Page 83 of Untouchable

But Caleb couldn’t stand to be weak either. “Damn it, Kelly. Tell me the truth.”

She jerked and whirled around, obviously wanting to strike him again but holding herself back. “You’ve done nothing to deserve the truth from me.”

He reached out and took her by the upper arms, holding her so she couldn’t turn away from him again. It felt like the whole world was pulsing behind his eyes, in his ears, in his chest, and in his cock. “I don’t care whether I deserve it or not. Tell me the truth anyway. Why do you hate me so much?”

“Because… because…”

She was almost strangling on the words, tears streaming from her eyes, and her whole body shaking helplessly with some sort of combination of anger, outrage, and grief. “Because you made me… fall for you!” She choked out the last words like they were horrifying.

For a moment, the truth of her words washed over him, answering, soothing the trapped, wounded animal inside him.

But they didn’t answer or soothe anything in Kelly. She was just as broken as before as she continued, “You made me want you to be… want you to be…”

“To be what?” he demanded.

This was the final straw. The cusp of the whole world changing. He knew it somehow. What would happen now would change him, would change everything.

It might break him more than he was already broken, but he was going to have the truth anyway.

18

Kelly almost toldhim the truth. The whole truth. Everything.

She stood there in the bedroom and almost blurted it all out.

She’d never been so out of control in her life, enraged in a way she’d never experienced before. It was so unexpected, so out of the blue, and Caleb was so unrestrained. Nothing but passion and fierce feeling. She couldn’t play her part. She couldn’t make up a convincing story or tell a believable lie.

She didn’t even want to. She wanted to be real. As real as she could sense Caleb himself was being right now.

But she’d come too far to throw away everything for no good reason, and a tiny thread of sanity held back the deepest part of the truth.

So her answer was true. Absolutely true. But modified slightly from what had originally started to come out.

“To be different,” she burst out. “To be better. And I know you never will be.”

She tried to pull away from him, her heart too exposed even by the altered response, but he wouldn’t let her. His grasp was no longer painful, but it was unbreakable.

So she gave up, slumping against his chest, feeling completely exhausted, completely defeated. She whispered, “I can’t fall for you, Caleb. I just can’t.”

His grip on her arms loosened, and he wrapped his arms around her. He was hard—so hard against her—and shuddering with a tension that felt more emotional than physical.

He was aroused. She could feel it against her. But he was more than that. The tension was also emotion.Emotion. Which she’d never felt in him like this before.

“Why can’t you fall for me, Kelly?” he asked, very softly, holding her so tightly she momentarily couldn’t breathe. “What’s so horrifying about that?”

And that was the pivotal question, the pivotal moment. If she ever wanted to continue her plan or even get out of this room, she would need to give him a believable answer.

Her mind was blank though. She couldn’t think of anything. She could only feel the protective fervor of his embrace, the vulnerability in his voice that no one else had ever heard. She could only feel a pulsing of desire—both physical and more than that—as her body reflected back his own urgent arousal. As if, even in body, they’d always been two pieces of one whole.

She was about to give it up. Give everything up because it was so much easier than trying to hold her crumbling world together.

But she could still see her father’s body, blood soaking into the dirt with the brain matter and bone fragments and hair.

He had been killed—unjustly, without reason—and it couldn’t be for nothing. If she didn’t see this through, then maybe she hadn’t loved him at all.

She heard herself saying, “Because I can’t fall for a guy like you again.”

She hadn’t planned the words out—they’d just come to her in some sort of flash of inspiration—but they were absolutely perfect. They answered everything.