Hot and Bothered(87)
“So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, too,” she continued. “I never felt like I fit in my family, growing up. They were women of substance—my mom and my sisters. They called me their princess, and I think maybe they even meant it affectionately, but I never took it that way. When I finally left home and started to be okay with who I was, I fell in love with this guy, this poet. He seemed like the kind of guy who would go for one of my sisters. Only he didn’t, he went for me. And I thought, he thinks I have hidden depths. He thinks I’m not just a princess. But when he broke up with me, he said he’d never been able to get past my shell because there was nothing to get past. There was just more of the same, surface all the way down.”
Oh, hell no, he hadn’t said that to her. Mark wasn’t sure what to feel right now, pain for the woman who’d listened to that bullshit and heard truth, or rage at the man who’d said those words to her. “Haven, no,” he said. “He was wrong. Just plain wrong.”
She smiled at him, a brave smile, the sweetest smile he’d ever seen, and the wonder of that swept away the other emotions and took root.
“What he said—it broke my heart. And I decided that I wasn’t going to go after any more men who would hate that about me. I would find men like me, who wouldn’t want to crack me open and then be angry when they didn’t find what they were looking for.”
“So that’s why you dated all those—really boring guys?”
She laughed. “They would probably not be boring to everyone. They were just boring to me. And that’s also why I never stayed with anyone long enough for him to get disappointed in me. When I heard you play music—God, you got straight under my skin. Into my blood. I admired it so much, the way you had all that passion and talent inside you. But I was pretty sure after a while you’d figure out there was nothing in me to match. I was pretty sure if I gave you long enough, you’d realize there was no substance to me.”
He’d mistaken her hesitation for something to do with him, when all along it had been her, fighting herself.
She reached across the table and took his hand. For a moment she turned it palm up, as if she could read something there. Something about him, something about their future together. “When I was with you, I forgot that I was supposed to be guarding myself. And it was—well, to be honest, it was terrifying. And the deeper I got in, the more scared I was that you’d see the truth and run. That’s what I was holding at bay. Not you. Not Mark Webster, blues musician, music teacher, all-around hottie, seriously smokin’ lover. But I’m done. No more holding back.”
“Haven Hoyt,” he said. “You are not shallow. You are one of the least shallow women I know. Believe me. I’ve been peeling layers for weeks and I feel like I’m only starting to learn about the woman you are. You’re intense. And loving. And passionate. Incredibly passionate. You see the world—and me—in a way no one else ever has. Not that I’m complaining about your surface,” he said, giving her a heated look. He tried to fill that look with everything he planned to do with her later. Hopefully those activities would involve a certain pair of high-heeled sandals and a good leather belt. And the certainty that she’d be there when he woke up in the morning.
He watched her face flush and her pupils dilate and felt a deep sense of satisfaction—and peace.
There was a question he really wanted to know the answer to. Needed to know the answer to. “Did you mean what you said?” he asked. “What you told Elisa?”
She nodded. “I love you,” she said.
It was strange. He’d known that truth already, known it intuitively, but hearing her say it out loud made such an overwhelming difference. Those words could awaken and transform, making him feel like a new man even when he already thought he’d done all the hard work of understanding who he was and who he wanted to be. His heart hurt, but a blissful kind of wide-open, broken-down, re-rendered pain. Glorious. “I love you, too,” he said.