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I didn’t want to get on my feet.
I wanted to sit right there with the beautiful woman who somehow knew exactly what I needed.
So when she started to stand up, I didn’t overthink. I didn’t second-guess. I reached out and grabbed her hand.
Her eyebrows rose slowly when I wound my fingers over hers. Then I tugged.
“Stay,” I said. “Just for a little.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
CHARLOTTE
Stay,he’d said. So calmly, like he hadn’t been a completely different person only a few minutes earlier.
I wasn’t going anywhere, not while he’d sit there and talk to me.
I’d never walked in on someone wobbling on the tightrope of a panic attack before, but as soon as I saw that haunted look in his eyes, the tension rippling over every inch of his frame, I knew that’s exactly what it was.
I’d had them. A few times. And they were terrifying, even more so when you didn’t have a name for what was happening to your body.
Daphne did, and she walked me through the first few after my mom died, when I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go with all the boiling emotions trapped under my skin.
Grief had a funny way of coming out when we least expected it. That was the look in his eye that I recognized.
There was always a tipping point.
The moment before everything came spilling out in a messy burst—short, shallow breaths that couldn’t be controlled or slowed or regulated, the tears I saw in his eyes, and that trapped, panicky look about him.
Burke Barrett, at the moment I found him, was as dangerous as a wild animal. Capable of causing massive damage and immense hurt, to either me or himself.
But instead I witnessed someone with incredible control over what he was feeling. Instead of lashing out in embarrassment, instead of allowing the physical chemistry between us to serve as a distraction, he directed his focus onto me.
So I stayed.
None of this fit the tidy picture I’d drawn for our nonrelationship relationship. And somehow that seemed to fit us too.
“What was your mom like?” he asked.
I smiled. “She was ... quiet.”
“So not like you, then.”
I smacked his arm, and he smiled.
“Sometimes I think it’s because she spent so many years fighting; she just wanted peace once she was free of it.”
Burke made a small noise at the back of his throat, and there was understanding in it.
“My mom wanted simple things,” I continued. “A cup of tea when she woke up. A pretty view to look at while she drank it. A garden to get her hands dirty. A good, hearty meal. And her loved ones close by.”
He took that in quietly, then gave me a questioning look. “Did she find all that?”
I nodded. “Eventually. She rented a small house about ten minutes from my aunt Daphne’s; it wasn’t on the water, but she had a nice backyard that the landlord let her take charge of.”
“She didn’t want to own a home?”
“She didn’t.” My throat felt a little tight talking about my mom. Daphne was the only person I could share stories with, and the memories felt a little rusty coming up. “But she loved the place she lived, even if it wasn’t hers. Her garden is gone now. The person who moved in after her didn’t want to take care of it.”
