in the corner while there was screaming going on around her.
Of when she would retreat deep inside herself and force that feeling because she hadn’t wanted to be where she was.
She had even learned to do it when her father had turned his rage on her.
To just go to another place and detach.
This moment was oddly reminiscent of that and she didn’t like it at all.
It wasn’t long before the door to the bar swung open, and in walked Ryder.
She was getting really tired of this.
Really tired of him deciding that he was going to go ahead and be shocking when that was supposed to be her job.
He was supposed to be predictable and easy. He was supposed to be safe. But nothing that he was doing right now was safe at all. And she didn’t know what to make of it. Not even a little bit, not even at all.
She started to back away from the door, but his eyes caught hers and managed to glue her in place to the floor.
And then the sensation inside her flipped, and it was like a whole other different kind of being alone. This was an isolation. It was as if the bar around her was falling away piece by piece. As if it were transforming into something else entirely. All of the insignificant bits were crumbling and dropping out of the sky like so many fallen stars, scattered around the floor at their feet. And it left her. It left Ryder. And this growing intensity between them that was thick and black like a night sky.
“You don’t want them,” he said.
And the unspoken words there were that she wanted him.
And she didn’t know what to do with that. Didn’t know what to make of it.
Didn’t know what to make of this intense stranger who was in the place of the man she had called her best friend for so many years.
Except, was he a stranger? Or was this just the guardian unleashed? What happened to the man when he was pushed? And she’d pushed him. On purpose. Maybe this was her consequence. That he was here now. The warrior that she had always known existed beneath that protective exterior.
He had never even tried to rearrange the boundaries between them before. But he had always been capable of it, and she saw that now.
That everything he had ever done all these years had been him being controlling. Had been him protecting her. And suddenly, he wasn’t protecting her from him.
Suddenly, he was everything that she had sensed he might be in all of its terrifying glory.
The kind of man that she had avoided all this time. She had favored those concave chests and smooth faces he had accused her of liking earlier.
Men who didn’t just assume that she might want a certain kind of kiss, but who couldn’t seem to figure out which one she did want even when she told them outright.
Almost as if Ryder knew something that she didn’t.
None of this is about that.
She had to wonder if her body was doing some kind of weird female hormone thing.
And maybe that was true. Maybe it was more of a weird hormone thing. Suddenly, her body had identified that he would make a spectacular protector for a baby.
And why not? He had been the protector for her for all this time; of course he would make a great father.
Biologically.
But he was demanding all of these other things, and she didn’t know how you were supposed to compromise with a brick wall.
They couldn’t bend; you could only break them down.
And she had a feeling that she could grab hold of this one white-knuckled and still not come out the winner. Only come away with bleeding hands and destroyed fingernails, and he would remain as he had always been.
She waited. She waited for him to do something to make her comfortable. Waited for him to do something to defuse all of this between them. Because surely at some point he would crack a smile and revert back to being her friend.
Wind back the clock so that he was the man she had known for the past seventeen years, and not the stranger who had pulled her into his arms and scalded her with his heat. But he didn’t. Instead, all of that intensity only seemed to grow as he moved closer. And she didn’t have the heart to back away.
“Don’t do it,” he said, his voice rough. “I couldn’t stand it.”