Page 71 of Between Never and Forever

“Or I’m meeting him on his level.” He stared at me before he continued, searching for something. “Has he talked to you like that before?”

“Like what?” I gripped my thighs, and his eyes trailed my legs, stopping on where my fingers indented my flesh, where I felt the pads of them digging in so tight I might explode with that feeling alone. “Like him bossing me around? Sure, but it’s not something I haven’t endured time and time again.”

“You’re handling it, it seems.”

“I’m flying by the seat of my pants,” I confessed. “That’s not something you ever do.”

He leaned close. “You don’t need to be like me. You never were. Don’t you remember? You ran my ass down to the lilacs more than a time or two in the middle of the night without even a jacket on to tell me about some random thing.”

“I don’t run to you about any random things anymore though.”

“No. You’re bottling up your whole life in there, aren’t you?” He studied me then, his green eyes scanning my face like a laser looking for clues, like suddenly he could tell me all about myself. “Just be how you were before.”

“How I was,” I emphasized. “I’m not that way anymore. I can’t be…”

He leaned back in that seat and folded his hands in his lap. “What way are you now then?”

“Honestly? I hate to admit it, but I’m a doormat,” I confessed. “I can’t be anything else when there are a million people walking all over me to make sure I do what needs to be done for my career. I go with their flow and let them do what they’re trained to—”

“I didn’t sign the contract for them. I wanted you. I agreed to this for you.” He shrugged. “So change the trajectory.”

“Right.” I chewed on my cheek. “I am. Well, I did. For now. But for how long? You know Frankie’s going to call Mitchell and this is going to blow up in our faces.”

“You don’t seem to realize…” He stood then, and my eyes gobbled up the sight. I’d looked him up and down too many times over the past few days, and still, I wanted to gaze at his appearance for so much longer. “I own this resort. I own your contract and you. They cannot and will not ruin their relationship with me, Kee.”

“Why?” I whispered now, because Dex was unbuttoning his navy suit jacket. His hands worked so effortlessly that I had to squeeze my thighs together and try my best not to focus on what other tasks those hands would do well at.

I knew.

My body knew.

The freaking Ben Wa ball in me probably knew.

“Because I control my destiny and nowyours.”

“You’re sayingnowlike you didn’t always.”

He smiled down at me, but his eyes swam with turmoil. “How could I control you? You were sparkling bigger than my life in that small town. And I would have done just about anything to keep you there, including…”

He let his statement trail off, but I knew where he was going. “That car wreck wasn’t your fault, Dex.”

His hands went to my hips, and his forehead fell to mine as he whispered, “When you’re with me, it’s always my fault, Kee.”

I gripped the lapels of his suit jacket to pull him closer so he’d feel what I felt then, so he’d understand like I understood. “I went to therapy for that night. I racked my brain on how it would have turned out had I not had another drink, had I kept you in the woods, had I not pushed Gabriella on you. None of it mattered. We can’t change the past and we can’t dwell on it, especially when we were all kids—”

“I was nineteen.”

“And I was almost eighteen.” I slid my hands to his shoulders and shook him. Did he not get that? “You weren’t going to control me from getting into the car that night. We were all going with or without you. Don’t you see? You didn’t cause that car wreck at all. If anything, you saved us from it.”

His eyes squeezed shut so hard I knew the fight inside him was barreling around in his mind, trying to find its way out. I wanted to hug him, to pull him close, to make him see that trauma shouldn’t have blame. Yet, he placed all that blame on himself.

I saw it now, and I was starting to realize why he’d told me he would control this relationship.

“You can’t control everything, Dex,” I whispered.

His hand slid up the bare skin of my arm and then down over my dress to my thighs. He gripped me there while he kept his eyes closed. His hand shook just like my whole body shook at his touch. Did he feel me tremoring, my breath coming faster? He gave no sign of it other than how his muscles bunched.

“Everything in my life I can and do control, Kee. That’s why you’re normally not in it. For these next couple of months, you’ll have to learn that.”