by Stacy Gail
A shaky laugh escaped Angel, and she tucked her pale blonde hair behind her ears. “It’s just… that’s my worst nightmare, I guess. My father felt trapped in his marriage to my mom, and while they’re back together now, it was rough for a long time after he let that particular cat out of the bag. I never want Twist to feel trapped by me. I love him so much that I’d let him go, if that was what he needed to be happy. It would kill me, but I would do it. He’s my whole world.”
“I’m so glad.” Essie again reached for her hand while her sister-in-laws words brought moved tears to her eyes. “Twist deserves to be loved the way you love him, Angel, and you deserve the same. That’s exactly what you have, trust me on this. There is something going on, but it’s a super-crazy good something that you’re going to love forever, so try not to worry about it, okay? The last thing your husband would ever want is for you to feel even a moment of worry or anxiety. He loves you so much that the thought of putting you through anything upsetting would tear him apart.”
It was true, Essie thought later after seeing her sister-in-law off and the clothes Angel had tried on hung before her for one last steaming. Her brother had had a rough life, in part because of her attack, and there had been a time where it seemed as though Twist—and the rest of the family—would never know true happiness again.
But love healed all wounds, especially the kind of love that touched the soul. That was what Angel and Twist had. She was the balm that soothed her brother’s wounds, and that thought eased Essie’s conscience over telling Angel that Twist was working on a big surprise for her. Twist loved his new wife so much that he’d no doubt break out in hives if he knew his actions were causing Angel stress. That was how it was to love someone; the thought of hurting that person, even inadvertently, was too terrible to even think about.
She knew that now.
She hadn’t meant to tell Steele that she loved him, but she wasn’t sorry she did. It was impossible not to love a man who’d gone out of his way to bring her out into the world. She lived life now in all its glory, and she had Steele to thank for that. It had taken a living nightmare that most people would thankfully never experience to shove her into her cocoon of numbness, where nothing of life could ever touch her. It only made sense that a man beyond any fantasy was the one who was strong enough to pull her back out of it.
She was wrapping the cord around the steamer when a knock on the door brought her attention around to it. After a quick check through the peephole, her heart skipped a beat as she swung it open with a breathless smile. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself, sweetness.” Though he looked like he hadn’t slept and his face was shadowed with a sexy scruff, his eyes lit up the moment he saw her. His arms came around her while propelling her back into the cramped apartment, and the moment they did everything clicked into place in her world.
“Tell me you’re done working for the day.” The words were growled into her neck as he kicked the door closed behind him. “After spending a boring-ass night with Havlik, who talks too much, and Echo, who doesn’t talk at all, all I wanna do is take you out for some ramen, then go home so we can fuck like rabbits before sleeping the clock around.”
In a heartbeat, she realigned her thinking. “I just wrapped up Angel’s fitting session, and I can let my brother off the hook for tonight when it comes to making him do his final fitting. I was going to apply the screws to him via our mom in order to get him to cooperate, but torturing Twist can wait until tomorrow.”
“Aren’t you the sweetest thing, sacrificing like that.” He lifted his head from where it was against her neck to kiss her, a slow, deep tangling of tongues that heated her skin so much she began to believe spontaneous combustion could actually happen. When he at last broke the kiss and nuzzled his face with hers, the sound of his disturbed breath told her he felt exactly the same. “You know, if you keep kissing me like that, I don’t mind if your brother never cooperates with you. Hell, I’ll pay him to keep doing whatever it is he’s doing just so I can have you all to myself.”
“Believe it or not, he’s buying a dream house for his much-adored new bride and surprising her with it on her birthday,” she said, smiling against his lips. He recoiled a fraction, no doubt in surprise. “I know, crazy, right? Buying something that important without even consulting Angel… I can’t believe my brother’s guts. Then again, the Santiagos are well-known for going big when it comes to romance. Not to mention Angel’s dad is an architect who knows exactly what his daughter would like, so they’ve drawn up the perfect house for them to raise a family in. Isn’t that sweet? Crazy, but sweet.”
“Yeah. Crazy.” His arms loosened and his hands fell to her hips—not pulling her into him, but rather simply holding her still, as if he didn’t know what to do with her. Slowly her smile faded as she stared up at him, a rivulet of disquiet trickling through her when she couldn’t decipher his expression.
“What?” She touched his cheek, and though she couldn’t visibly detect any movement on his part, some instinct deep inside sensed his withdrawal. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing.” His mouth moved into a smile, but it never reached his eyes as he gently set her away. “You hungry? I know it’s early, but I’m feeling the need to get out of here. What do you say?”
Something was wrong. She was sure of it. But since he was obviously not in the mood to share, she decided to let it slide—for now. “Let me just feed Mooch for the night and we can go.”
“Mooch, huh?” As she headed into the kitchen area, Steele moved to where the clothes she had steamed hung by the window. “Still taking care of that cat?”
“His owner moved out unexpectedly and left Mooch behind.” Reaching for a paper plate, she opened a can of beef liver pâté. The damn cat ate better than she did. “As wonderful as it is to have peace and quiet, I’m still pissed off that that self-centered jerk upstairs abandoned his cat. When you choose to open your life to a pet, you should have the freaking decency to accept full responsibility for taking care of it, you know? But he didn’t, especially when it wasn’t convenient for him, first-class prick that he was, so that’s it. I now have a cat.” Checking the water dish to see if Mooch had enough to last overnight, she plopped the pâté on the paper plate, set it down and watched the cat zero in on it like a food-seeking missile. “Okay, that should do it. Let me just wash my hands and—”
“Wait.”
She turned on the faucet, soaped up her hands and glanced over her shoulder at him. “Wait, what?”
He took a breath that moved his whole chest, and as she reached to turn off the water his eyes burned into her. “I need to know if that’s what you think of me.”
“What I think of you?” Confused and hating that the unnamed disquiet was now a hell of a lot more than a trickle, she dried off her hands as she turned back to him. “What are you talking about?”
“I know you were talking about how that asshole upstairs treated his pet, but I’ve gotta know… if that was your veiled way of talking about how I treat my Pet.”
What in the world… “Of course not. Why would you think that?”
“From the time I set my sights on you,” he said as if he hadn’t heard her, “I’ve made damn sure you were well taken care of, even going so far as to clear out that noise-making asshole upstairs so you could live in peace. I did that, and whatever else that needed to get done, because I care about your happiness, even when it’s not convenient for me, so I’m nothing like that dick.”
Essie stared at him, her jaw unhinged. “What? You made Thor move?”
“That guy was a piece of shit,” he grated, and his eyes were almost black with a dangerously churning emotion she couldn’t put a label on. “I explained to him how much he needed to get himself gone, and his response was to prove how he was the king of assholes. He didn’t give two shits that he was making you and all his other neighbors crazy. Said y’all should’ve felt fucking privileged to hear him play without paying a cover charge. Fucker.”<
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She was so stunned she could barely find her voice. “You went upstairs… and talked him into leaving?”
“I can be persuasive. That’s not the point I’m trying to make here.”
“Did you talk to Thor with your mouth, or with your fists?’
He huffed impatiently. “Over the years I’ve discovered that when you’re dealing with professional-grade assholes like that, the combination of the two can be highly effective.”
“Wow.” She shook her head, dazed and more than a little impressed. “I always wanted to lay the lumber to that jerk, but… holy crap, you actually did it.”
“Don’t tell me life hasn’t been one hell of a lot more enjoyable since he went away.”
“Are you kidding? It’s been heaven.” She smiled and pressed a hand to her heart, so touched he’d done that for her that it was hard to find the words. “Thank you, Steele.”
“That alone should show you that I’m nothing like him. I do care, and I’m not selfish.”
She blinked, then struggled with the first stirrings of anger. “Are we back to that? I never implied you were anything like Thor, so I don’t know why you think I did. If anything, you’re the exact opposite. You’re sweet and loving and thoughtful, and I—” She broke off when he jerked away to look out the window, leaning a fisted hand high up on its window frame. “What? Damn it, Steele, the way you’re acting is starting to freak me out. What the hell is the matter with you?”
“We should’ve had this conversation a while back,” came the cryptic response, freezing her in place. It wasn’t the hint of the South in his tone that brought her to a watchful standstill. It was the darkness that dragged through it that she didn’t like. At all. “I don’t know if it would’ve made a damn bit of difference, but I guess now is as good a time as any.”
“What conversation? Steele, you haven’t made sense since you walked in here. Tell me what’s going on with you.”
“Before I do, I just want you to remember that I’m still me, and you’re still you. Nothing has to change between us. You understand?”
“No.” It was faint, but it was all she could manage. The buildup of dread was like a poisonous gas; it was suffocating the life out of her. “I don’t.”
He took a deep breath and turned to face her fully, as if he felt he needed to tackle whatever this was head-on. “I told you that I was taken in a by a kind couple after my father went to prison. What I didn’t tell you was that this couple, the Toussards, had a daughter. Her name was Apolline. From the moment I saw her, I loved her. I was only twelve years old, but it didn’t matter. I’d found the love of my life.”
The floor tilted under Essie’s feet. Or maybe it just felt that way because his words impacted her so brutally they rocked her back like she’d been punched. “Okay.” She had to clear her throat to make it work. “Why are you telling me this now? That was a lifetime ago.”
“I’m telling you this because you need to know what you’re dealing with when it comes to me. I care too much about you, respect you too much, to ever mislead you.”
Essie stared at him while her pulse pounded in her throat so hard she almost choked. Care. Respect. Those were good things. Wonderful things.
But…
They weren’t love.
“Apolline and I did everything together,” he went on, when all she wanted was for him to shut up and not change her world, her everything. God, why wouldn’t he shut up? “She was my playmate, my best friend, my partner in crime. As we grew older, she became my girlfriend. She was my first dance. My first kiss. My first lover. My wife.”
A ragged gasp ripped her throat raw, but she barely noticed it. The light was vanishing from her world, and with it every ounce of hope she had. “You…Oh my God, you’re married?” This was a nightmare. This had to be a nightmare…
“No, Essie. I’m not married anymore. Apolline filed for divorce after I got wounded.”
She nearly collapsed in a relief that was so huge it took her a few seconds to process what he said. “Wait. She divorced you after you were wounded? That almost sounds like she divorced you because you got wounded.”
“It’s more complicated than that, so don’t judge what you don’t understand,” he warned, and the hard edge in his tone made her freeze in place. “The life I had before I was welcomed into the Toussard home was hell on earth. There are no words to describe how awful it was. They saved me from it. I’d heard the words ‘perfect’ and ‘heaven’ and ‘happiness’ before, and from an academic standpoint I understood what they meant. But I never knew what those words truly were until I lived with the Toussards. I found happiness and heaven there, because I’d found my idea of perfection in Apolline.”
That horrible tilting beneath her feet started again, so much so it made her sick to her stomach. “Nobody’s perfect, Steele.”
“She was,” came the simply reply. To Essie’s ears, it sounded as final as a door slamming irrevocably closed. “She lived in the kind of world that I’d only seen in storybooks—loving parents, laughter at every meal, hugs and kind words. She even lived on a little farm that had a duck pond surrounded by flowers, a tire swing of a huge oak tree… hell, she even had her own fucking pony. She was the idyllic princess, with her silky blonde hair and a smile like sunshine. She never swore. She never had a show of temper. Never drank or smoked, and always had a kind word to say about everyone she met. Ugliness never touched her life, until I came back with half my face blown off and she couldn’t bear to look at me.”
God, God, that selfish bitch. “Don’t tell me she abandoned you?”
His chin jerked up, an abrupt move that wasn’t quite a nod. “Don’t get me wrong—I’ll never forgive that Apolline didn’t stick by me when I needed her the most. But I also know that it broke her, seeing me like that. It broke her.”
“I don’t care what it did to her. You were the injured one, Steele. You were the one who nearly died, then had to go through the endless trauma of losing a part of your identity—your face—and having it pieced back together bit by bit, year after year. Don’t make this about her. I don’t want to hear about what she went through. You were the one who needed a support system to help you find a way to live after everything in your world shattered.”
“Didn’t you hear me when I described her life? It was idyllic, a happy dream that somehow existed in the real world. She’d never known ugliness until I brought it into her life.”
Ugh. “There’s a saying my aunt would tell me whenever I was having a bad day, and believe me, I had one hell of a lot of bad days. She would tell me that the strongest of swords are created in the hottest of fires. She meant that whatever adversity I forced myself to survive made me a stronger person. A better person. The same philosophy can be applied to someone who’s too weak to tolerate the pressure and the heat. A person like that isn’t perfect. Far from it.”
“You don’t know what she went through, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t tell me I don’t know anything about this subject, or that I shouldn’t judge, because there isn’t a woman on this earth who knows this subject like I do.”
“Essie—”
“I know what it’s like to have your face destroyed, Steele, just as I know how important it is to have the people you love and trust to fucking be there for you. They’re the ones who help you hold onto a life that you don’t want to live anymore.” Then she sucked in a shaking breath when she realized she’d dropped an F-bomb. No doubt the perfect Apolline would never have done that. “But what I know about that subject isn’t the point. The bottom line of this is simple—I never would have abandoned you. I would have been incapable of that. I love you, and when you love someone, you take care to never hurt them. What they need supersedes everything, and what you might want or feel… none of that matters. All that matters is the person you love.”
“So you did say it.” His voice was so low she almost didn’t hear him, his eyes surprisingly dark a
s he stared at her. In that moment she hated those beautiful eyes, because they didn’t give her the reassurance she needed. “I thought maybe I hadn’t heard you right or that it was just the heat of the moment.”
“No.” It took all of her courage to stand by her words, and her heart nearly beat her to death because of it. But this was important, the most important thing in her life, and she wasn’t going to back down now. “I do love you, Steele. Considering everything we’ve been through, that can’t come as a surprise to you.”
“Should’ve had this conversation earlier,” he said again, and because that wasn’t the response that anyone would hope for after declaring their love, it was like a knife in the heart. “Four years ago I was stretched out on a hospital bed, scared out of my mind not knowing what my future would be like with half of my face fucked up. I was in so much pain the drugs they gave me could barely even touch it. I was counting on the one source of comfort left to me to tell me that my life hadn’t turned into complete shit—Apolline. Instead, all she did was explain she had to leave because I was too hideous for her to look at. A day later she sent her parents in to tell me that as much as it hurt her to do it, she was filing for divorce. And while they claimed to care about me, they said it’d be best not to contact their daughter ever again.”
“That bitch.” She couldn’t stop the words, because she’d been there. She’d lived that exact same moment, terrified no one would be able to love her when she’d been so broken and helpless. “God, that selfish bitch.”
“She didn’t just gut me, Essie. She tore my heart out and crushed it into nothing. It’s gone. I’ve been through the same intensive recovery therapy you’ve been through over the years, but it can’t fix what she killed in me. Whether the shrinks label it PTSD or whatever, I felt a part of me die that day. I fucking felt it, do you understand? In that moment—the worst moment of my life—I felt it die, and I died with it. It’s gone.”