This Fearless Girl (St. Clary's University #2) - E. M. Moore Page 0,79

body. “I’m sorry I punched Wyatt, okay? It was a reaction.”

“Sounds like you should apologize to him, not me.”

I try to flip back over on my side, but Stone stops me. “You’re pulling away from me. I can feel it.”

I close my eyes, pictures playing on my lids of what I was dreaming about before I was awakened. Cole’s words about Stone seep into me, highlighting the fact that he’s chosen to play this game with his father instead of choosing me.

They’re just dreams, though. The reality is that Stone is doing what he can. But that doesn’t mean I can’t hate the situation. That doesn’t mean I can’t worry about how this will play out.

“It sucks to see that stuff. That’s all.”

Stone pins my arms to the bed, hovering over me. “I’ve wanted you since I was a boy. I may not have understood what it meant, but I wanted to protect you. Every time I saw you, I was drawn to your sad face. Then that sadness turned into defiance and hatred, loneliness simmering underneath it all. Can’t you see that all I’ve been trying to do is give you everything you never had? The clothes, the shoes, the hiking gear.... For as much as you hated me for having everything, I hated myself. I hated a world where a girl like you could grow up and not have anything.

“My father used to laugh about it; about how much of a tomboy you were, about how ‘crazy, old Wilder’ was bringing up a single-minded soldier who’d never amount to anything and die a complete failure. I hated him for that,” he seethes. “I hated that all he saw was something to laugh at instead of the bigger problem underneath it all. You were a shell of a person, Dakota.”

His words tear through me, but it’s not just them, it’s the emotion behind them. His fury slices through the thick skin I had to grow at a young age. The snide comments, the teachers who gave up on me after trying again and again, notes home to my father about my ragged appearance that went unanswered. When I was in second grade, a teacher actually bought me new clothes.

My father never even noticed.

“And I still see it in you,” he continues, his gray-blue eyes pleading with me. “You’re so, so strong, but there are moments when you just take what you get, and you, Dakota Wilder, should never take just what you can get. It’s not good enough for you. You deserve everything.”

Tears sting my eyes. It feels like he just dropped a bomb, and I’m trying to pick up the remnants of what I truly feel afterward. I swallow, putting my thoughts together. “I understand you guys keep saying this to me, but there’s nothing I can do about the past. Nothing. And I think I turned out okay despite being poor.”

“It wasn’t just not having money,” Stone growls in my face. “He treated you like shit. Actually, he didn’t treat you like shit. He didn’t care enough to treat you like anything, and that’s so much worse.”

A tear slips down the corner of my eye, and Stone lowers himself to kiss it away. “I want you to fight for that little girl who couldn’t do it for herself, who didn’t know any better. I want you to demand more all the time, not only when shit gets really bad. Like you did with Meghan yesterday. Like you should’ve done with Cole. Like you should do with me,” he adds, lashes fanning over his cheeks as his body crumbles.

His straining erection presses into me, and I suck in a breath. “Stone.”

“One day,” he says, voice lilting as if he’s telling me a story, “we’re going to have little treasure hunting babies. We’ll hyphenate our last names, to join our two families.” He slips a hand over my tummy to drive his point home. “We’ll bring them up the complete opposite of how we were raised. They’ll be loved and cherished. They won’t ever go without, but we’ll teach them to care, too.” He inches my shirt up, dragging kisses over my stomach to punctuate his fairytale.

I’m not going to lie, baby talk scares the shit out of me...and ignites my core until it’s a raging inferno. “You want a life with me?”

“It’s what I’ve always wanted,” he whispers into the night.

I swallow the apprehension creeping up my throat. It’s not Stone I’m worried about. It’s everything else. Like