He lowered his head. “I would have. I would have, Iris. And I didn’t get to. That is failure that I cannot get out from underneath. To have loved someone so much... You know, people say that. That you’d run into a burning building for someone. I would have and I was too late. If I could’ve saved her... If I could’ve saved Mel...”
A sob shook Iris’s frame. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” She said it over and over again, and her jagged sobs covered up any emotion of his own. And he was damn grateful. To share his feelings and have some privacy in them as well.
Then he gathered Iris close, and laid them both down on the bed. And he closed his eyes, clinging to her. Committing to memory her softness. Her face. Making sure that as sleep began to drag him back down, it was Iris that he saw in his mind.
He wanted her, not nightmares. Her, and not memories that brought him straight down into hell.
He was only sorry that in sharing with her, he had certainly given her a few of his nightmares as her own.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WHEN IRIS WOKE the next morning, she was drained, both physically and emotionally. Griffin had turned to her two more times in the night. And she had opened herself to him willingly.
This morning, she felt tangled in him. Because of what they had done with their bodies. Because of the things he had told her.
She had known that he was a man in pain, but she had no idea. Not really. He’d lost everything.
Everything.
The two people he loved most in the world, his sense of himself as a man. Any sense of control that he had in the whole world. And she could relate to it. To pieces of it. But it hadn’t been her job to protect her parents, and as much as she had grieved them, she hadn’t suffered the kind of regret that she knew he did. The fear that he had failed them so profoundly. She knew that he carried that in a deep and real way.
But she didn’t know where that left them. And she didn’t know if it was even fair to try and figure out where she fit in the equation.
Of all the things to have entangled herself in.
Pansy had talked about having a fling.
It had been pretty obvious since she’d met him that he was a man grappling with something heavy, something intense. And she’d told herself before she ever set out to seduce him that there was no way she could get too emotionally involved.
But now she felt...even more convinced of that.
She could help him. She’d been through grief. It might not be the same as his, but she knew what it was like. To experience loss. To experience the way people treated you as a result of that loss.
But she wanted a new life. And this was too perilously close to what she was trying to escape.
It would be fine. She just had to...not fall for him. If she fell in love with him she would want him to love her. And he loved his wife.
Her stomach went tight.
A lifetime of trying to live up to someone else. Of being second. Trying to earn first place...
She just couldn’t.
She extricated herself from his hold, slipped her clothes back on and walked herself over to the outhouse. And on the walk back, tried to make some decisions.
Mostly, she thought she might need a little bit of distance. Because she was overwhelmed. Not just with his revelations, but with the one she was having about herself.
And she didn’t quite know how to fit all those pieces together.
Because she wanted to... She wanted to be there for him, but she needed to figure out how to be there for herself too. Because aside from all of the sharp and painful things she had learned about him last night, she’d had sex for the first time.
She stopped right there, in the middle of the woods, feeling awed by that realization.
She was finally not a thirty-one-year-old virgin.
That seemed revelatory. More than a little bit incredible. But somehow, she had managed to attach herself to the most complicated man in the general area. Maybe Rose was right. Maybe she would have been better off with khakis. Khakis and water filtration, and no deep, emotional scarring that tested her own.
Maybe that was why some people opted for easy partners.
He’s not your partner. Settle down. He’s a