Page 145 of Brutal Vows

“Because what I want more than anything is to know you. The real you that you keep hidden under all those smirks and that awful macho swaggering.”

“Look who’s talking. You’ve got so many ancient hell witch costumes, I can’t keep up with them all.”

I pull away, frame his face in my hands, and gently kiss him on the lips. Looking deep into his eyes, I say, “They’re not costumes.”

After a beat, we both start laughing.

It’s soft and grim, but laughter nonetheless.

I kiss him again. He drops his forehead to my shoulder and exhales. A shudder runs through his big body. I can tell he’s deeply affected by the story he just told me, that saying it aloud was excruciating and brought back horrible memories along witha mountain of guilt. But for the first time, I’m grateful for his insistence on talking things out.

But there’s one last item on the agenda that I’m not about to let go.

I pull away from him and wait until he raises his head and looks at me to say, “A small public service announcement: if you ever refer to me as ‘pussy’ again, I’ll break your face.”

He pulls his brows together. “What?”

“I heard what you told Declan about me.”

After a moment, he understands. “You were earwigging at the door?”

“If that’s an obscure Irish word for eavesdropping, then yes.”

He raises his voice. “Then you should’ve heard me tell him that I was being an idiot when I said that.”

“I’d already left by then.”

“Also,” he says, talking over me, “I didn’t even fucking know you when Declan and I had that conversation. I was talking about Lili, not you.”

“Stop talking, Quinn. You’re only digging your grave deeper.”

He stares at me for a beat in tense silence. “You’re always going to think the worst of me, aren’t you?”

“Don’t get dramatic. You’re telling me I heard something out of context, and I’m accepting that.”

His brows shoot up. “But you don’t believe it?”

I can tell he’s on the verge of another outburst. I don’t want a repeat of the episode we had in the car where I get another angry tirade shouted into my face, so I pull away from him and walk slowly over to the windows.

As I stare down at the city lights, an overwhelming sense of exhaustion settles over me.

I’m thirty-three, childless, with no career or work experience. I was raised in an environment of shame and fear by people who didn’t love each other. All I’ve ever known from every man whowas supposed to care for me is violence. I’m jaded, cynical, and broken in so many places, there’s not enough glue in the world to put me back together.

And I’m starting to have real feelings for a man who might be even more broken than I am.

I say, “I believe both of us have problems that we’re not going to fix tonight. I have trauma over my past. You have trauma over yours. Both of us are haunted by bad memories. I believe you wanted an arranged marriage to try to escape all that and find some peace, but you got me instead. A woman who has as many scars as she does demons. I believe we have an intense physical connection, but neither of us knows how to live with ourselves, let alone another person.”

I turn from the window and look at him. “I also believe you would’ve let Lili out of the contract if you’d known about Juan Pablo sooner.”

“Aye,” he says crossly. “What of it?”

“It just occurred to me that we never signed a wedding license.”

Frozen, he stares at me from across the room. I see his mind in action, the mad dash as he connects the dots. Then he passes a hand over his face.

“Fucking hell.”

“Yes. We’re not legally married.”