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“I was done with them,” he replies, his voice a snap of barely contained anger. “I went back for you. I saved that damn family for you.”
“Saved them from yourself?”
“Yes. You saved them from me. If we’re going to be honest here,you saved them from me more than once, at least where my father’s concerned.”
“How do I believe I have that power? Why would I have that power?” I shake my head. “I don’t know how I have that power.”
“And yet you do. There are only three people in my life who have ever been able to pull me back when I’m charging forward: my mother, Grayson, and you.”
“I want to be able to do that for you, but we just talked about trust on the plane. You say you would have told me—”
“I would have.” His words are low, rough, emotion-laden in ways he doesn’t do emotion except with me.
“But you didn’t want to. I heard you say that to Grayson.”
“Of course, I didn’t want to tell you, Harper. But I would have worked through my resistance and done what was right. And telling you was what was right.”
You didn’t trust me and what I’d do with that information. That was clear in what you said to Grayson. You didn’t trust me or us. I need us to be more than that or I can’t do this.”
“When this family gets out from between us, we will be.”
“They don’t get to be between us, Eric. That’s not how this works. No excuses. No secrets. You trust me. I trust you.”
His eyes sharpen. “Are you sure you can live with those terms, Harper?”
The implications of that question are clear. He believes I have another secret. Maybe I do, but it’s not like his. I duck under his arm and walk toward the desk, whirl around to face him, even as he faces me. “I want that kind of trust with you.”
His eyes narrow on me, those damn intelligent eyes that see everything. He knows I didn’t say yes. He knows I just avoided a direct answer. Damn it, I want to tell him what I found, what I saw, what I know about him, but now more than ever, I fear it will only make things worse. “I really do want that kind of trust with you, Eric.”
He pursues me, closing the space between us, and this time, he doesn’t stay hands off. His hand slides around my back and settles low, molding me close. “Does that mean you’re staying?”
I could resist, and torment us both with a battle, with a breakup, but he’s right. There’s so much going on in our lives, so much that has tried to divide us, so much keeping us apart even as we’ve held on to each other. I’ve never believed for one moment he wasn’t flawed or that I knew everything there was to know about him. He is a beautiful, broken man, but I think he’s less broken when he’s with me. As I am with him. And those things matter.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m staying but I’m still angry with you.”
He strokes my hair behind my ear, and his touch shivers through me, his finger settling beneath my chin and tilting my gaze to his. “Be angry with me, but don’t leave me. I will not be okay without you.”
“I will not be okay without you either, which is a terrifying thing to confess after what you just told me.”
“That was the past, the part of our story that brought us together. Without it, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
He’s right. Much like his tattoos, we are a dramatic story filled with heartache and happiness, created over time, even years before we met that first time at his father’s house. And when his lips brush mine, I tell myself we will leave the heartache behind and find our happy ending.
Chapter ninety-two
Harper
Thirty minutes later, we’re in the living room, on the couch, a bottle of wine between us, our glasses full and plates ready, waiting on our Chinese takeout to be delivered. We also have the two coded messages we’ve been given, and not one, not two, but three Rubik’s cubes in front of us. I grab one of them and eye Eric. “I thought you didn’t need to solve these to focus anymore?”
“I don’thaveto use them,” he explains. “I can focus without them, but I’ve trained my mind to turn off the outside noise the minute I pick one up.”
“That’s something you learned in the military, right?”
“Yes. When I went into the Navy, I was just another enlisted soldier to the government, but as they discovered my ‘gifts’ as they called them, they called in several specialists to work with me. One, a woman named Karen Montgomery, a grumpy old lady is a more precise description, honed my thinking process. She was a bitch, but she was a good bitch. Good at heart. Good intentions. To her, being the bitch was her job. She was about protecting me. She was saving my life and teaching me how to save other people’s lives.”
“Do you ever talk to her now?”
“She had a heart attack during one of our training sessions.”
