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Theo, please.
Those had been the last sweet words I’d heard from his lips before the hellfire that my parents and their beloved Bible had warned me about had finally come crashing down on me… on my entire world.
“Fuck,” I whispered as I let my eyes drift shut and watched the entire scene play out again in my head.
Light flooding the dimness of the athletic shed that had served as a make-out spot for Ford and me.
My fingers tightening around the waistband of Ford’s jeans as I took in the sight of his erection tenting his briefs the second the thick flesh was free of the confining denim.
Wood slamming against wood, someone shouting, my desire-muddled brain trying to play catch-up.
Then pain.
So much fucking pain.
And not just from Ford’s fist as it had connected with my cheek. No, it was the name he’d called me as I lay on the floor at his feet trying to make sense of what was happening.
There’d been a lot of pain after that. Sometimes it had seemed like every minute, every hour, every day that had followed Ford’s defection had only been about pain.
My eyes popped open long before the other images could invade my brain. I felt the strength return to my body as a different kind of anticipation made my blood burn. I ignored the whisper of a voice somewhere deep inside my head that tried to tell me there was another way.
Because there wasn’t.
Not anymore.
Not in my world.
In my world, pain meant one thing and one thing only.
Relief.
Fucking relief.
Enough relief to remind myself that I’d escaped that hellish day and the ones that had followed and, just like Ford, I was okay.
I staggered to my feet and stumbled to the bathroom like a newborn giraffe. It wasn’t until I slammed the door shut and the darkness closed around me that I finally began to believe the words that little voice in my head always tried to convince me were a lie. The words that had gotten me through. The words that had made it possible to breathe in the endless darkness. The words that were only a lie in those empty moments before the pain took it all away and I became whole again.
I’m okay.
CHAPTERONE
LINCOLN
SIX MONTHS LATER
The kid was a pretty good liar; I had to give him that.
If I hadn’t forced him to shake my hand during the informal introduction, I never would have guessed that the lightness in his voice was practiced and the confidence in his stormy gray eyes was forced.
But for some reason or another that I didn’t want to give much thought to, I’d made the decision to step forward and extend my hand rather than remain where I was and just offer a cursory nod as he was being introduced to me. I’d been able to tell right away that he hadn’t wanted to have any kind of physical contact with me but, admittedly, my gentlemanly side had stepped out of the building the second I’d laid eyes on the gorgeous man, and I’d instigated the physical contact anyway.
I’d known there would be sparks long before his skin came into contact with mine, but as I studied his stunning eyes to see if he felt those same sparks, the second his palm met mine, the nurse in me took over and I forgot all about what it would feel like to have his lithe body pinned beneath my own as I drove into him over and over. I focused instead on how clammy and unnaturally cold his skin felt. I’d come to learn that summer evenings in Minnesota weren’t always the warmest, but the guy’s skin felt only a few shades warmer than the many ill-fated patients whose hands I’d held as they’d taken their last breaths.
A dozen different potential diagnoses went through me in those brief seconds but that was all it took to know that his happy-go-lucky smile and polite words were bullshit.
“Lincoln,” I said after Ford introduced me as Linc, the nickname everyone knew me by. I tried to convince myself I was only giving the guy my full name rather than the shortened version of it because I needed the few extra seconds to catalog as many physical signs as I could. I absolutely did not care what my name would sound like on his lips.
I did not.
