Page 38 of Ryder’s Storm

“I’m not.”

He laughed softly. “Don’t you want to cuddle a bit, or do you only want me for sex?”

“Are you for real?” she asked, amazed that he would suggest to cuddle when he was already hard again, and clearly ready for more sex. “Most other men would—”

“I’m not most other men,” Ryder replied.

She smiled. “You’re right.” She slid her hand down his body and touched his cocks. “You’re not like other men. Far from it.”

Ryder tucked her against his body, spooning her, his cocks wedged against her backside. “Tell me about yourself, Scarlet. You’re obviously not just the studious young woman you pretend to be. There seems to be so much more to you. Why do you hide those parts of you?”

Ryder was right. She was hiding parts of herself. “Same reason as you. I don’t want to get hurt.”

He pressed a kiss into her hair. “I would never hurt you.”

“I know that now.” How she’d come to this conclusion, Scarlet didn’t really know. But she knew what she felt. “When I’m with you, I feel safe.”

“I am your bodyguard, you know,” he said with a smile in his voice.

She laughed, but then turned more serious. She wanted him to know that being with him was different, special. “When I’m with you, I feel like I belong.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, my whole life… it always felt somehow disjointed. My family is like a patchwork. This is my father’s third marriage. I guess he was never very lucky with women, until now, until he married Claudia.”

“What about your mother?” Ryder asked.

“She died when I was fourteen.”

“I’m sorry. That must have been hard. How did it happen?”

“Heart attack. She was only forty.”

“She must have had a heart condition then. In general, it’s rare for women your mother’s age to have a heart attack. That’s tragic.”

Scarlet sighed. “I never knew about a heart condition. I was still a kid and probably too self-absorbed to notice. Though I remember that she was sick on and off, but I never knew it had anything to do with her heart. Dad was crushed after her death. We all were. Joshua too.”

“Joshua?”

“My half-brother. He’s my dad’s son from his first marriage.”

“Did his first wife die too?” Ryder asked.

Scarlet shook her head. “No. She left him when Joshua was only a year old. She divorced him and left Joshua with him. She had no interest in children, never even wrote him a single birthday card. Luckily, Joshua was too young to remember her, and when my dad married my mom, she became his mother. And when I came along shortly afterwards, we were a real family for a while. Joshua would have been twenty-seven next month.”

Ryder squeezed her tightly. “He passed away? Oh, Scarlet, I can’t even imagine how I would feel if I lost my mother and my siblings. I would be devastated.”

“It was hard for Dad and me. Claudia was a rock for Dad to lean on. They’d gotten married only four years before Joshua was killed. I remember where I was when I heard of the shooting.”

“The shooting?”

“Yes. It happened just outside a nightclub. A man pulled a gun without provocation and shot Joshua. A couple of other people were injured too, but they survived. Joshua didn’t. He died right there outside the club. The paramedics tried to revive him, but they couldn’t.” She felt tears well up in her eyes at the awful memories.

“Shhh, baby, I’m here for you. You don’t have to tell me more if it’s too painful for you.”

She turned her head halfway so she could look at him. “I want to tell you about it. Because all these events, my mother’s death, my half-brother’s murder, they turned me into who I am today.”

Ryder stroked his knuckles over her cheek. “You’re a strong woman.”