The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(39)

“You’re worried about him.”

“What if this is as far as he can get?” he asks quietly. Bran’s outside, well beyond hearing range, but it’s still not something to share with everyone in the living room. “He made such a big step, and now he’s just stuck there.”

“You realize that’s not inherently a bad thing, right?” I ask carefully. “If this is as far as he goes, that’s okay, as long as I understand that.”

“And do you?”

“His issues aren’t the only things keeping us where we are, Ian.”

He actually looks surprised at that. I know I’ve never told him about it, but I really thought Bran or Xio would have.

“I was engaged for a while. Before I came to Quantico. I was bullied into it, didn’t know how to get myself out of it.”

“What happened?”

“I got myself out of it.” I smile, but it’s tighter than I’d like. “On what was supposed to be my wedding day, Bran and Mercedes took me to a bar and spent the entire day pouring drinks into me. That was only a couple of weeks before he got shot in the leg.”

“And you two started dating.”

“After we clarified some of the things he’d said while on painkillers.”

“Hell of an origin story.”

“I was terrified. I’d come to like him a great deal, in a completely different way than I liked Mercedes, and what if everything went wrong? What would happen to the team, to my standing and reputation in the Bureau? What if . . .” I swallow hard. “What if I lost myself again?”

Ian watches me gravely, and one of his callused hands comes to rest over mine.

“In some ways, saying yes to him was even harder than saying no to my ex,” I admit for what may be the first time. “Mainly because I liked Bran a hell of a lot more, even then. It wasn’t a marriage proposal; he wasn’t asking me to move in with him. He was just asking me on a date. But it was Bran, and it felt like even more of me was at risk.”

“You said yes.”

“I said yes, and despite some lingering fears, I haven’t regretted it. Some of those fears are still there, though. He’s not the only reason we stay as we are, Ian. He bought a house.”

He nods slowly. “I’d wondered. I thought there’d be an announcement.”

“His bedroom and his living room look exactly the same as they did at his apartment, right down to the framed black-and-white photos Priya took of Special Agent Ken’s worldwide adventures. He’s shown those to you, surely, the Ken doll in the FBI jacket? The ones he keeps over the television? He hasn’t put anything up in the hallways or other rooms, hasn’t even furnished any other rooms, much less decorated. I don’t think he can.”

“Why not?”

“Because before he can do anything to a room, he has to know what it’s going to be. Guest room? Office? Man cave?”

Ian snorts.

“He can’t furnish The House because he doesn’t know what its future is. Is it his place? Could it be ours? But he’s so determined not to push me into something I may not be ready for that The House is just frozen in place. He’s the reason he can’t call it home; I’m the reason he can’t make it one.”

“Your ex . . . you say he bullied you into the engagement?”

“Not just him. Our mothers too.”

“But he bullied you.”

“Not . . . not like that. Cliff never hit me. Never threatened to. When he was angry, he’d either ignore me or lecture me like a child.”

There’s a thought, an impression of some sort, lurking behind his eyes. He doesn’t share it, though.

“Do you know why Brandon was so resistant to the idea of dating anyone?” he asks suddenly.

I shake my head. We’ve talked about the fact of it, never the facts behind it. Even then it was mostly from the stance of “I’ve never been in a relationship before, so I’m going to screw things up sometimes and badly,” which was a bizarre conversation for the two of us to flounder through when he was still intermittently on Vicodin.

“He couldn’t protect Faith.”

I blink at him, open my mouth to speak, and realize I have no idea what to say. “That . . .”

“Wasn’t his fault,” he agrees. “There is not a thing in the world he should have done differently that day. But it made him more protective of Faith’s friends. He got offered a full ride to the University of Miami, and he wasn’t going to accept it because it meant being too far away to protect Lissi, Stanzi, and Amanda. We had to talk him into it.”

“He didn’t date because that was someone else he might fail to protect.”

“First time I saw a picture of you, I nearly lost my mind. What the hell was he thinking? To have shaped so much of his life around his missing sister, and the first time he dates someone, you look enough like Faith to need a minute and a third and fourth look. Thought I’d need to dig back into the psychology books. Took him a while to convince me that he liked you in spite of your looks, not because of them.”

Closing my eyes, I slump against the table and laugh helplessly.

“Er . . .”

“Oh, Ian. If I didn’t understand the context of that statement, my perfectly healthy sense of vanity would be mortally offended.”