her knees wide in the same move. Something fell to the floor and shattered, but he didn't give a shit. "You want to fuck, we'll fuck."
A hint of uncertainty moved over her face. "Nate - "
He closed his hand over the bare skin of her upper thigh. "You're backing off? Don't want me now that you're faced with the reality?"
Her lower lip quivered. "Not like this," she whispered. "Why are you being so mean?"
The protective male core of him couldn't bear to see her looking so emotionally bruised, but they had to have this out. He couldn't handle being pushed the way she'd been pushing him since her return from New York. "I'm trying to give you something - I'm trying to love you the only way I know how, and you're rejecting it because you're hot for sex?" That hurt him. Her freedom was the biggest gift he could give her.
Some days, the cost it demanded threatened to drive him to murder.
"No, Nathan, no." She cupped his face in her hands. "I just need you - all of you - so much that I'm going crazy. I need your laugh. I need your company. I need you to sleep beside me and I need you to wake when I wake. I need you with everything in me."
"Then stop with the sex talk. It's not you."
Her hands dropped to his shoulders. "It's not me?" A soft question.
"No. You're warm and practical and loyal. You don't go around flaunting yourself like a - " He caught himself before he said something unforgivable.
"Why don't I finish it for you - like a bitch in heat - that's what you were going to say, wasn't it?"
Happiness Chapter 8
"DAMN IT, TAMMY, don't look like that." He was the one who cupped her face this time - her spine was straight, but she couldn't hide the hurt in her eyes.
"All this, the way you've been talking and dressing, it's not anything normal for you and you know it."
She looked at him through her lashes. "Yeah. Don't know what I was thinking."
His beast didn't like the flatness in her tone. Reacting instinctively, he bent until their foreheads touched. "Come on, where's my sweet Tammy?" He missed the woman who had become his closest friend over the years, the one with whom he could totally lower his guard. It was something he hadn't been able to do since the day she'd started pushing at him. "Tamsyn?"
"I'm fine and I'm also late." She gave him a shaky smile, then pressed her hands gently against his chest. "Some of the kids will be here soon to finish up their ornaments. I'd better get dressed. I'll talk to you later, okay?"
"You sure you're all right, baby?" His leopard was pacing inside his skull, growling that something was wrong.
"Just a headache. Lack of sleep, you know." She shrugged, making the former point of contention a joke. When her lips curved upward in a deeper smile, the leopard relaxed.
"Yeah, I do." Laughing, he helped her down from the counter, then lifted her over the mess of the broken jam jar on the floor. "Go get changed. I'll clean this up and head out to continue my watch."
"Here." She reached out, picked up a muffin from a tin, and gave it to him. "I made them for the kids."
He bit into it. "Good thing I got here first."
TAMSYN left the room to the sound of Nate's chuckle. The knives of pain inside her stabbed with brutal force, but she kept her composure until she heard him leave the house. Then she sat down on her bed and cried. The tears weren't of frustration or simple hurt. They were the shattered cries of a broken heart.
Juanita had been wrong. The mating heat might have forced Nate into wanting her, but he didn't actually see her as a sexual, desirable woman. He saw her as comfortable...practical. Warm, loyal Tamsyn. If the bond hadn't thrown them together, he'd probably never have looked at her twice, not as a man looks at a woman.
She might have lain there for hours, but she couldn't bear to disappoint the kids. So she got up and dressed. What she saw in the mirror simply reinforced her earlier conclusions. Dressed in a pair of old jeans and a thick white sweater, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail, she looked young and... ordinary.
She was no temptress. She was safe and sensible, the one that juveniles came to for help without