his finger found them, rubbing softly, tugging at the bottom one ever so gently, and suddenly, I didn’t feel so tired after all. I nipped at his finger, and his laughter and smiles disappeared along with his hand.
A small groan escaped his lips. “God, I want you.”
“You don’t need to want, Dawson. I’m here. I’ve always been here. I’ve always been yours.”
He closed his eyes.
“I can’t have you, Vi. I can’t keep you.”
“I’m sure I can find holes in whatever logic is making you think that.”
“The reasons have always been stacked up against us, haven’t they?” he asked, opening his eyes to meet mine again. “But now there is so much more standing there. Regardless of what Jada’s father said to her, we will both be looking over our shoulders for a long time. If not forever. I’m good at ruining people’s lives. I have a knack for it. I won’t have yours on my conscience too.”
“You know what your problem is?” I asked, sitting up and taking off the scrub top the nurse had lent me.
Dawson’s eyes traveled over my skin, landing on the paste cups holding my breasts in place. He groaned again, closing his eyes and flinging his arm across them.
“At the moment, my problem is multi-faceted,” he said.
I removed the bottoms of the scrubs and then returned to the bed, straddling him. His hands went to my waist, as if he was going to toss me off, but then stilled as our skin touched, igniting the flame that was never completely turned off between us.
“You have this inflated image of your self-importance,” I told him.
He snorted. “What?”
“Whose life do you think you ruined?” I demanded.
“Carlos’s, to start with,” he said.
“Carlos?” I asked, frowning at him. “From Clover Lake?” I remembered him talking about his friend who’d been in the boating accident that had caused Dawson to leave his hometown in California, but I wasn’t sure why that meant he’d destroyed the man’s life.
“How did you ruin his life?” I asked.
“Well, he no longer has a right arm.”
I stared at him. Dawson had never disclosed this piece of information to me, even when we’d chatted for hours about why he was in New London that first summer. “He lost it in the boat accident?”
“Yeah. I challenged him to the race that night when we’d been drinking. If I hadn’t, he wouldn’t have crashed. He wouldn’t have almost died.”
Thoughts of our crash flooded me. Another accident. Another person he’d been afraid he’d lost because of something he’d asked them to do. I was surprised he was even able to function with the guilt he must have carried around with him.
“He could have said no. It’s on him. And you didn’t crash, right? He did.”
“But I knew neither of us should have been at the helm. Just like your father knew he shouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel of the car.”
“By your logic, then I guess I ruined your life by being behind the wheel of a car I shouldn’t have been behind? I knew I could barely drive, yet I did it anyway. And worse, I let you take the blame for it.”
“You wouldn’t have driven at all if I hadn’t asked you to come and get me when I knew you wouldn’t tell me no. Just like I asked Jada to turn on her dad,” he said.
“Your ego is going to be the death of you,” I said. I put my hands on either side of his head and shifted my hips ever so slightly, rubbing up against the erection he had pressed up against the zipper of his tuxedo pants. “We aren’t spineless, infatuated wimps, caving to your demands.”
“Vi,” he said, a warning and a beg all wrapped into one.
“We all have free will. You didn’t put us under a spell. For example, right now, my free will is telling me that instead of letting you retreat into a pool of self-pity and guilt, I should force you out of it by any means necessary.”
I bent my head and kissed the soft spot at his neck visible over the button of his dress shirt. The bow tie had long been discarded with the jacket. The white shirt was soft and silky but needed to be removed so I wouldn’t think of Jada and her blood and the nightmare that had existed for a few minutes in the safe room.
I tugged at the shirt fiercely, and it opened easier than I’d expected, buttons flying. I looked down