Page 29

I felt victorious. Not only had I made love to the woman I’d been aching to possess since the day I’d met her, but only minutes ago, I’d heard her soft whispered words as she lay curled against my chest, her fingertip drawing small circles into the flesh.

She’d told me she loved me. If I was being honest, I hadn’t expected to hear those words from her mouth for a good long while.

I’d said them because I meant them. I’d meant them with everything I had inside of me, and although I’d feared I’d freak her out, I couldn’t hold them inside.

So to hear her whispered confession hours later was a thing I took a moment to cherish. I took a long moment. And after that moment had been good and spent, I had to admit to myself, and the world, that I was happier than I’d ever been.

“Thank you,” my voice was gruff and heavy with emotion as I covered her hand on my chest with one of my own. “For giving me everything you gave me tonight.”

“Thank you for giving everything to me.”

“What did I give you?”

“Happiness. Laughter.” She stopped talking, breathing deep against my chest. “You gave me safety.”

“Safety?”

“Yes. Safety.”

“I don’t understand.” The thought that I’d made her feel safe had me both wanting to pound my chest in male pride, as well as demand to know what or who had made her feel unsafe to begin with—and then pound them.

“I think I have to tell you something, Beckett. Maybe I should have told you before, but I didn’t, and I think now I have to.”

“Okay?” My chest felt tight with worry and unease, but I didn’t want her to feel uncomfortable or unsafe. So I let my hand roam along the length of her back, my fingers tickling her flesh softly the way I’d figured out these past few days that she liked.

“You know I was in the system.”

“Yes.” I confirmed, hating that she’d known any kind of pain.

“Well, I was with this one family. They weren’t good people and they raised an even worse son.

At first he was exciting and fun and—well, I was stupid.

I thought he was my friend. He wasn’t. Like I said, I thought he was exciting and I went with him when he did a few bad things.

We vandalized and he bullied kids at school.

By this time in my life, I really resented the kids that had good families who loved them.

So, picking on them wasn’t something I was really all that against. It was early-ish into our relationship that he started sneaking into my room.

Again, at first, I didn’t mind.” A sob caught in her throat and I felt a new kind of protectiveness I wasn’t fully prepared to comprehend.

“He was nice to me. At least, he was in the beginning. Then it got weird. He started to do odd things to me, say things that made me feel worthless. He’d convince me I needed to do bad too, and by the time I realized he wasn’t doing harmless bad—it was too late. ”

My mind was reeling against the uncharacteristic admission. I couldn’t see this woman who was so firm with her opinions doing anything out of force. She was always so—strong. She was always so firm when it came to protecting her own.

“Anyway,” shame and pain flooded her words.

“I tried to distance myself, but when I couldn’t, I tried to tame him.

He’d suggest something horrific . . .” her body was beginning to shake.

“Toward an animal he’d see in someone’s yard or something .

. .” a shudder passed from her and into me.

“And I’d convince him to instead take his rage out on a building or a car or something that wasn’t alive to feel it.

I knew the vandalism was wrong, but I couldn’t be a part of something as vile as physical abuse against anything.

I couldn’t, Beckett. I’d once tried to tell his mom—she never listened.

She didn’t want to hear it, but her husband was the worst of them all, so she would have been adept at ignoring it all. ”

“Amara,” her name was a whispered prayer. “You don’t have to go on. You don’t have to relive it.”

“I do. I do because after I give this to you, I won’t ever have to give it away again. It’ll be gone.”

She said the words with a concrete belief I couldn’t have argued even though I desperately wanted to. So I acquiesced, “Okay, baby.”

“He thought we were an item. He’d sneak into my room and he’d kiss me, touch me—make me touch him.

He’d get really mad when I didn’t and he’d say things that hurt.

It was easier to . . .” she shook her head against my chest, inhaling my scent on a deep breath.

“I never gave him me. I was always able to stop things from progressing so far, but now, looking back, I think he was excited about one day taking that away from me—taking away my innocence. I think he had a twisted fantasy about it. And then one night at a party he took things too far. He drugged a girl. I hadn’t known quite what was happening, until it was well into happening.

He’d always been attractive and girls easily fluttered around him, so when he took her into the room, I didn’t think.

I didn’t think about the way she stumbled or the evil intent in his eyes.

I didn’t think about it until I walked in on him.

She was like a doll, barely able to move her limbs, Beck . . .”

“Amara,” Her name was tortured on my lips. I was filled with a rage I’d never before known. It was so intense, so strong, and so without control, that if I knew who this prick was, I don’t think I would have kept a level head.

I didn’t know his name, but he’d made the woman I loved a victim she didn’t deserve to be. She’d lived for years in her head, terrified of everything. She’d lived for years as a victim and all I wanted to do was free her forever from it all.

“I told someone after.” There was more pain in those words than there’d been in everything else she’d told me thus far.

“I told someone because it was the right thing to do—even though I knew it was too late. That girl will live every day knowing something horrible happened to her. That night changed her irrevocably, altering the path of her future. I knew she’d never be the same.

She’d never trust like she once did. She’d never look at herself and see strength, but instead a suffocating helplessness she can’t obliterate.

I know that—but I had to do something. And that was all I could do. ”

“What happened?”

“There was an investigation. That’s how his father got caught doing what he’d been doing.

” Her voice lowered, and although I wondered, I didn’t ask about the pricks dad.

“I was old enough then to move out on my own. At first, I had government help to pay for my apartment. But I worked. I hated working around people who thought flirting was the thing, and somehow I built a wall around myself. I thought I was protecting myself from men, because I worried they were all like him. And then Joss hired me at the Library and I realized there were safe places out there. But I still didn’t look at men and think of safety.

Until you. You showed me that there are good men out there, Beckett.

You showed me happiness and laughter and safety. ”

My arm convulsed around her as emotion, deep and raw, flowed through me.

“I’ll do everything I can to make sure you always know happiness. I promise I’ll give you laughter for as long as you let me be a part of your life, because when you laugh, I get happy.” My voice pitched low and I murmured in her hair. “And I’ll always give you safety. Always. I promise.”

“That’s why, Beck,” she said softly and I felt my brows furrow in confusion.

“Don’t understand, baby.”

“That’s why I love you. This is why I fell.” Her voice was soft and small. “We all have demons. I just met my monster before I was old enough to understand. It scarred me and until recently, until you, I never healed.”

“Definitely the best Christmas I’ve ever had.” I murmured in reply—and because everything always got better with Amara, I wasn’t surprised when my heart lifted and she made perfect even better as she pressed her lips to my chest where my heart was beating fast.

I lost myself in Amara Bloom for the second time in one night, obliterating all the past pains with the promise of a good and happy future where I was the man who kept this woman safe.

New Year’s came and went. So far, it’d been a real good year and I fully believed this was because I’d welcomed it with my lips pressed tightly, lovingly, and a little possessively against Amara’s.

We’d spent New Year’s with our little family of good friends in the condo I shared with Amara.

The girls had cracked the bottles of wine Raina had gotten for Christmas, and danced up a storm in the living room.

It had been a good night, and the beginning of this New Year had been even better.

It was early February and my relationship with Amara had been going strong.

I’d even convinced her to move her stuff into my room.

This had been a bit of a fight as she liked the color of her walls and had no interest in moving into my plain white room, as she’d put it.

Still, she did because my room had a huge bathroom with an impressive soaker tub.

I’d also had to promise we’d paint a feature wall.

She’d tried for the whole bedroom, but I’d calmly explained that in a relationship, there was compromise.

I might have explained this, but I’d been willing to paint the whole damn condo purple if that meant I made her happy.

My dad, when he eventually saw it, would blow a gasket.

School was just as intense, but with Amara giving me all the sweetness she’d been hiding for years, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. I felt like I was walking on top of the world.

Damn, I was a man who now had date night. I loved date night.

If I were to have been told the day I met this little woman who breathed spitfire and glared ice, that within half a year I’d be a man who looked forward to date night, I would have laughed in disbelief.

Now, I couldn’t imagine my life any other way.

I was happy. I was in love. And I was building a fucking good life with an even better woman who had finally come into her smiles.

That was another thing. Amara was smiling on a regular now. It had been a good month that I’d had her smiles, but they still took my breath away. I had a feeling that I could have her and her smiles for a hundred years, and they would still steal my breath.

Mom had called last week to check in and ask about my Christmas.

Although I normally didn’t have a crazy holiday with all the fixings I’d had with Amara and my family of friends, I usually saw my parents at least once.

I hadn’t this year and I knew my mom was feeling my absence.

I could hear it in her voice. So when I finally told her about Amara and the reason for my absence, she exclaimed firmly that we were coming for dinner so she could meet her.

I’d never had a woman I was serious enough with to tell Mom or Dad about, so this was a big thing.

That was why Amara was fretting beside me as I pulled my truck up the large concrete pad of my parents’ massive house. Her blue eyes were as big as saucers and her usually pink cheeks were ghostly pale.

Reaching across the cab, I squeezed her thigh gently. “Stop worrying.”

“What if they hate me?”

“It doesn’t matter what they think because I love you.”

“But,”

“They will love you.”

She shook her head. “You can’t know that.”

“I do.” I stated firmly, entirely believing my words. “Stop worrying.”

She glared at me like I was telling her to swallow a ghost pepper without burning from the inside out, so I barked laughter as I pushed open my door to climb down from the truck. I met her on her side, taking her trembling hand in mine as I walked her to the front door.

Mom was already there, waiting for us. She was smiling elegantly, wearing a comfortable outfit of brown pinstriped pants and a cream sweater.

Her hair was tied back at the nape of her neck in her signature bun.

Mom was a pediatric surgeon and although she hadn’t wanted her own children, she loved them.

So when she smiled, she had a smile that was welcoming and easy to trust—a smile perfected for nervous children.

It was with this smile that I felt Amara’s tension disintegrate.

“You must be Amara? How lovely to meet you.” I watched in muted fascination as my mother pulled the woman I one day intended to make my wife into her arms, and then into her home.

I already knew, as I watched Amara move into the home I’d grown up in, that she would complement my existing family perfectly. Maybe she’d even make it more of a family when one day she gave my mother grandbabies.

Amara’s insecurity was gone before I’d even made it through the door.

The two women disappeared into the long hall, and I smiled, because Amara didn’t look back over her shoulder with big uncertain eyes.

She didn’t plead, silently, for me to save her.

Instead, she fit. And what I’d already known was solidified in concrete as I saw my life unfolding with the very woman who’d undone me the summer before.