Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,121

challenging me. I’ve had enough, Adam. I wanted some orgasms, that’s it.”

“You want me,” he said, his voice rough. “You could have had an orgasm with Mark.”

She laughed. A short, huffed-out sound. “That’s up for debate. And, in fact, I didn’t sleep with him because that is so up for debate.”

“You want me. Admit it. Not anyone else.”

The words hooked onto something in her chest and tugged hard. Made her feel wounded and fragile.

“I had a marriage. I had a whole twenty years of beautiful, wonderful, hard commitment. I don’t want it again. I don’t have it in me to care for another man, not like that. That is the last thing that I want. On this earth. Don’t tell me that I have feelings for you. You don’t know me. You don’t know what’s in my heart. I loved him. And that’s it.”

He hauled her into his arms, and she wanted him. Immediately. Even while she was angry. So damned angry.

“You need me,” he growled.

“No,” she whispered.

The word was fractured, weak and fragile, because what he’d said was the most terrifying thing anyone had ever said to her.

Need.

She couldn’t afford to need anyone.

She knew what happened with people. They left. They died.

She had grown up never needing a father because she didn’t have one. She hadn’t needed Jacob because she’d had to learn not to. She thought that she did. Oh, at first in their relationship she thought that she did. But as the years progressed and it became clear she was going to lose him, she had to learn how to make it so that he needed her, but she didn’t need him to survive. Because when she lost him it was bad enough, but if he’d been a requirement for her survival where would that have left her? All the days when he couldn’t be with her. All the days when she had to be strong for him... If she needed him, everything would’ve collapsed.

She couldn’t need. It was simply impossible.

Love was too heavy. It was too heavy, and the kind of need that he was talking about, the kind of feelings he brought out in her... They only led to one place.

You were in love with me then.

No. She rejected that.

“No,” she said again, finding her strength. “I don’t need you. I don’t need. Least of all you. You don’t matter to me. You know what matters? My family. And you’re not part of my family. You couldn’t even handle your own, why would I trust you to handle me and mine?”

He drew back like she’d struck him, and she might have felt guilty if she wasn’t so terrified. Of him. Of herself.

“Low blow, Rachel. Really low.”

“You’re the one that went and changed the rules on me, Adam. You had a woman offering you no-strings sex, and what do you do?”

“I was in love with you before this started,” he said. “What hope did I have once we were together like this? Once I’d kissed you and touched you...”

Her stomach cramped up. “Don’t. We’re not teenagers. We don’t... We don’t need to do this, ridiculous, intense, love thing just because we had sex. We are adults. We’ve both been in love.”

“Yeah. We have. So we know how to recognize it when it comes up, don’t we?”

And that was the thing that scared her the most. That she did understand what love looks like. That she understood what it looked like at two weeks, two years, twenty years. That she knew what a lifetime looked like, because she’d had a lifetime with a man. His whole damned life. Her whole life. She already knew what it meant.

And she was tired.

Tired and scared. And the guilt. So much guilt...

“I have to go home. I’m not going to see you again.”

“Rachel...”

“I have to grieve! I have to... My daughter graduated from high school and she’s going away to college. My husband is dead. I am a mess. I can’t begin to figure out how to clean it up, and God knows I can’t do it with you.”

“Why not?”

The question was so simple. Asked so flatly. As if it was the easiest thing in the world to just bring him into her life while she was dealing with all of that. As if he didn’t have to compartmentalize and do things in a certain order. And wait a certain amount of time and...

“I can’t talk to you if you even have to ask that question. There’s no answer that I