Page 89 of Protected By the Sinner

My body starts to tremble. “Did I sleep with someone else? Did I cheat on you?”

He walks up to me. “No. You didn’t. You’re mine. Only mine.”

“Being crazy about me doesn’t mean you love me,” I say, because there’s no point in pretending at this stage.

“Good luck finding a name for what I feel, Amber. You wanna call it love? Go ahead. But that doesn’t even begin to explain what you are to me. When I say I’m crazy, it’s because there’s no word invented yet for what we are. And I don’t know if there ever will be.”

Chapter 41

No planning. I’ve just realized we’ll always be like this.

No matter how carefully I try to organize our story—trying to fit it, in my naturally pragmatic way, into a neat compartment—what I feel for Amber has a will of its own.

“I don’t need labels for us, Beau, but I’m afraid of what I don’t remember.”

I open my arms, and she comes to me. She jumps into my lap, her legs wrapping around my waist.

I bury my face in her neck, breathing her in a few times. My arms lock tightly around her. “We’re not perfect, and we’re not a fairytale, but I never wanted that either. Until I met you, I didn’t even know I was searching for anything. But from the very first second I laid eyes on you, no matter how much I tried to tell myself it was temporary, I knew I could never let you go.”

“I don’t care if you don’t say thewords. I just need to know I’m not alone in this crazy feeling. It’s terrifying to lovein the dark. Without remembering how it all began or what brought us to where we are now.”

I start walking again toward our room, but I don’t let her go. Instead, I open the balcony door and sit with her in my lap.

It’s past midnight, and aside from our breathing, the silence of the New Orleans night surrounds us.

“You’ll remember.”

“Will I?”

“It doesn’t make sense that the only part you can’t recall is the time we spent together before the accident.”

She nods. “Tell me something about yourself. You said we never talked about each other’s pasts. Change that. Let me in here too,” she says, touching my forehead.

“I don’t know how. I don’t have any memories of a normal family. We moved all the time,” I say, grossly simplifying the hell that was my childhood and teenage years.

“Then we have that in common.”

“Yeah, but you were forced to. My family lived a lie. Everything I believed in was fake. I only found out I was adopted as an adult,” I tell her, certain she doesn’t remember me saying it before.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, but I will. For you.”

She squeezes my hand.

“Our life was a performance. My mother—the adoptive one, because I never met my real parents—pretended we were normal, but we were nowhere near it. On top of never staying in the same place for more than six months, my father was always gone. And when he did come home, he’d usually beat me or my mom.”

She looks at me, and I can see the pain on her face.

I close my eyes for a second, trying to stay detached, like I’m telling someone else’s story. “He did that until I got bigenough to fight back. One day, he was beating her and I gave him a taste of his own medicine. I probably would’ve killed him if she hadn’t stopped me. After that, he started coming home even less, barely lived there anymore, but still forced us to move around. I never understood why she always took him back, after everything.”

“Maybe she loved him too much.”

“Probably. Though I’ll never understand how anyone can love someone who hurts them. Anyway, when I turned eighteen, I left home. Not long after, he left for good—ran off with a much younger woman. I started taking care of my mother.”

“Where did you go? You said you left home.”

“I can’t talk about that, Amber. And it’s not about trust—it’s to protect you. Just know that being with me means you’re not with the hero of this story. I’m one of the bad guys.”