Twisted(128)

“Do what? Walk away from everyone who cares about you?”

“No. I’m doing this for the people who care about me and depend on me. And I’m doing it most of all for myself. That’s hard for me to say, because I’ve spent so many years living for you. But I can’t do that anymore.”

“I never asked you to.”

“I know you didn’t.” He caressed her leg through the sheet. “I thought I could be everything to you. Make up for everyone who’d ever hurt you.” His hand stopped moving. “Until I joined them, and I realized I’d been doomed to fail all along.”

“I hurt you just as much.”

He started to deny it. That was what he did. But this time, he couldn’t. “Yeah. You did.”

“You…you really started the night you saw me with Nick. That was true.”

Yet again his first reaction was to deflect. He blew out a breath. “Yes.” At her soft inward breath, he gripped her thigh. “That doesn’t mean you’re to blame. I made that choice. You and I weren’t together. You had every right to be with him.” He shook his head. “Just like I had every right to act like a complete dick and do something that harmed me more than anyone else.”

“All those times I tried to talk to you about us in recent years, you blocked me and changed the subject. Ever since Brent, you never said another word about us. How did you expect me to know?”

“I never said I was smart.”

She drew her legs up, out from under his hand. Always, always she curled into herself when she needed to retreat. He shifted to look her way, trying to stifle the flash of pain he knew must register on his face. But she reached forward just the same and cupped his cheek. “You need your sling.”

“Later.”

“You don’t need a wife. You need a keeper.”

“Yeah, for the last while I have, and I’m not about to shackle you with that.”

“Isn’t that for me to decide?” she asked, tucking her hands between her knees.

“No. Not anymore. I need to do this for me, and I’m asking you to understand. Just like I need you to understand why I didn’t make another move toward you all those years.”

“Because I’d turned you down so many times—”

“No. Don’t get me wrong. That wasn’t a walk in the park.” He smiled faintly. “But I’m used to working for what I want. You could’ve told me no a million times and I never would’ve given up.”

“Then?”

Of all the things he’d had to tell her, this was the hardest of them all. He sucked in a breath and discovered it didn’t alleviate the pressure in his chest, so he rolled out of bed and paced naked to the dresser. He braced his hands on it and searched for a way to tell her that wouldn’t make her hate him.

There wasn’t one.

“Gray.”

“The night Brent attacked you, I provoked him.” When she didn’t reply, he gripped the edges of the dresser and pushed on. “I came home early to go to your party with you. I rented a tux, whole nine yards. He goaded me by trying to make me think the two of you were involved. I knew it was bullshit. I knew it, and he still grabbed me by the balls. And I reacted.”

“What did you do?”

Her quiet question, so full of confusion and hesitation, nearly broke him. For that moment, she was sixteen years old again, almost innocent and yet the exact opposite. And he was the one who’d nearly shattered her with his thoughtless taunts.

“I told Brent you’d never want him like you wanted me.” He turned back, then crawled across the bed and framed her beautiful face in his hands. Even the aches in his body no longer could compete with the open wounds in her eyes. “It was my fault. I caused him to go that far. If I hadn’t said—”

“If you hadn’t told the truth, you mean?”

He fell silent.

“I did want you more than anyone else, and I’d certainly never looked at him that way. But I don’t think he even cared about me. I was a pawn to push around. A weapon in his competition with you. And we all lost out because he didn’t know when to back down and when to fight.”

He sat back on his haunches. “Jazz—”

“You came onto me when I wanted to be adopted more than I wanted anything else. Even you,” she said softly. “When adoption wasn’t an option on the table anymore, that’s when you decided to back off. Every time I looked at another man, you’d growl, but you never did one damn thing to indicate you still wanted me. Until Nick.”

“Until Nick,” he agreed.