Nash (Marked Men #4)(69)

“I want to believe that so badly, Nash. I can’t explain it to you, but part of me wants so much to see me the way you do, but a bigger, louder part refuses to believe it’s possible.”

I put my hands around her delicate wrists. My fingers overlapped because her wrists were so fragile, and I felt her pulse hammering under her pale skin.

“What do you want, Saint? What do you really want?”

She moved her hands off of my head and let them rest on my shoulders. Her eyes were swirling gray as she fought for control of the emotion whipping in the depths.

“I want your dad to be okay and for you not to have to watch him suffer. I want to be able to enjoy the time we spend together like a normal person and not constantly be waiting for the other shoe to drop. I want to get promoted at work. I want my mom to get over my dad and stop hurting. Mostly I want to make sure that this thing we’re doing doesn’t leave either one of us sad and full of regret.”

I couldn’t fault her honesty, but I also couldn’t give her any kind of guarantee or affirmation that any of those things she wanted were possible. In fact I knew some of them weren’t.

“What do you want from me?” I sounded a little like I was being strangled. I was already stripped to the live nerve center of my emotional threshold for the day. Doing this with her was the last thing I needed or wanted.

She sighed and finally all the shadows and fog in her eyes cleared and left behind the crystalline gray.

“I want you, Nash. I always want you; this is just the only way I know how to do it and feel comfortable.”

“Why are you so certain I’m going to hurt you? That I’m going to f**k up and disappoint you?”

She gave me a lopsided smile and she worked her hands under the collar of my shirt so she could stroke the base of my neck.

“Because it’s bound to happen, but I really want to enjoy what we have before then.”

How did I fight against that? How did I convince her when she seemed so certain that if she let go and trusted the feelings building between us instead of worrying about what might happen or what had happened, we could make the here and now something that lasted forever?

I wanted to keep arguing, to keep pushing her to see that this was more than a fling, more than two people who were sexually compatible. I wanted her to feel, to know I wouldn’t have been able to make it through everything going on with Phil and the shop without her kindness, her gentleness and care. However, she had her hands under my clothes and her mouth settled over mine, and even though I knew she was trying to distract me from the conversation, I decided not to stop her.

If this was the only way she was going to let me connect to her, I would just have to make do with it for now. I was a guy after all … and there were far worse things in life than having a gorgeous girl want you for sex. Plus, she wanted me, had proven that time and time again. I guess I would just have to ultimately decide if what she wanted me for was going to be enough when I felt like I needed to give her everything else I had.

CHAPTER 14

Saint

I was going to screw all of this up. I felt it all the way down to the marrow of my bones.

I had to touch him. Had to try and soothe the way I was cutting into him and making him bleed. There was no hiding the way my hesitation, my resistance, made his eyes go dark and his mouth go hard. Even with his obvious disappointment, he never lashed out, never got nasty, which made everything even more convoluted in my head. I did what I knew would make it all go away for a while, I kissed him, started pulling at his clothes and pressed up against his hard body. He was stiff and unresponsive for a half of a second, but like always when we got together like this, his big frame started to loosen.

Seeing Royal making herself at home on his couch had made every concern, every worry, every insecure part of me want to run away from him and never look back. All those questions of why he would want me, of how long would it take until he found someone without my hang-ups, someone not stuck in the past, barreled through my head like a runaway boulder falling off a cliff. If there hadn’t been real joy, real gratitude glowing out of his violet eyes when he saw it was me at the door, I would have bolted and never spoken to him again. I hated that this thing with him made me feel that way, brought such a ridiculous weakness to the forefront of my mind. It made me feel like I was stuck in time. I just couldn’t handle that, so I blew him off when he tried to explain. I was protecting myself, insulating my heart, but little did I know my words were drawing a line in the sand where he was concerned and his heart very well might be just as fragile as mine.

When he had told me to go, walked to the door like he was really ending it all, my breath had been sucked out of my lungs and my blood had frozen still in my veins. I couldn’t give him everything he wanted, that left me far too vulnerable, but I had to make him see this was just as important to me as it was to him. The only way I could do that without getting stuck on words was with my body. Sure, I wanted him and he knew it, but I don’t think he knew it was so much more than that. I just couldn’t figure out a way to explain it all to him without sounding like a nut job or an uncertain and immature child.

I made a startled noise when he pressed me back fully into the door and tangled his fingers in my hair. His eyes burned down at me in endless rivers of purple and blue.

“This is a conversation we are going to have to finish at some point, Saint.”