Beard Necessities (Winston Brothers, #7)(73)

“What? What don’t I know?” I stepped in front of him. Giving in to the desire to put my hands on him, I gripped his forearms. “Talk to me. Please, just talk to me.”

“Fine. I couldn’t deal with the thought of something happening to you, your father getting his hands on you again. I was going to do whatever it took.” He turned his wrists, sliding his hands up my arms to my shoulders. He held my gaze, staring deeply into my eyes, like this next part was critically important. “But that’s not on you, it’s not your responsibility. I made the decision, for myself, not for you. I did it for myself.”

“That’s some crazy twisted logic, Billy. You did it for me and you’ve spent eighteen years hating me, resenting me because I had no idea.”

He shook his head, like he was disappointed in my interpretation. “No. That’s not what happened.”

“Even if it’s a little true, even if just a little of your resentment stemmed from taking my punishment on yourself, then that’s exactly what happened.”

“This changes nothing. I did what I did. I didn’t do it for you, I did it for myself. And I don’t regret it. It’s what I wanted. Can’t you understand that?”

This was how he’d rationalized his decisions to himself, how he rationalized keeping the truth from me. At least now I had my answer. Billy had never told me the truth because he was afraid. He didn’t trust me to love him without obligation then, and he didn’t trust me now.

Placing my palms against his chest, I grabbed loose fistfuls of his shirt. “This is what I understand: You withhold yourself from me—big, huge parts of yourself—because you don’t trust me to accept them and love you. When we were sneaking around, meeting at that hotel, you never wanted to discuss the past. You never wanted to talk about anything that came before, what happened while I was gone. I thought it was because you didn’t want to hear about Ben. But I see now, you didn’t want me to know about you.”

Billy continued to stare at me from behind his fortress, his jaw tight, silence his sword. That was okay. Maybe he’d hear me, maybe he wouldn’t, but I still had things that needed saying.

“I guess I’m supposed to be a mind reader?” I asked quietly, inspecting his handsome face. “Well, I can’t read your mind. I don’t know what you want or what’s in your heart if you don’t tell me. I’m tired of the secrets, I’m tired of the lies, especially lies for my supposed benefit.”

His jaw worked and I thought I detected a crack in the fortress, a slight crumbling of stone. But maybe it was just me wishing.

“Listen to me. Listen. Do you know how hard it was to stop blaming myself and hating myself for being disloyal to Ben because I thought he’d saved me? Do you have any idea? And now it turns out, he was the one lying to me.”

I let that sink in. I let him marinate in it.

And then I continued, “Did it ever occur to you that keeping this secret was harmful? Did you ever stop thinking about yourself, and what you wanted from me, long enough to notice you’d locked me in limbo? And you had the key all along.”

While I spoke, Billy blinked and flinched, as though my words sliced him. His gaze lost focus.

But I wasn’t finished. “Pretend for a moment that you hadn’t been in love with me, hadn’t wanted anything from me except my happiness. Pretend we’d just been friends. Would you have told me the truth then? If my happiness was all that mattered, what would you have done?”

Realization sharpened behind his eyes, his lips parting, giving me the sense this—what I’d just said—had truly never occurred to him.

“So, you’re right.” I tightened my fingers around the fabric of his shirt. “I don’t owe you a damn thing. That debt has been paid tenfold.”

To his credit, the drawbridge lowered with a crash, revealing a sudden anguish and remorse. Big, huge remorse. So much remorse. It spilled out of his eyes and the ragged breath coming from his parted lips.

“Scarlet,” he whispered, the sound of my name forged in tortured self-recrimination. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you for apologizing.” Taking a half step back, my hands fell from his shirt. “But where do we go from here? I don’t know, I really don’t. But let me be one hundred percent clear: I still love you, and I still want to be with you.”

He winced again, stumbling a step forward, his fingers on my shoulders flexing, and I recognized the telltale signs of shame and guilt, which made me feel guilty. Mentally, I shoved the guilt away, scraping it off and throwing it in the trash. That’s right, no more guilt for me.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m mad as hell,” I continued in gentle tones because I only wanted gentleness between us from now on. “That’s where we are. I’m angry with you and I still love you. And it’s not because of some stupid sense of obligation or any of that foolishness. I’m done with that. I still want you in my life. And yet, I have to wonder, what else are you lying to me about?” I searched his Tuscan glacier eyes for the truth. “What other secrets are you keeping?”





Chapter Seventeen





Billy





“If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing.”

Sir James Barrie, Peter Pan