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She shook her head. “I shouldn’t even be here now. That’s why you’ve been keeping your distance—so I don’t get you too tangled up, so it’s not your life on the line too—and here I am—”
She pushed to her feet, spinning toward the door, and then I had to move. I sprang off the sofa and grasped her arm before she could take more than a step. With a gentle tug, I turned her to face me. “What are you talking about, Rose? I’m here for you. Iwantto be here for you.”
“But not too close,” she said, looking up at me, her voice raw. “You said you’d tell me the truth, Gabriel. You don’t really trust me either, do you?”
I stared at her. Fucking hell. I’d thought I was doing what was best for her, and somehow I hadn’t realized just how much it was hurting her.
Maybe it didn’t matter whether I was the kind of man she needed right now. Maybe what she needed was just to know how much she had me.
“Rose,” I said. “I promise you, it’s not that. It’s not— You’re everything I could have wanted. Hell, I’d share you with four other guys in a heartbeat, take whatever time you could give me. I just don’t want to screw upyourlife.”
A startled laugh burst out of her. “How could you possibly screw up my life more than it already is?”
“I already did once, didn’t I?” I said, waving my other hand. “I pulled you in with us, I encouraged you to run around with us when we were kids, and then your stepmother came down on you and I couldn’t do shit. Ipromisedyou we’d be there for you and it happened anyway. They dragged you away from your home. Maybe your dad wouldn’t even have felt he needed to do this crazy magical binding if it wasn’t for us—for me.”
“Gabriel.” Rose caught my hand and brought it between us, wrapping her fingers around mine. The warmth of her touch sent a shiver of desire through me even through all the other emotions churning inside me. “It was my choice to hang out with you guys. I knew even when I was seven years old that I was breaking the rules. You didn’t force me into anything. And ifIcouldn’t do anything about my stepmother, how could you possibly have changed her mind?”
“I don’t know,” I said. My pulse stuttered at the words I was about to say. I forced myself to hold her gaze. “But it’s not just you. Everyone in my life—I couldn’t save my dad. This job was his life after my mom left, you know, and then he lost that, because of me. I know he never forgave me. And I could never make it up to him.”
“Gabriel,” Rose said again, softly, but I didn’t let her stop me.
“I went looking for my mom after he died, you know. Tracked down her new family out in Nevada. She acted like she didn’t even know me. Like I had to be some kind of crazy person. The last time she’d seen me I was five years old, and she couldn’t even—”
I caught myself just before my voice broke. With a ragged breath, I finished. “I break things. I break people. There’s obviously just something about me… So it’s better if I don’t stick around anywhere too long. I don’t want to get close to you because I don’t want to get close to anyone, because something always goes wrong.”
As the last words spilled out of me, I felt wrung out. Drained. I’d never admitted that all out loud to anyone before. I wasn’t sure I’d even admitted it to myself all at once.
Rose was silent for a long moment. Her hand squeezed tighter around mine. “So this whole time you’ve been pushing me away out of some idea you were protecting me fromyou?”
“I guess you could put it that way.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” she said. “For starters, you never broke me. I was fine. I missed home and I missed you and the other guys, but look at me. I survived. I’m stronger now than I ever was. And that’s the other way you’re wrong. You’re not going to break me now. There’s nothing you could do that could hurt me more than I’ve already been hurt by people who owed me more, and I’m still standing.”
“That doesn’t change—”
She raised her hand from my hand to my chest, resting her fingers lightly there. “If you really don’t think there’d be anything wrong with me lashing out at my dad and the people working with him, then how can you think there’s anything wrong with you? Haven’t you always done everything you could to help me, to help everyone you care about? If it counts for me, it should count for you too.”
I didn’t know how to answer that. My heart beat beneath her hand and the ache inside me seemed to bleed right out to the edges of my skin, but the pain of it was almost pleasant now, like the hot glow of the sun when you’ve come out of somewhere cold.
Tentatively, I eased my arms around her. I gathered her against me, tucking her head under my chin, feeling her soft warmth all along my body, the rise and fall of her breath.
This was Rose.MyRose. She would let me call her that. She’d already told me, more than once, how much she wanted me. And here she still was, in spite of everything.
This was what it felt like to hold her in my arms. She didn’t feel at all fragile now. Strength was coiled through those muscles, and power I couldn’t even imagine simmered deep inside her.
I let my head dip, just a little. Just enough to brush my lips against her temple. Her breath caught. I kissed a little lower, and lower still, charting a slow path across the curve of her cheek. Her fingers curled into the fabric of my shirt. I had just enough self-control left to murmur, by the corner of her mouth, “If you need to get back to the house—”
“Not yet,” she said. “But the Spark help me, Gabriel, if you back away again—”
I captured her mouth with mine, cutting off her words. Letting my kiss be my answer. She melted into me, one hand trailing up over the back of my neck, sending tingles down my spine. Her lips parted under my mouth, offering me entrance, and I had to take it, teasing my tongue over hers, tasting how sweet she was all the way through. She made a hungry sound and pulled me even closer.
I traced her sides down to the hem of her shirt. Hell, yes, that was coming off of her. I tugged, and she eased back half a step to let me pull it up over her head. For a second, I just stood there gazing at the slim curves of her breasts in the black bra that was as glossy as her hair.
She made a twitching motion with her hand, and the back unclasped itself. The bra tumbled to the floor, leaving her completely on display for my approval. In an instant, I was rock hard.
“Fuckme,” I muttered to myself.
She laughed, mischief dancing in her eyes. “That’s the general idea.”
