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I needed to know. The pragmatic side of me needed to know what in the hell it was about Ronan Wentz that was messing with my head. Sex appeal was the easy answer, but there was m
ore to him than that. He was radioactive, his presence rearranging my atoms, turning me into someone I didn’t recognize. Someone who got flustered, unsettled, who blushed for God’s sake…
“I’m nothing,” he said.
“No one is nothing.”
“I was eight when my parents died. I was shuffled around foster homes for ten years before my uncle showed up. Been trying to figure out a lot of shit ever since.”
“Ten years in foster care?”
He nodded.
“God, I can’t imagine it,” I said. He stiffened and I could see he didn’t want to imagine it either. “But I know what you mean. A little. My mother…” I waved a hand. “Never mind.”
He didn’t say a word but watched me, the message clear in his eyes. You can tell me.
“I was just going to say that Violet’s parents were best friends and now their marriage is falling apart. She’s never seen a healthy relationship. And neither has Miller. And neither have I.”
“Same,” Ronan said.
“So you’re not nothing,” I said. “We’re all just…I don’t know, refugees of broken marriages.”
“Broken,” he said, a slight curl to his lips. “Yeah, you could say that.”
I raised my eyes to his. Talking to Ronan felt like tugging a thread—pull too hard and it would snap. Against my better judgement, I wanted more of him. I wanted to know he’d had something good at least once.
“Did you ever see your parents happy?” I asked gently. “Before they died?”
His arm under my hand stiffened and his gray eyes went hard and flat again.
“No. Never.”
“I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.” I glanced at his arm, freshly bandaged. “And my work here is done.”
But he didn’t move and neither did I. Both of us watched my hands that were still touching him. Without thinking, I turned his arm over, revealing the tattoo of one hand stabbing another with a dagger.
“Hands remember,” I said. “What does it mean?”
“It’s part of a quote,” he said. “Hands remember what the mind forgets. It means, shit happens, and we want to forget it. Move on. But we can’t. It burrows into our damn cells. Our blood.”
I was still holding his arm. “What kind of shit?”
What happened to your parents, Ronan?
Our eyes met, and I lost a few seconds in the depths of his gaze that weren’t flat and hard now but miles deep and cloudy with memories. The kind that stabbed like a dagger.
Ronan’s large body seemed to sink deeper into my touch without moving. His eyes cleared and became intent on me, roaming over my face, my chin, my mouth…
Then he blinked like a man coming out of a trance. The thread snapped. He snatched his arm from me and stood up. “Never mind.”
I sat, slightly shell-shocked as he picked up the rake and scraped it over the ground that was already clear.
“I shouldn’t have come,” he said after a minute, his back to me.
“Why?” I said, striving for casual as I gathered the first aid supplies.
“I can’t do anything else until the building materials get here.”
