Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,69

leave them. It wasn’t the missing them or the fracturing-of-the-family thing. It was the fact that I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to take care of myself. I had seven hundred dollars to my name, a phone my parents paid for, an apartment I shared with my brother—I didn’t have my own car, my own space. Even my job? My father got it for me. I was doing IT stuff for his oldest friend. I had nothing that was mine and no skills to take care of myself because my family had done everything for me. Or rather… those people I grew up with had done it all for me. I’ve never been more scared in my life as I filled a duffel with some clothes and walked out of my apartment. Nowhere to go. No idea what I was going to do with myself. I was empty. Empty-headed, empty-hearted… lost in the world.” She squeezed his hand again. “And I am never, ever going through that again. Ever.”

As her eyes met his, she was dead fucking serious. “I love this house,” she continued. “I’d love to visit you in it. But I am going to make sure I don’t rely on anyone else because that is the only way I’m going to make sure I’m not in that position again. I will make it on my own—and listen, I don’t know where this is going between us, but trust me. You don’t want a deadweight around your neck. You want someone who’s a partner, not a problem that needs solving.”

“You are not a problem.” At least… not in the sense she was talking about.

“And I’m going to keep it that way.” Her eyes were dead serious as they met his. “I need to do this. I have to prove to myself I can be strong.”

Reaching up to her face, he caressed her cheek with the back of his knuckles. “Okay. I respect that.”

“Thank you.”

Trez had an impulse to kiss her, but she got to him first. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

They stayed close for a time. And then he felt compelled by her honesty, her openness. Or maybe it was more like guilted by it.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“For what.”

“Being such a head case.”

“You’re not a head case. It’s clear you have… something in your past that goes deep and is very painful. And I hate that for you.” She shrugged. “But you are under no obligation to share it or anything else with me or anybody else. I only want the parts of you that you willingly want to give me. Those are the gifts I want, and I can be very patient with you.”

Trez was so struck by her calm surety, her gentle strength, that he leaned in and kissed her. “You are… amazing.”

And he was so grateful for the space she was giving him. The only problem was… he didn’t think that time was going to ease his reticence. It seemed weird to tell her a story in which she was the heroine, a story of love and loss that she herself had lived—even if, at present, she didn’t seem to consciously recall any of it. Still, she had been there at her death, she had suffered and—

Oh, bullshit, he said to himself.

The real reason he didn’t want to tell her everything was because he wanted what he believed to be true to be reality, and if he laid it all on the table, his female had the ability—as no one else did—to blow it all up. iAm could talk in theory. People around him could worry about him. Reason could play endless matches against hope in his head.

But Selena… this female next to him… held the true detonator.

As a sharp, shooting pain went through his head, sure as if an arrow had penetrated his frontal lobe, he thought about his resolve after Xhex had spoken to him. His defensiveness when he’d fought with iAm. His certainty when he and his female had been having sex last night that it was, in fact, Selena and he reunited, the break that had come with her death resoldered, life not so much renewed as resumed.

Yeah, and then he’d cracked in half. So exactly how well was this shit working for him.

He felt torn in two for reasons he couldn’t bear to look at too closely.

What if iAm was right. And Xhex had been kind rather than accurate that night of