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“I...” She was panting hard. “You don’t like me.”

“No, carrot, I can’t say that I really do.”

“Why did you kiss me?”

“The same reason you kissed me. You might not like me, but you want me. You can’t help yourself.”

She didn’t look away. Instead, she met his gaze. Full-on and clear. “I don’t think that you’re stupid. I’m not ashamed of being attracted to you—I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand how I can want somebody that I can’t say two words to without making them furious.”

“Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe it’s the spark.”

It was as true as anything, probably. At least as he figured. “I am sorry,” she said. “About invading your privacy. I didn’t mean to do that. Well, I did. But I didn’t mean to upset you.”

He breathed out hard. “You sure you don’t just want to keep kissing?”

She laughed, a kind of frantic, helpless-sounding laugh. “Sure. The kissing is nice. But I can’t keep kissing you as long as you think I’m trying to hurt you. Or that I look down on you. It was never about you. It’s about me. I had to make myself feel important because otherwise I just feel...” Her chest hitched, a cross between a sigh and a sob. “I must not matter that much.That’s what I feel. My dad might have sucked, but he was also the one person I wanted to please most in the world. I didn’t have friends because I wanted to make him proud on the ranch and I worked the land instead of playing with other kids. And he...he chose a new life over me. A lover over me. He...he made me feel like I didn’t matter and I had to make myself matter, Levi. I had to prove I was good with ranching, and I’m never going to be the strongest, am I? So I had to find a way to convince myself I was the smartest. It was never looking down on you. I look down on me.”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” he said, feeling heavy with tension, and with some of his own shame. Because he had been hard on her. He had assumed the worst to try to push her away. And he didn’t even think he believed any of it. Because absolutely nothing that she had said to him today had been condescending. Absolutely nothing that she had said had been in that vein. She had not acted like he was less because of the dyslexia. He had simply felt it.

And he had felt it because he didn’t know how to talk about it. He didn’t know how to be vulnerable about it.

He hated being vulnerable more than anything, so even if he did know how to be vulnerable about it, he didn’t want to be. Not with her, not with anybody.

Because what he’d said to her the other day was true.

Vulnerability led straight to victimhood.

Because it let people get in. It let them get under your skin. He would be damned if he ever did that again.

And then there was the sole carrot.

Up in his grill, up in his life, who drove him absolutely crazy... And maybe that was the key.

Because he didn’t feel especially vulnerable to her. She wasn’t somebody who was tangled up in his life. So why not share with her? Why not? He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to dump her in a pond. He wanted to drag her upstairs and take her to bed, even though Camilla was here.

He wanted her.

And that could never be anything more than desire, because he just didn’t do anything deeper than that, and he never would.

The truth was, he didn’t have it in him. He didn’t want to have it in him.

He wanted his freedom.

And maybe that was part of the problem. He had only ever experienced personal affairs when he was young. When he didn’t understand that sex didn’t have to be meaningful or connected. That it didn’t have to matter.

He had only ever signed a contract for the use of his land back when he’d been naive.

He wasn’t naive anymore, and he wasn’t inexperienced.

And he had first realized that he had a problem with letters and numbers in school, back when he’d been a kid, and all the teachers had given him a very specific vocabulary to deal with that. Lazy. Lazy was the big one.

No drive. Doesn’t apply himself.

So that was what he believed.

And in the years since, he had clawed his way to a new understanding of all of those things.

None of these things with Quinn needed to be personal. And none of them needed to make him feel bad about himself.