I bite down on my bottom lip, nodding my head. All week I’ve had moments of this. We both have. At least I thought we had. Now I’m starting to wonder if Liam had compartmentalized and hadn’t been thinking about it at all. I’m wondering if the gravity of the situation is truly hitting him for the first time, and he’s overwhelmed by it.
His eyes are haunted, his voice strangled as he chokes out, “He trusts me with you.”
The anguish kills me. It breaks my heart for him. Last night he made such a huge breakthrough by finally letting someone in, and now I feel like this could send him ten steps backward. It’s a lot harder to get over something when you break your own heart than when someone else does it.
“And he’s right to trust you,” I tell him with conviction, pushing off the wall. I only go far enough that I can reach out to take his hand. “You told him you wouldn’t do anything you weren’t invited to do, and you haven’t. This was my choice, Liam. You would have stopped the first night if I’d told you.”
“Ishouldhave stopped.”
“Could you have?”
His mouth opens to answer me, but he hesitates, staring blankly like the question confuses him.
I seize my opening. “I couldn’t. We tried, remember? We tried to stop after that first night. We said it was just going to be that one night, but we couldn’t stay away from each other.”
“I should have fought harder.”
“And then what? Until when? When the attraction got so heated between us that we couldn’t control it? What would have happened then? Something scandalous in front of someone we know? In front of Nate?”
My fingers grip his tighter and I close an inch of the gap between us, physically taking the ground that I know I’ve gained with him mentally. “What if you’d fought harder and then we’d seen Paul? What would you have done? What if that whole thing would have gone differently because we hadn’t fucked the night before.”
“Even if we weren’t fucking I still would have stood up for you,” he says through a clenched jaw like I’m trying to insinuate he wouldn’t have.
“That’s not what I mean,” I tell him patiently. “I mean what if you would have lost it on him instead? Or worse, what if you’d come over and claimed me with a kiss, and Nate had seen that?”
“He would have understood that after an explanation.”
I shrug in challenge. “We’ll never know. And besides that, it would have been game over at that point anyway.” I take another step towards him, my body so close that I can feel the heat coming from his. “What I’m trying to tell you is that we would have ended up here anyway, Liam. Screwing the week away, having fun together, enjoying each other.”
His light brown eyes are conflicted as he peers down at me, his jaw set, lips tight. We both know I’m right, but his conscience is messing with him. When it comes down to it, though, neither of us could stay away from the other.
It’s going to take a miracle to do so once we’re back in Santa Rosé, but I’m hoping that reality, and being back to normal life, will help with that. Honestly, I’m counting on it.
“I feel like a piece of shit,” he confesses with a sigh.
But I know I’ve won against his thoughts when his free hand slides around my hip and he draws me flush to his body. Pressing the side of my head to his chest beside my free hand, he rests his chin on top of my head.
“You aren’t one,” I assure in a soft whisper. “But if you want to cool it, and not spend the next two nights together, I understand.”
“That’s the worst part,” he grumbles, the war still waging even though I know we’re on the other side of the worst of it. “I don’t think I can. Not until I absolutely have to.”
“Sunday,” I murmur.
“Sunday.”
Stepping into a large, private room in the hotel restaurant Savanna and Nate reserved for the rehearsal dinner, my stomach swoops near my feet when I make eye contact with one of my aunts. I can practically see the wheels turning as she takes in the man at my side. It makes me want to throw up.
Liam’s hand is at my lower back, pressing gently to guide me through the door when all I want to do is dig my heels in and turn around.
So much for the confidence I had upstairs when I was calming him down. Nate swears it’s worse to be alone and deal with them, but he’s forgetting that they’ve all met Liam. Multiple times.
In fact, when he doesn’t show up to a family event a couple of the aunts are quick to ask about the “hunky firefighter.” The perpetually single one.
Why didn’t any of these thoughts occur to me when we were talking in Nate’s room?
Oh right. They did. I just didn’t give them a voice. Among all the other thoughts I couldn’t give voice to.
Like how bad this is going to be for my heart. And confusingfor my head.
