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Simon snagged his arm, uttering in a low voice, “I say stick with the plan. Use the club if you need to.”
Sam nodded, mesmerized by Maddie’s gently swaying hips as she walked with Kara and his mom to the door.
Mine.
Feral possessiveness slammed him in the gut as he watched his woman smile at his mom and Kara.
He turned his head to see Simon staring at Kara in exactly the same way.
Simon turned to Sam and the brothers’ eyes locked, exchanging an intense look of understanding and agreement before they both nodded emphatically at the same time.
He’d give Maddie as much time as he could, but eventually he’d give in and use the caveman tactics. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. He needed her so damn much, even if he didn’t deserve her.
Thinking about his reaction when she’d attempted to touch his cock, he frowned. He should have at least tried to explain. But that was a part of his past he didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to explain, even to Maddie. Especially to Maddie. He didn’t want to see the look of revulsion when he told her, when she realized just how contaminated he was by his past. He’d done what he’d needed to do to protect his brother. Still, it had tainted him, and Maddie might be a doctor, but she was still so incredibly sweet. That part of his life was in the past and he wanted it to stay there.
But I rejected her, pushed her away.
Because he had needed to do it. Thinking about it just made him feel less worthy of a woman like Maddie. She didn’t need to be polluted by his bullshit.
I wanted her touch. I wanted to feel her mouth on me.
His reaction had been instinctive, an aversion that he’d had since he was a child. Since there were certain things he didn’t want sexually, he’d made an art out of pleasuring a woman. And Maddiehadbeen pleasured. She had climaxed so beautifully, so erotically. Just thinking about it nearly made him groan aloud as he raked his hand through his hair in frustration. Every sexual experience he had ever had paled beside that incredible encounter with Maddie, his every sexual fantasy come to life.
Trying to block his past, trying not to remember how very fucked up he still was, he went to join the others.
It was several days before Maddie actually read Sam’s medical records. Strangely, he hadn’t made love to her again at his house. They’d gone to bed after Kara, Simon, and Helen had left, exhausted from the events of the wedding. She had slept in his enormous bed, actually longing for him to touch her, but he hadn’t. Somehow, he seemed distant, not at all as they had been during their incredible experience out on the dock. He remained aloof the next day. They had spent a lazy morning and afternoon watching movies in his home theater, and then she had needed to get back home to take care of some personal business before returning to work.
She had agreed to his business proposition of taking over the clinic as a charitable entity, and she had given the hospital her notice. Sam had stubbornly insisted on her not going back to work at the clinic until she was ready to start full-time. He was keeping paid staff there until she could do so. She hadn’t liked it, but she had agreed. If working full-time at the clinic meant she had to wait a few weeks to go back, she’d do it.
He hadn’t mentioned marriage again after they had hammered out an agreement for the clinic. She’d left his house with a brief goodbye and plans to improve the clinic, and he had told her he would call her.
It had been three days, and she still hadn’t heard from him. Now, disquiet was beginning to set in, and Maddie’s brain was working overtime.
Something’s not right. His reaction to me when I touched him was as if…
She flipped open the manila folder, taking a sip of her wine as she relaxed in a comfortable pair of old pajamas on her couch. Not even sure why she was reading the file, she turned the pages, finding his recent physical and his negative results for all sexual diseases and blood work. It wasn’t exactly a shocker that he was in superb physical condition after seeing his body in the raw, up close and personal, an incredible specimen of male perfection.
Trying not to think aboutthat,she kept turning the pages, seeing very little except a few incidents of viruses over the last ten or twelve years, but nothing significant.
Maddie knew she had seen enough to know that Sam was medically doing fine, but curiosity made her flip to the thick file in the back of his medical documents, wondering what had happened to accumulate so many old records.
Her eyes grew wide as she realized they were all psychological records, documentation of visits with a psychologist.
Victim of sexual abuse…forceful anal penetration resulting in rectal bleeding…fondling of the genitals…occurring from age eleven to age twelve.
Maddie tore her eyes away from the records with a horrified gasp. Putting a hand to her racing heart, she tried to calm her frenzied breathing.
Dear God, no! It had to be wrong. Not Sam. Please, not Sam.
She downed her wine in a couple of gulps and put the file on the couch to fetch another glass, her thoughts racing.
She returned with a very full wine glass, her body shaking as she sat down again. As a physician, Maddie had seen plenty of rape and molestation cases. Every one of them was horrifying, but she just couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around the fact that Sam had suffered in that way.
Sometimes, I just don’t like to be…touched.
Maddie shuddered, remembering his deep baritone saying those words, the brief look of fear in his eyes as he said them. She had known something was wrong, that it was an instinctive reaction. Somewhere deep in her mind alarm bells had sounded even then, knowing it was the reaction of a man who had somehow been hurt.
“Shit. I wouldn’t want to be touched there either if someone had violated me,” she whispered to herself.