needed to give her the story or somebody else was going to do it for him. And maybe part of him hoped someone else would.
He just didn’t have any practice telling it.
Tell yourself that all you want, but you know that’s not why.
No. The beast inside him turned circles around this particular truth, snarled at anyone who might get too close. The beast inside him wanted to protect this wound like it was a living thing, and it paced around it in a slow circle, snarling at him.
Because this was his most cherished pain.
That prize trauma that had turned him inside out and finally changed him.
The one that had made sure he knew that there was no happiness for him in this world, and believing it when he had already been shown that it wasn’t to be by his parents... Well, it was foolishness. And he had been a fool. He learned his lesson since. And it was that lesson he guarded with such ferocity. Because it was more than a lesson.
It was a human being.
It was a sweet girl who’d had the misfortune of being on the receiving end of his overly intense, obsessive brand of desire.
But there was no reason to not tell her. She deserved to know. She did deserve to know. Because to be with him was to share space with this. Hell, he’d been doing it for the past sixteen years. He was comfortable with it. As these things went.
“Breanna was my girlfriend,” he said.
“I see. I had it on good authority that you didn’t have girlfriends.”
“Yeah. Not after her.”