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My little spark of color in a lifetime of winter.
Does she deserve to know why I’m all fucked up inside? I know the answer already. If I’m going to be her man, if she’s going to fall for me, she deserves the truth.
We’re so embedded in one another it’s only fair I tell her what the Garrisons did to me and the ones I loved most.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
KEIRA
I’m so ashamed I can’t move. I’m not sure what he just did to me. The word that bounces around my mind doesn’t fit. A part of me knows that if I’d started crying in earnest, if my body had locked up, he would have stopped.
If he didn’t force me, then what did we just do?
He’s a sadist.
So that makes me his masochist.
Does that mean what we did was play? Because it felt deadly serious.
I don’t have time to unravel my feelings because I’m angry that I told him I was falling for him even though he killed Clint. I’m so fucking angry that even though I said no and I meant yes, neither of those words meant anything to him in the end.
And I'm so ashamed because I should hate him, but I don’t.
Tears spill down my temples. Catching in my hair. He picks me up and I sag against his naked chest as he carries me up the stairs. We’re both a mess. Both sticky with his blood and our cum. He pulled his sweatpants back up, but I see the wet stains seep through the front.
I must have been soaked.
Distantly, the shower runs. Then he lifts me and we’re standing on cold tile with steamy water running over our bodies. He tilts my chin up and all the anger is gone from his face.
“Do you want the truth, redbird?” he says hoarsely.
I swallow hard. The last time he told me the truth, it was horrifying. But I have to know, so I nod weakly.
“The woman I was engaged to…Clint Garrison killed her,” he says. “She was twenty, I was nineteen. There was an ongoing feud between myself and the Garrisons. Clint ran into her at a bar one night. He offered to drive her home, but instead he crashed his truck outside the lodging house I was staying at with Westin. We heard the noise from the house. I pulled her body from the vehicle, but she was gone.”
My jaw is slack. He’s staring at the wall, his thumb moving over my chin in a slow circle.
“I’m so sorry, Sovereign,” I whisper.
“She was pregnant, about seven weeks,” he says. “After that, I got snipped. I thought if I couldn’t have her babies, I wouldn’t have any. I regret that.”
“You can get it reversed,” I whisper.
He shrugs. The slow realization of what he said is sinking in hard. Clint did that. My dead husband killed his fiance. It was no wonder he’d wanted revenge, or that he had a chip on his shoulder about me being Clint’s widow.
“How did Clint survive?” I whispered.
He clears his throat. All I can see is that black and white bull skull swimming in my vision. Dotted with dark hairs and water droplets.
“The police said it was accidental,” he says. “But he ran the passenger side of the truck into a wall. The rest of the car was fine, he barely had a scratch.”
“Do you think it was an accident?” I manage.
His eyes go dark. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
I’m still aching from what he did to me on the kitchen floor. But I lift my hands and lay my palms on his hard stomach. He feels like life, like warm flesh and blood. I want to close my eyes and pretend everything leading up to this moment was a dream.
Pretend there was no Clint.
