Silence fell between them, the light in her eyes changed. She looked fierce. Angry. “You should never have been subjected to the things you saw. It makes me want... I want to go back and protect you and I can’t. It hurts to know that I can’t.”
He felt like she’d reached straight into his chest, taken his heart in hand and squeezed tight. “I do not need protection.”
“Maybe not now, but you did. I wish someone had done that. I think it’s wonderful that you love your mother, in part because no one else did. But I wish, so much, that someone had stepped in and protected you.”
“You...care about me, Rachel?” he asked. They were hard words to speak, and yet it was harder not to say them at all.
“More than that, Alex. I actually... I wanted to say—and I was going to wait until I had you all sex-sleepy, but—I love you.”
Alex froze. “Say it again,” he said.
They were the words he’d wanted from someone all of his life. Words that had never, not once, been directed at him. Not by his mother, not by his father, not by a lover. Now that he’d heard them he wasn’t sure what they made him feel. It was something deep. Something hot and cold. Something that made him want to pick up a car and throw it into the ocean, or just pull her into his arms and kiss the hell out of her.
Instead he waited, frozen inside. Even his heart had stopped. He was certain of it. Because he couldn’t breathe, not at all. The world might even have stopped turning, just waiting, on pause, for the next words that might come out of her mouth.
“I love you.”
She said it again, and it all started again. His heart pounding hard, causing a shift inside of him that made him feel like he was crumbling, each beat compromising the stone walls built up around him for protection.
He couldn’t think of what to say. Or what to do. And that rarely happened to him. When it did, though, Rachel Holt seemed to be the cause of it.
“Why?” he asked.
He hadn’t meant to ask the question, but the minute he did, he realized it was the word pounding through his head. Because it made no sense. Because no one ever had. And he wasn’t sure why this beautiful, incredible, ridiculous woman who seemed to light the world on fire when she smiled, would feel that way about him.
Not when he’d used her. Seduced her for revenge.
“Because I cried in front of you. I want to seduce you, and be seduced by you, and say dirty words for you. I can sing off-key in front of you. And you don’t judge me, or look down on me. You accept me that way, and I feel like I can accept myself that way, too.”
“Is that all?”
“Achieving self-acceptance isn’t big enough for you? Fine, that’s not all. The sex is good, too.”
He didn’t feel torn about what to do anymore. He crossed the room and pulled her into his arms, kissed her until neither of them could breathe. Until his lungs were filled with her. Her scent. Everything.
Until his blood was so hot with lust he thought it would scald him inside.
He felt wild. Out of control. Unequipped to accept what she’d given him and unable to return it.
But one thing he knew for certain was that she was his. Love would make her stay. He’d truly done it. He had made her love him, and now that she did, she wouldn’t go.