looked so terrible that day,” I murmured more to myself than to him, finally knowing why.
“Thank you,” he said, throwing me a glance.
“You know what I mean.” I nudged him with my shoulder.
He gave my hand an affectionate squeeze and continued. “After that, I did my best to keep you at a distance. It was just too hard. I was waiting for… I don’t even know what. For my feelings to go away, maybe. For something to just make sense again.” He paused, giving me a sneaky grin, “Though I will say, if I’d have known how things were going to work out, I’d have touched you that first day and saved myself some sleepless nights.”
“Last night wasn’t so bad.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them, and I immediately looked away, biting my tongue.
He sat up, ending any hope I had of him having missed the comment. “How did you know that?” Before I could think up an excuse, he figured it out. “That was you? How did you do that?” he asked, turning to face me.
“I connected with you,” I admitted, seeing there would be no way around it. “When I’d done it with Mr Anderson in training that afternoon, he’d said it was comforting, so I thought I’d see if I could help.”
“But didn’t Min replace the Block after your session?”
“She did, so I took the whole thing off.”
“Becca! You shouldn’t have done that, it’s dangerous!”
“But, you were upset.”
The anger in his eyes softened, and then melted into something that made my skin warm and my stomach tight.
He leaned toward me with embers burning behind his gray eyes. “Well,” he said, his lips just barely brushing mine as he spoke, “I promise you I will sleep very, very well tonight.”
Just before he moved in – and I lost my focus completely – I leaned away. “Hold on now, you’re not off the hook yet.” I pressed my finger to his lips, pushing him back a bit. “I get why you didn’t tell me after the test, and I can even see why you wouldn’t have told me in the beginning, but that still doesn’t explain why you didn’t bring it up at any point in between. You had a good two weeks at your disposal, why didn’t you just tell me?”
He looked away again, his ears turning red. “I…” He paused, clearing his throat and scratching the back of his neck. “I didn’t want to tell you until…”
“What?”
He took a breath and looked up sheepishly. “I wanted you to love me.” He held my eyes for a second then looked back down, his ears on fire. “But on your own, because you wanted to, not because you felt like you had to.”
“You know I’m not the type to be pressured into anything.”
“You mean to tell me,” he eyed me skeptically, “that if I had told you that I was, not only hopelessly in love, but also irreversibly bound to you for the rest of my life, that you wouldn’t have felt the slightest bit obligated to at least try to be with me? Then felt guilty if you couldn’t make it work?”
“Maybe a little,” I allowed.
“See? That’s not what I wanted. I wanted you to be with me because it’s what you wanted, and I thought maybe if we spent time together…” He cleared his throat again. “Anyway, I couldn’t wait any longer, so I’d planned to tell you the night after the test, and hope for the best.”
“Alex,” I said, leaning over and forcing him to look at me, “I did love you. I may not have realized it at first, but I knew that before–”
“No,” he said, holding a hand up to stop me. “It’s OK, really.”
“I’m serious,” I insisted, not about to let him think that I was only trying to tell him what he wanted to hear.
“I know it may seem that way now, but really, it’s all right.” He brought his hand up, resting it on the side of my neck, grazing his thumb across my cheek. “What we’ve ended up with is more than I’d ever even imagined, that’s all that matters.”
As opposed to arguing with him, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the woven cross, holding it up for him to see. “Remember this?” I asked, though the look on his face told me he did.
“You kept that?” he breathed.
“I kept it, and it has been either in my pocket or on my