out ugliness I couldn’t take back. “So what if I didn’t pick out my makeup. What did you do? What did you ever do besides blame me?”
Calm, still, his amber-green eyes holding me hostage, he reduced me to my own lies. “You were always submissive, Sanaa. I did not make you that way.” Dismissing me, he turned toward the door.
The girl who first laid eyes on the beautiful golden boy next door, the boy who made her heart come alive and sing at first sight, she frantically pushed her way to the surface and bled out desperation. “I wasn’t alive until I met you.”
Ever so slightly, he paused, but then he took another step.
The pendulum that was my emotions around him swung the complete arc away from anger and whipped past desperate as it hurdled toward panic. “Wait. Please.”
His next step didn’t come.
Frantic to keep him, I dropped back to my knees because it was the only way I knew how to show him what I wanted. “I was living, but I wasn’t alive.” Memories of another life dripped pain on my heart. “I didn’t use my voice for song. I didn’t know hope. I didn’t know life could be full of colors that made my heart sing.” Colors of his rich, dark hair and dusty lips and sun-kissed shoulders. Shades of turquoise ocean days and navy, star-dotted nights. Being with him had made everything brighter, and he’d given me the courage to sing arousing, seductive songs about a kind of love most people only dreamt of. But now I was an empty shell who performed on stage like I knew what I sang of. With both nothing and everything to lose if he walked out that door like this, I begged. “Please.” Please. “Give me my heart back.”
His broad shoulders tensed, but every other muscle in his military-hardened body froze.
Fearing what I would see in his eyes if he turned around, terrified I wouldn’t get the chance, I fueled the incineration of my demise. “Make me your Songbird.”
He turned.
As if he knew I was on my knees, his hard, cold gaze was already angled down to meet me. “My Songbird,” he stated.
“Yes,” I dared to answer.
“Mine,” he ground out, hardness creasing little lines by his eyes and bringing his eyebrows down low.
Terrified, determined, I didn’t drop my gaze. I waited. I waited for him to decide exactly what our future would be, because he was right, I was submissive. And with him, that had always felt safe. But once I fell into the real world and hit the impossible, dizzying sphere of fame where my feet never touched the ground and I didn’t have a single guiding hand, but a thousand every second of every day, nothing had felt safe.
So I waited.
I waited for the one man who truly knew me.
I waited with strained vocal cords and crushing anticipation while he held my heart in his impossibly hardened countenance.
But then my Ronan, the boy who was a man, the only calming influence in my life, he robbed me of any hope of refuge. “What exactly do you want from me?”
I only thing I’d ever wanted. “Just you.”
He started to turn.
“I want attention and safety and control,” I stupidly blurted. “I want emotion and feelings and dominance and protectiveness.” I wanted everything.
“You have my brother for that.” Controlled and smooth, his voice suddenly like thick caramel, the blow hit harder than if he’d yelled at me.
But then I recognized it for what it was. Jealousy. Deep seated and significant in ways I was only beginning to fully understand after his brother’s admission.
Tempering my voice, I tried to alleviate fears I was responsible for. “Your brother never brought me joy. Your brother never owned my smiles.” I briefly wondered how big of a mistake I was making with my next words, but I said them anyway. “Your brother never felt like you.”
“Yet you still mistook him for me.”
I knew he wanted real answers. We had never discussed this. Not rationally. Me throwing desperate apologies at him wasn’t an explanation. I’d always wanted the chance to explain. I’d cried for it. But now that I had the stage, my reasons a decade ago were trivial.
All but one.
“I feared if I didn’t give myself to you before you left, you wouldn’t come home to me.” And I feared if I hadn’t signed that contract, and if he hadn’t come home, I would’ve been left with nothing. I didn’t want to ever be in