Page 109 of Revere: A Legacy Novel

“It’s been almost two weeks. I’m tired of waiting, babe.”

“Oh?”

“Someone let me know your car showed up here, too. You were gone.”

Catherine’s gaze narrowed. “You’re having me watched?”

“No, someone just checks in occasionally. You have an enforcer from your father to watch you.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“That’s what I’m offering,” Cross shot back.

“Ass.”

“You know it.” Cross kicked out his legs, and hooked his Doc Martens one over the other. “I assume if you were talking to Cara, you must have made a trip over to her side of the border.”

“Sometimes I just need to hear it from her, even when I already know what she’s going to say. She tells me it like it is.”

“Does she?”

“She might as well have told me to stop acting like a child,” Catherine muttered.

“Were you?”

“Probably. I do that, or rather, use child-like tactics to avoid confrontation. Everyone else around me simply avoids creating conflict with me because they’re scared of what might happen to me if they do.”

“Like you’ll fall back again,” he murmured.

Catherine picked at her manicured nails. “Yeah, like that. They don’t get it, though.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m allowed to be angry, sad … or whatever else I want to feel. Not everything I feel is going to be on the good side of the spectrum, and that’s okay. If I avoid feeling any sort of emotional upset, then I never learn how to handle how I react to it. That, more than anything else, is what could trigger me.”

Catherine propped her arms behind her head like a pillow. “Besides, I do have spells. I have days where I don’t want to get out of bed, when I’m tired for no reason, and when I just feel like … dark in my heart. It comes and it goes. I deal with it, though, as it happens. When it happens.”

“Before, you didn’t deal with it all.”

“Nope.”

“Cara was good for you, then?” Cross asked.

“The best.”

“I can go, you know, if you don’t want me to be here.”

Catherine eyed him with a smile. “I thought you were tired of waiting on me to call.”

“It’s your life, Catty. I don’t need to be forcing myself into it when you don’t want me here.”

“I want you,” she whispered, “and sometimes I want to run away from you.”

“If you do run, could I chase you?”

Cross asked the question so flippantly that it almost made Catherine laugh. Still, she could see how serious he meant for it to be, despite his light tone.

“Yeah, you could chase me, Cross.”