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"He told you that you were a danger to yourself."

"Yes."

Ben moved closer and took my hand. His calloused fingers wrapped around mine. "Sutton, you drove a rental car hundreds of miles through a Florida rainstorm. You survived a crash into a swamp. You lived in a stranger’s house for a week without a single complaint. You helped make dinner. You took your most famous song and reinvented it. You aren’t mentally ill. Most people would have folded under that pressure. You fought. You ran. That’s survival instinct coming to the front."

A sharp sob tore out of my throat. I pressed my free hand over my mouth to stifle the sound, but the dam broke. Ben provided the validation I had been starving for. I didn’t need someone to praise my vocal range. I needed someone to confirm my sanity. Tears spilled hot and fast down my cheeks. "He will find me. He always finds me."

"Let him try." Ben released my hand and leaned back against the cushions. The amber lamplight caught the hard, uncompromising planes of his face. "He thinks you’re property. He thinks you’re an asset he can manage. But on this island, you are my person. He won’t get past me. He doesn’t have the power, and he sure as almighty hell doesn’t have the right."

The fierce possessiveness in his voice banished the terror. His tone didn’t sound like ownership. It sounded like absolute protection.

"As soon as this tropical storm blows over, we take the offensive,” Ben said. “But first, I need to show you my cards too."

I wiped the tears from my face using the sleeve of my sweater. "What do you mean?"

"You showed me your monster. I need to show you mine." Ben stared at his hands. The silver scars on his knuckles caught the flickering light. “I spent my twenties and even a couple years of my thirties making massive messes. I was angry at everything and everyone. My dad walked out when I was twenty. He checked out of the family and left my mom to hold up the sky. We’ve never heard from him since. I reacted by trying to punch a hole in the world big enough to make him feel it.”

He kept his gaze fixed on his hands, refusing to look at me. "I got into a lot of fights. Arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. I put a few guys in the hospital. The fight that finally ended it was a stupid brawl with a guy named Gabe Markham several years ago. We threw punches over absolutely nothing and both ended up in the Marathon city jail. His sister bailed him out the next morning. I stayed. I sat on a hard bench bolted to the concrete wall. The silence after Gabe left was crushing."

He swallowed hard, the motion clear down his throat. "I sat there with the metallic taste of my blood still on my tongue while my future laid itself out in front of me. Just another cautionary tale. The local loser who got arrested at bars until he turned fifty and nobody remembered who he was before he threw his life away. The shame was absolute. The kind of shame that comes from seeing the end of the road and knowing you walked down it on purpose."

Ben lifted his head and those green eyes held mine. "I made a promise to myself in that cell. I swore I would earn my place back in my family and the community. I took any job I could find—mostly landscaping work. I learned discipline. I decided to be the structure that holds things up, not the mess that tears them down. I built this orderly life because it’s a cage. It keeps the monster locked up."

He waited, bracing himself for my rejection. He expected me to pull back, to realize the man I trusted was a reformed thug.

I didn’t pull back. Instead, I shifted on the couch. I slid across the cushions until my knee brushed his thigh. I reached out and took his scarred right hand, cradling it between my palms. His skin was rough, calloused from years of physical labor and penance.

"You’re wrong." My voice cut clean and steady through the dark room. "You think you built a cage because you’re a monster. Monsters don’t worry about hurting people, Ben. Monsters don’t buy curly fries in a tropical storm or catch a stranger when she’s stumbling and too stubborn to ask for help."

I lifted his hand and pressed my mouth to the center of his palm. A jolt of electricity snapped through my lips. "You didn’t build a cage. You built a fortress. A monster destroys things. A fortress protects them. When I look at you, I don’t see a criminal. I see a man who feels things so deeply he had to learn how to carry their weight."

I leaned closer, and the scent of male musk and clean cotton enveloped me. "Your intensity doesn’t scare me, Ben. It makes me feel safe. I don’t care about what you did years ago because I know the man sitting in front of me right now."

I climbed onto his lap and swung one leg over his hips, settling myself astride his thighs. The fabric of his sweatpants was soft beneath my legs. I wrapped my arms around his neck as his jaw clenched shut. Our faces were inches apart. "I’m not afraid of you, Ben Coleridge.”

The air in the room evaporated.

He didn’t move. His hands hovered at my shoulders, not quite touching, the heat of his palms ghosting through the cotton of my sweater. The line of his jaw tightened in tiny increments. His pupils swallowed his irises. Then his fingertips pressed in, slowly, until the cotton was no longer between us. He had decided.

Ben groaned. The low, guttural sound tore out from deep in his chest. He buried his hands in my hair and pulled me down. His mouth crashed against mine, and our lips slanted together. This kiss was the starving hunger of two people circling each other in a small room for days and finally colliding in the dead center.

His tongue swept into my mouth. I made a high-pitched noise in the back of my throat, ravenous for him and for everything about him. I ground my hips against his. The friction was blinding, and he was instantly hard beneath me. Ben clutched my hips. His fingers dug into my flesh, like he wanted to consume me. He ran his hands over my body. My skin caught fire when his palms traced up the curve of my back. I arched into the touch, pressing my chest against his. My fingers gripped the hair at the nape of his neck, pulling him closer.

"Ben." I broke the kiss to trail my mouth down his jawline. "I’m dying here. I want you so much."

The sound of his name on my lips was his undoing. He slid his hand under the hem of my sweater, his calloused palm making contact with the smooth, hot skin of my lower back. I shivered, my muscles contracting under his touch. Moving his hand around to my front, he slid his palm up over my ribs until his thumb brushed the underside of my breast through my bra.

I cried out, a broken, needy sound escaping my lips, and rocked my hips against his erection. "Yes! More."

He didn’t want to stop. Every protective instinct, every lonely year he had spent locked inside his cage, poured into his touch. Sliding his hand down the flat plane of my stomach, he hooked his fingers into the elastic waistband of my leggings and brushed the bare skin of my hip bone.

Then he froze.

His fingers curled into the fabric of my waistband while my ragged, shallow gasps filled the air. He closed his eyes, fighting a vicious, visible war inside his own head.

"Stop," he gritted out, his voice wrecked and unrecognizable. He pulled his hand out from under my pants and prized himself away from my heat. "Sutton. Stop."

I pulled back, staring down at him with swollen lips. "What? Did I do something wrong?"