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Fuck. Finally. He didn’t know what had brought this about, but he was grateful for it. “Come here, baby.”
“I can’t.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I can touch you while I tell you.”
Raid didn’t like that. He wanted to cuddle her while she did this. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy for her. And if he hadn’t known it before, he could see it in the way she was trembling.
“Baby, if you’re not ready to tell me, I can wait.”
“No, I want . . . I want to show you that I trust you. I might still have moments where I get . . . where I forget that it’s you, and forget to be brave, and I forget that you’ll catch me if I fall. Shoot. I’m not making any sense.”
She wasn’t. Yet, at the same time, he thought he understood.
“I’m always going to catch you, Hannah.”
“I know.” She let out a deep breath. “All you do is give to me, and I have to, no, I need to show you that I want this. Us. I want to try. If you do?”
He didn’t know how she could still have doubts . . . but he would reassure her as much as she needed.
“Hannah, I do. I want this. I want us.”
She nodded so fast that he worried she was going to hurt her neck.
“Baby, I want you to sit with me.”
“Soon. I have to get this out.”
“Nothing you tell me will change how I see or feel about you.”
She shot a pained look at him. “No? What if it was my fault?”
“Your fault? How the fuck would him conning you be your fault?”
“I fell for it,” she cried. There was so much pain in her voice that it made him flinch back. “How could I be so stupid! I sold my grandma’s house for him. Do you know how long that house has been in my family? Over eighty years. And I sold it. I sold it because a man told me that he wanted me and that he wanted us to build a life together. But to do that, we needed to find a house of our own. One that could be for our family. He said that he wouldn’t be comfortable moving to this town and living in my house. It had to be our house. Which meant we both had to contribute. Which I thought sounded fair. I wanted to help build our life together. To feel like we were equal. But to do that, I had to sell Grandma’s house.”
“Baby,” he murmured. He hated this for her.
She paced back and forth, clearly unable to stay still. “I can’t believe I fell for his lies. I met him on an online dating site. Did I tell you that? I can’t remember if I did. It was a site for Dominants looking for subs and vice versa. They recommended that you met in a public place for the first few dates. To tell a friend where you were going. To send details of your date to a friend. And to not meet at club for the first time unless you had someone with you to watch out for you.”
“You didn’t do those things?” he asked in a soft voice. He didn’t want her to think he was in any way blaming her.
“No. I was an idiot. I . . . I knew that Melody wouldn’t approve of me meeting with a stranger without having someone with me. And I figured she’d tell Brye. Then Brye would tell Jake. So I didn’t tell them that I was going to meet him. But I insisted we meet at a restaurant. We just hit it off. It was like he liked all the same things as me. I spent the weekend in Lafayette with him. We went to the movies. We ate out. We did tourist things. He told me that his family didn’t know about his kinks. That they wouldn’t understand. And that his employers would likely fire him if they found out.”
“What did he say he did?”
“He said he was part of a tech start-up and had to travel a lot. Which meant I couldn’t see him as much as I might like. But he still made time to call me. And he messaged me. He said all the right things. When we . . . when we finally started taking things further, it didn’t feel as good as I thought it would. But I thought it was me. That’s when he started getting in my head.”
“How did he do that?”
She bit her lip.
“Hannah. What did he do?”
“It happened after the first time we went to a club in Lafayette. It wasn’t what I was used to. There were no monitors. No one even asked me to fill in any paperwork or go over rules or anything! I didn’t even realize there were clubs like that. I’m always safe at Saxon’s. No matter what, someone is always watching. If I say my safeword, someone will stop everything. But there . . . it was like flying without a parachute. But I thought I could trust Steven. Things went . . . they went further than I thought they would.”
