AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No,” he said firmly. When I turned back to look at him, he had a pained look in his eyes. “I mean it. With every fucking cell in my body. All I want is to kiss you. Fuck, all I can ever think about is kissing you. I want to kiss you in the morning when you wake up, and your hair is still all screwy. I want to kiss you before you go to sleep, and make sure you know everything will be all right.”
“So why can’t you trust me?” I asked, my voice strained. “Why can’t you trust me when I say that’s all I want, too?”
He swallowed. A car drove by on the street, and I watched as the ambient light on Roman’s face changed with the passing headlights.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s that it’s hard for me to trust just about anything,” he said. “I’ve been so hurt. And this is… this is all so much, so fast.”
“And you like feeling more in control.”
He puffed out a breath, something between a relieved laugh and a sigh. “Yes. My whole life, I’ve just been grasping for more ways to be in control. It makes me feel safe. But you… you’re a fucking firecracker. You’re the wildest thing I’ve ever known. I never could have guessed in a million years that I’d meet someone like you, let alone spend all of my time with you.”
“I know. My fame… changes things.”
“What?” he said. “No, not that. I’m talking about… you. Who you are. It wouldn’t matter if nobody in the world knew who you were. I know who you are, and you make my heart do about sixty billion backflips a day.”
My own heart thumped in my chest hearing him say it. “That’s… that’s a lot of backflips.”
“It’s nuts,” Roman said. He reached up, running his palm along the top of his dashboard. “Do you know what my life was like before you exploded into it?”
“Ideal? Beautiful? Hanging out with your mom and brother, protecting college students on the campus, studying, banging a ton of sexy women?”
He shook his head. “No. It was boring. Nothing was going on. It’s strange, actually, because I was so in control of everything that I’d started to feel like I was losing it. And then I met you. And finally, after you hired me, I had a purpose. Hell, even before you hired me. I wanted to make sure you were okay, and I knew I could keep you safe.”
“And you have,” I said softly. “You’ve kept me safe just about every moment of every day since.”
He bit his lower lip, looking over at me. “Theo, I’ve had my heart broken before,” he said. “By a guy who was a lot less exciting than you are. Less sexy, less fun, less smart, less fucking incredible. If… I can’t even imagine how it would feel to get to have you, and then, one day, it would inevitably have to end.”
I cocked my head to one side. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means,” he said. “It means we both know that you end up with someone more like you. Somebody huge. An actor, a musician, an artist. Someone amazing. Someone on your level. Someone…”
“What? Rich, famous? A pompous asshole?”
“Well,” Roman said. “Hopefully not pompous or an asshole, but yes.”
“What if all I want is you, though?”
He was silent. My words hung in the air, an unanswered question, the tension rising so high I thought it would pop like a bubble.
I was laying myself on the line completely. I’d been vulnerable before, but it had never felt quite like this. I hadn’t realized how deep my feelings for Roman went until I’d finally expressed them, and now I felt like I had everything to lose.
I felt like it was all or nothing.
And I had no fucking clue what was going through his head.
19
Roman
“You’ve been through a lot,” I told Theo. My throat felt like sandpaper.
“I know it’s hard for you to trust,” he said. “And I know it’s even harder to trust me, because you have some idea in your head about who I am ‘supposed’ to end up with. But I’ve been falling for you since the moment I met you, Roman.”
The man was going to kill me. I turned away, looking out my window so that I wouldn’t lose myself looking at his perfect face. “Theo,” I whispered.
“It’s true,” he said. “You looked at me differently, since moment one. Everyone looks at me like I’m an alien, these days. Even the nice ones. They think something is fundamentally different about me just because they’ve seen me on a movie screen. There was never a second of that with you, even after you found out I was famous. And then when you found out how fucked up I am, you still didn’t budge—”
