Page 40 of Love Walked In

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Leo

For a moment, we sat there stricken.

She’s hurt .

The words whispered through me, and I shot out of my seat, adrenaline bunching my muscles. It had been an epic fight to stay silent as Mari’s life was dismantled in front of her eyes.

She needs someone.

Jammed my chair across the tiles with a loud scrape.

I need to be her someone.

“Go, go, go,” Jamie ordered unnecessarily, as I sprinted out of the café. Mari’s shiny jacket was a beacon fifty meters down the street, and I heard a loud “Oi!” as she almost crashed into an older man.

“Mari! Mari, wait!” I called, heart in my throat.

She didn’t stop, but she at least turned down an alleyway. When I followed, it was blessedly empty, with only a faint smell of rubbish.

She’d pressed her hands against the dirty brick and bent in half. A howl came out of her like she’d had her insides ripped out.

My palm found her shoulder. “Mari.” The need to stay with her warred with the visceral urge to go back to Jamie and make him cry, too.

“She lied,” she forced out through her tears. “She lied to me the whole time and she left me alone.” She gasped, and sobbed, “I could have had a family and she left me all alone.”

I tugged, needing to see her face, needing her close. “You’re not alone, I won’t let you be alone.”

Mari straightened up and threw herself into my arms. Frantically pressed into me, like she’d climb inside me if she could. “Make me forget.”

I tried to pull back a few inches, get a look at her face so I could have some sense of what she meant. “Hold on, you’ve had a huge shock.”

But she buried her face in my chest. “Please make me forget,” she said, her voice high and tight.

I pressed my mouth to her crown. She was so utterly lost and she needed someone to make her feel found. “All right, we’ll go to the flat tonight. I’ll take care of you, don’t worry.”

She tugged hard on my coat. “No. Now. I want you to take me back to the attic and fuck me until I don’t feel anything.”

That was a roller coaster of a sentence, intimacy and distance crashing into each other.

A cool edge of reason cut through my longing for her, the desire to take her pain away.

What she wanted was exactly the wrong thing to do.

She needed to stay with the feelings she was having, not push them aside.

Not to mention that my heart couldn’t stand that kind of closeness without any affection to go with it.

“Now,” I exhaled. “All right. We’ll go to yours. But Mari?”

She looked up at me, her face red, her eyes wet. “Yeah?”

“I’ll only come if you understand that I won’t do exactly what you’re asking.” I gently pressed my fingers over her lips when she opened her mouth to object. “Yes, I know I’m being high-handed. But I can’t do it.”

I held my breath as she thought. Would she respect the line I’d drawn?

Her eyes softened. “I understand. I just need you, Leo.”

I barely kept back a sigh of relief as I tucked her into my side.

I walked her back to the shop, her hand tight in mine.

Graham looked up at us when we came through the door, eyes wide with concern, phone in his hand.

I nodded to him, hoping he’d understand the universal sign for I have her, and thankfully he nodded back.

When we’d closed the garret door behind us, I took off her coat and scarf, then nudged her into sitting on the bed and unlaced her boots, pulled off her socks, then took off my outer clothes.

I piled all the blankets in the room on her bed and pulled back the covers for her.

I took off my glasses and climbed in after her, wrapped my arm around her waist and buried my face in her tropical-scented hair.

“You made a nest,” Mari said, easing back into me.

“You needed comfort.” The low hum of arousal I felt whenever we were close like this clicked on, but I ignored it, listening to her quieting breath, feeling how the tension in her back and shoulders dissipated slowly, slowly, until she was relaxed in my arms.

I exhaled, for once in my life knowing I was exactly where I needed to be. Where I wanted to be.

She turned over and snuggled into my chest. “This is a cozy sweater,” she said, her voice exhausted.

She rubbed her cheek on it, such an adorable gesture that I couldn’t help but smile. “I think you were a cat in a previous life. Mog loves my jumpers, too. Though she shows her love by sinking her claws into them.”

Mari made a clawing motion with her fingers, and I took her hand and kissed her fingertips gently.

She pulled me in for a soft, languorous kiss, the kind where it was just our lips brushing for endless seconds. “You were right. Sex was the wrong idea.” She looked up at me, her tired eyes dancing. “I’m giving you the next ten seconds to be smug, then it’s over.”

“How dare you. I’ll need at least thirty.” Then the need to say something in earnest pushed out. “I do like just holding you, Mari.”

Her brow furrowed. “What do you like about it?”

I was about to jokingly accuse her of fishing for compliments, but there wasn’t a hint of a tease in her eyes. She was genuinely curious about why someone wanted to show her affection, and I wanted to fly to America expressly to find her stepfather and ruin his life. Instead I answered honestly.

“Well, you’re lovely to touch, but I should think that’s obvious.

” I reached down, squeezed her delicious arse lightly, and she smiled.

“When I hold you, all the things I usually think I should be doing, that I feel guilty or anxious or generally afraid about, they don’t matter.

” I reached up and trailed my finger down her nose absent-mindedly.

“I’m just here, with you, and it’s good. Being with you is good.”

She stretched up and found my mouth again.

We kissed softly, me trying to give her all the tenderness I had without words, knowing I was condemning myself with every brush of my lips on hers.

But it was too good, the way she saw and accepted all the parts of me: the shy joker, the demanding lover she’d woken up, the gentle, steadfast supporter I could be for her.

Even after she’d left, I’d long for her like she’d taken a vital piece of me with her. But telling her that enormous feeling would destroy the little idyll we’d created in this bed.

Mari bit her full lower lip for a moment. “I hate that I miss her so much. But I can’t stop thinking about her. It’s like I thought it was all under scar tissue, and now it’s been ripped off.” She looked up at me. “What you said to Tommy, at his house. Is that how you feel about Alexander?”

Her words reached out to me and I grabbed them with relief. “At the start, I just missed him utterly. Like there’d been something torn out of me, and I wasn’t whole anymore.

“I never doubted that my grandfather loved me. Not for a second. But… I think he might have loved me as an extension of himself. I was the person who’d inherit everything he’d made, and he wanted me to think like him, act like him.”

Her hand trailed up my back. “What would he do if you didn’t do what he wanted?”

“I never found out.” I rubbed my forehead. “He and my dad, they’d shout at each other a lot when they disagreed. I hated that. They were like two massive bulls, always on the verge of headbutting each other over the smallest things.

“But Alexander was different with me. Affectionate, jolly. I would go to the shop after school most days, and he would set me up at the end of his desk with papers and pens, or walk me around the shop talking about all the authors he’d met.

Dad was caught up in working on local campaigns, then in starting his own firm, so he wasn’t around as much. ”

“It’s easy to say and do what people want when you love them and it makes them so happy,” Mari said quietly.

“Exactly. And you assume that the other person feels the same way. But then they tell you that they’re doing what’s best for you, when they’re actually doing something selfish.”

Her eyes swirled brown, murky and sad. “Sounds like we were both too trusting for our own good.”

I knew she was right, but something small and lonely in me hoped that she could trust again. It was like she’d been hiding behind closed doors for so long that the locks had rusted. If she wanted to get out, she’d have to kick them down.

I asked softly, “Is that why you don’t do love? What happened with Greg and your mum?”

She pulled back an inch, considering me, her mouth turned down. I wanted to take the question, shove it back in my mouth and sew my lips closed. Forget a bridge too far, I’d shoved us miles ahead of where we could be.

“It’s part of it,” she said, her voice distant.

“But I’d always known he didn’t love me, so nothing about what he did was surprising.

And when I left for college, things were better.

I made a few friends, dated a little bit.

But then I met Dina my junior year and just got totally…

consumed, I guess. She was the first woman I’d been with, and she was so experienced and glamorous, always made-up and put together.

I was head over heels for her, but she only wanted me when things were easy, when I was her cute little small-town girlfriend.

So when I panicked when Greg moved away and cut me off, she told me I was way too clingy, that I was toxic and she couldn’t have me in her life anymore. ”

My mouth tightened. Of course, who’d want to be in a relationship when all you’d been subjected to was other people’s selfishness? “What did she do then?”

“Dumped me for the girl she’d been cheating on me with. They’d met in one of her classes.” She laughed, bitter as coffee without sugar. “But the other woman ghosted her after a week. I tried not to feel too much schadenfreude when I found out.”

“She didn’t deserve you,” I said fervently. Mari deserved to be lavished with affection, garlanded with it like she’d garlanded her body with flowers.