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This dichotomy of a woman who could make me feel so fucking seen while she thought she didn’t deserve the same thing.
“I’m not hiding anything, Ezra.”
“Bullshit,” I told her. “You think I don’t know there’s something going on behind those gorgeous eyes? You think I don’t see it, the same way as you see me?”
I grinned against her knuckles. “Besides, it’s only fair since you know more about me than anyone else. A secret for a secret.”
Her eyes creased at the edges, trepidation filling her full, the woman shackled by distrust.
I did my best to kiss it away, lips on the inside of her wrist, her inner elbow, her jaw.
She trembled when I murmured them over the shell of her ear. “I’m here for you, Savannah. You’re holding the biggest broken part of me. I promise I’ll hold yours, too.”
I edged away so I could take in every tweak and pinch of her expression, and I felt like I was getting razed at the knees with the sorrow held in those fathomless pools of blue. The woman sucking me right down. Pulling me under.
“You want to know me?” She blinked over at me.
I took her hand and returned her palm to my tattoo. “Isn’t that what you said of me? That you wanted to know me? So yeah, Savannah, I think it’s plain that I want to know you, too.”
Fear dampened her features. “I don’t trust easily, Ezra.”
I smoothed the pad of my thumb over the creases that dented her forehead. “I recognized that from the first time I saw you. I’m just hoping there might be a way for you to trust me.”
A soft puff of air escaped her nose. It brushed over my bare chest, filling me with her warmth. Covering me in her scent.
Mango and cream.
So goddamn sweet.
“I learned not to trust a long, long time ago.”
Pain skimmed across her flesh, and I pulled her even closer, like I might have the chance of locking out that pain. Or maybe just calming it, the way she’d done for me.
She felt so tiny there, where I had her plastered against the hard, rigid lines of my body.
Fragile but tenacious. I couldn’t stop myself from kissing along her jaw and down the delicate column of her throat.
Her fingers drove into my hair as she tilted back to allow me greater access. Her words tumbled between a tease and desire. “I never took you for the type of man who employs tactics of manipulation.”
A rough chuckle skated free, and I released it at her mouth. “I’m just doing what a man has to do.”
Savannah edged back an inch, all traces of any lightness gone and severity on her face. “And why would he need to?”
I reached out and took her chin between my thumb and index finger. “Because he cares.”
She blinked. “He shouldn’t.”
“And sometimes he just can’t fucking help it. And don’t act like you don’t care about me, Savannah. Don’t act like you weren’t bleeding for me when I told you about Brianna. Don’t act like you don’t feel this, too.”
“But this is only going to hurt us.”
“Probably,” I admitted.
Her tongue stroked out to wet her dried lips. “Caring only leaves you devastated, Ezra, and I’m afraid caring about you will end up being the type of hurt I can’t take.”
“Because you’ve been hurt so many times before.” It wasn’t a question. I was just confirming what was written all over her.
Her laugh was hollow. “Everyone hurts me, Ezra. They leave me. They abandon me. They fail me.”
They fail me.
Those words cut into me like a dull blade, and I fucking knew that I didn’t want to be another person who fell into that category. That I wouldn’t fail again.
That this was…different.
Fuck, I didn’t know how it’d become so true, but it was.
Protectiveness ballooned inside me, pressing at my chest, the need to wipe the agony from her face. From her eyes. From her heart that thundered against mine.
“Your childhood was rough?”
Unquestionably.
Simply calling it rough felt like an insult, but I was hoping to give her a jumping point. A place to start. Even if she only wanted to share a little.
I’d known from the beginning that she was a survivor. A fighter. The kind of survivor who’d clawed her way through the muck to find herself on the other side. Someone who wore her fear like a shield so no one could get too close to inflict wounds again.
Affliction filled the shake of her head, and those locks of blonde strewn with brown tickled across my arm as she stared over at me. Uncertainty rolled through her before she seemed to make a decision, to trust me with this.
“My first memories are of the screaming.” Her brow pinched deeper. “My mother and father shouting. Furniture breaking and glass shattering. I was probably four years old, and I remember lying in my little bed with my heart pounding so hard, with this feeling I didn’t understand at the time, but I know now was fear and anxiety. Even in the middle of it, there was a protectiveness, too.”
