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He would understand she needed to be where she was most comfortable.
With the people she knew and loved.
“Emery.” He didn’t even shout it as I hurried away from him down the wood-plank sidewalk.
It was this low, hoarse command that somehow held the power to make me stumble in my tracks.
Facing away, I gritted my teeth and fisted my hands.
Trying to prepare myself. To fortify and withstand.
Fat freaking chance since chills lifted on my flesh when I felt the thud of his boots reverberating the wood as he took a slow step toward me.
Another then another until he was looming over me from behind.
A beast that had risen to consume.
Severity blistered, crackling across the dead space. In it, it felt as if all the numb, paralyzed places inside me had come alive.
I attempted to control the ragged breaths that scraped from my lungs. To ignore his scent and the energy he emitted.
To completely disregard the awakening of my body.
God, I was so messed up. I was going to need to re-up my sessions with my therapist over him. Because he made me react in every way that I couldn’t.
Conjured something in me I’d only hoped one day would exist.
What a cruel joke that he was the last person on earth who I would choose to invoke it.
Yet there it was, wisping around me like a vapor that could swallow me whole.
“Please don’t make me fight you on this, Little Warrior.” Kane’s words were low and controlled, brushing against the shell of my ear.
Did he really think it was that simple? That at his whim, I would concede?
Aghast, I whirled around, unable to fathom his audacity.
At the sight of him, the places that had come alive inside me ignited into flames.
“Don’t make you fight me on this?” Disbelief curdled the words, and I slammed my palm against the bleeding, mangled organ in the center of my chest. “That’s my niece.”
Ferocity deepened the lines of his harsh brow. “And she’s my daughter.”
“You don’t even know her.”
His own fury boiled in those magic eyes. Emerald sparks that struck in the night. “Because the chance to know her was taken away from me. That’s not going to happen this time.”
Agitation ticked through my limbs.
I hated that he was absolutely right and completely wrong.
“She’s just a child, Kane. Little more than a baby. She just lost her mother, and now you want her to lose the two people she knows best? The ones who love her most? Do you understand how terrified and confused she would be?”
I begged it, praying he would see reason.
Emotion pulled through his expression, and my spirit leaped, clinging to the hope that the sincerity I’d felt in him Friday had been real. There was goodness under the clear hazard he emitted.
“That’s not my intention, Emery. Not for a second.”