“If you’re looking for a damsel in distress, you can piss right off,” she narrowed her eyes on me. “She’s saved herself. From shit you couldn’t even imagine. So, if you’re looking to fix her life for her… look around, buddy.” She waved at the bakery behind us. “She’s done that too. She doesn’t need you. And if that’s why you want her, then go. Now. Because I’m not gonna sit on the sidelines this time when a man tries to cut her down so he can stand taller, pretending he's lifting her up too.”
“You done?” I asked her when she didn’t speak for a few seconds.
She scowled at me. “If you hurt her, I’ll peel the skin from your face and roast it on my barbeque in front of you.”
I nodded, trying very hard to restrain my urge to smile. Not because she was trying to be funny… She was dead fucking serious, which was why I needed to smile. It made me happy as shit that Nora had someone to go to bat for her like this. Said a lot about the kind of person Nora was.
“Wouldn’t expect anything less,” I told her. “Get why you want to protect her. She deserves that. Also get men are assholes. I’ve been one in my time.”
I inwardly winced, thinking about how badly I’d treated women when I first got home. I never had nor would I ever put a hand on a woman. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t hurt them. By using them. Being callous, cruel because I needed sex to silence my nightmares but also couldn’t handle another human being near me.
I regained my focus on Fiona. “But I’m not gonna hurt her.” It was a promise. More to myself than Fiona.
She stared at me intently, measuring my words, weighing them. I suspected that Nora didn’t have a whole lot of experience when it came to men, and it seemed—from what Fiona told me and from the small amount of Nora I’d experienced—that she was trusting. Kind. She didn’t expect men to lie to her.
Fiona did. Because she knew us too well. And she knew most men were in the habit of making promises in order to get what they wanted.
She nodded slowly after a long silence. “Fine,” she relented. “But I’ve got my eye on you.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
NORA
When Rowan walked through the door, I lost my breath. My heart hammered in my chest, my knees trembled. My lips burned with the reminder that he had been kissing me this morning.
Marking me. Making me his. But I already was. I always had been.
But in the time between the kiss till now, I’d managed to convince myself that I’d somehow dreamed it. Or that I’d overhyped the way he’d touched me, looked at me, the way his voice went raspy and full of promise.
As had been established, I was very good at convincing myself of all manner of things.
But seeing Rowan saunter in, his eyes instinctively finding mine, it became an inescapable fact that I had not imagined anything at all.
He had changed. He was wearing a flannel, black and red, unbuttoned with a black tee underneath, molding to his abs. The jeans he was wearing were worn, splattered with paint, and he had on his work boots. And of course, his trademark baseball cap on backward.
I found it very hard—almost impossible, if I’m honest —to do things like serve the remaining customers in front of him in line.
My fingers were numb, stomach swirling with butterflies and my body urging me to run. That’s what I did, ran away from things that made me feel fear, uneasy, a little too alive.
And Rowan made me feel all of those things.
But that stare… That froze me in place.
“Hi,” I breathed when he stood in front of me.
He didn’t say anything, just kept looking at me in that way that wasn’t fit for public consumption.
When my lower lip trembled, his eyes followed the movement.
Then he stopped staring.
He took action. Purposefully coming around the counter, he passed Tina at the coffee machine heading straight for me.
“What are you—”
I didn’t have time to ask the rest of that question since he was kissing me.
In the middle of my bakery.
With witnesses.
Like, a lot of them.
And I knew this town. My regulars. They were nosy. And they would very much be enjoying the show. I was not into PDA. Not at all.
Except for right now.
The kiss lasted longer than was appropriate for my place of work and business, but there was nothing else I could do but kiss him back.
I was clutching on to the sides of his shirt for dear life.
Rowan pulled back, mouth still inches from mine. “Hi.”
I blinked rapidly, trying to get my bearings after that kiss while simultaneously analyzing the roughness of his voice while uttering that one word.