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Sure, he was bigger and stronger, but he hadn’t spent years learning Jiu Jitsu under my husband’s ruthless tutelage.
He saw the confidence in my eyes, and he knew it, too. “Evie…”
With his ankle trapped, I drove into his chest, laying him flat on his back with a colossal splash.
He crashed beneath the water, the stream washing over his face. He thrashed and bucked under me until my thighs straddled his waist.
His hands broke the surface first, wrapping around my throat. His head followed as he sat up and gasped for air. “The fuck?”
“Fucking say it, Jesse.” My throat worked against the press of his fingers as my miserable damned emotions chewed away the edges of my voice. “If you’re going to blame me for their deaths, use your fucking words.”
“Blame you?” His face fell, as did his hands, dropping to my lap. “What are you talking about?”
I stabbed a finger at his chest. “You look at me with contempt. With hatred.”
My chin wobbled as an aching jolt of sadness punched through my anger. I covered my mouth with shaking fingers, attempting to hide the vulnerability plastered there.
Gathering my composure, I lowered my hands and curled them against my thighs beneath the water. “You’re breaking my heart with your…your goddamned silent treatment. What do you want me to say, Jesse? I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.” My voice broke, and I swallowed to strengthen it. “I’ve said it a million times, but dammit, I can’t express how sorry I truly am.”
Leaning back in the stream with water splashing over his shoulders, he held his head up to see me, to search my eyes, his own growing wider, glassier. “Evie, you…I’m not…fuck!” He swiped a hand over his face. “You couldn’t be more wrong. If I look at you with anything, it’s with…”
His raspy voice trailed off as he stared past me. When his eyes returned to mine, they were soft and full of regret.
I really needed him to finish that sentence, but I wouldn’t force him. Instead, I slowly, cautiously, traced the corner of his mouth, trying to tease the words from it.
He sat there, his body rigid beneath mine, forming an imposing cliff in the stream. Flexed biceps, strong neck, bunched pecs, the power in his thighs invisible beneath the water, but they tensed against my ass as he leaned forward, pushing the hair from my face, his gaze following the movement.
“I look at you with fear, darlin’.” His voice rumbled in that vibrating twang of his.
I leaned back. “Fear?”
“Panic. Dread. Afraid-of-the-dark-and-crying-for-my-momma terror.”
I shook my head, scrunching my brows. No way was he afraid of me. Hell, this man wasn’t afraid of anything.
He toyed with the ends of my hair where it lay across my chest. “When I look at you, I see you trapped in a spider sac, your blood sucked dry, your life…” His fingers squeezed around the wet strands, his voice hollow. “Gone. Then I see you pregnant, the child in your womb clawing its way out, and you’re bleeding and limp and…”
“Okay. It’s okay.” I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled his head to my chest, my fingers lost in his hair.
So the deaths of our friends had made the prophecy more real for him? Fuck, why hadn’t he just told me that?
“Did you think ignoring me or treating me like shit would make me go away? That it would make your fears go away?”
Footsteps splashed behind me with all the gracefulness of Roark’s heavy-booted approach.
Jesse dragged in a breath and exhaled thickly against my chest, his arms hugging my back. “No, Jesus. I’d never want you to go away. I just…I don’t know. It’s easier to harden a hurting heart, to force it back into its vault.”
Easier for him, but fucking hell on me. “You have to talk to me, Jesse. You can’t shut me out or throw me away.”
“He’s working on that.” Roark crouched beside us, positioning his body to keep an eye on Shea and Darwin upstream.
“He’s working on it with you.” I leaned back so I could peer into Jesse’s eyes. “Why him and not me?”
A look of confusion drew across Jesse’s expression. “Maybe because he doesn’t fling knives at my head.”
I huffed. “No, he just threatens to beat you until diarrhea leaks from your ass.”
Jesse’s mouth lifted with a small smile as he traced the lines of my lips with a wet finger. I didn’t know it until that moment how much I needed that affection. The gesture in his touch filled my chest with warmth, expanding it, healing the hurt inside it.
“He needed some distance,” Roark said, “to set things straight in his head.” His eyes cut to Jesse. “Though ye made a right balls of it, lad.”
Jesse’s lips flattened, twitched. “Let’s leave my balls out of it.”
Roark scratched his jaw and arched an eyebrow. “Want a go a’ mine then, do ye?”
