Rowdy (Marked Men #5)(44)

As close as we had gotten and as at ease as he seemed around me now, there was one thing that still set him off and still made me get buried under doubt and hesitation—Poppy. We both pretended to ignore the fact that she was still there, a specter hovering in the middle of this thing we were building around us, but I was in over my head now and I couldn’t keep tiptoeing around her or the past she shared with either of us.

“Poppy. She’s married to this awful guy and she never answers any of my calls or texts me back. I’m worried about her because this dude is a total control freak and she doesn’t have anyone in Loveless to look out for her best interests. I don’t think it’s a very happy situation for her.”

He stiffened next to me and made a noncommittal noise in his throat. I saw his jaw go tight and reached up to rub a finger along the tic that started to work in his cheek.

“It’s that bad, Rowdy? I can’t even bring up her name?”

Those baby blues shifted away from my probing gaze and I saw him struggle with himself to get his emotions under control.

“Nothing changes the past, Salem.”

“No, but holding on to something that happened so long ago so tightly that it’s keeping you anchored to the bad moments and keeping you from moving forward into new, good moments isn’t okay either.”

He curled his arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him so that he could kiss me on the temple.

“I think I’m moving forward just fine.”

I sighed and put a hand on his tight stomach muscles. “Not if I can’t talk to you about my sister you aren’t. She’s my family, the only member of my family I really have. I love her, and if I can’t even bring up her name without you turning to stone, then you are still very much back there in that place. I know she hurt you, we both did, but if you can forgive me you have to work your way to that place with her as well.”

He twisted some of the long strands of my hair around his fingers and took a long minute before responding.

“I had a crush on Poppy from the first second I saw her. She was so sweet. She just seemed like everything I had never experienced before. She loved her family. She was settled deep into the church and school. Even when I was that young I knew her roots ran deep.” His tone dropped a little lower and the light from the TV cast weird shadows on his face, making him look almost sinister as the memories swallowed him up.

“She never understood me, never grasped why she was so important to me, and when you left she was my only tie to family, to love and acceptance. I knew I only made things worse by clinging to her, by deciding that all of my happiness was forever going to be tied up in her. It was too much to ask of anyone, let alone a young girl that had never been out of her hometown and out from under her father’s rule.”

He dropped his chin down so that it was sitting on the top of my head. I moved my arm around his middle so that I was hugging him and rested my cheek on his heart.

“Her terrible taste in men, her endless desire to please your father—I take the blame for some of that. I was smothering her and I think she was doing whatever she could to get away from me without flat-out telling me to get lost. Poppy ended things in a really final way but I think I drove her to it. So along with the heartache I have carried around for a long time, I also lug around some pretty heavy guilt. I don’t like to think about it. I like to pretend none of it ever happened.”

“You fell in love with Poppy because you knew she was never going to leave?” It sounded incredible but in my heart I knew it made a lot of sense. Rowdy’s mom had died when he was so young and he was used to being unwanted and bounced around, so it totally followed that my sister’s simply being part of the fabric of Loveless would be appealing. She was a safe bet and not a threat to his fragile heart.

“Partly. She was also pretty and made me feel like I had a purpose—taking care of her.” He chuckled but it didn’t have any humor in it. “She never looked at me as more than a friend or a brother, not once. Most of the time she was encouraging me to do what everyone expected. She wanted me to play football, to be prom king, to date a cheerleader, and she wanted me to keep my mouth shut and let the other men in her life treat her like crap. Something your dad and her boyfriends never failed to do.”

I turned and rubbed the end of my nose into his chest. This wasn’t exactly a pleasant conversation to be having but I think it was long past time that we did.

“What about me? You loved her on first sight because she was stable and planted in the Texas dust, but what about me, Rowdy?”

He chuckled again and this time there was amusement in it.

“To a ten-year-old boy you were the prettiest thing I had ever seen. You were wild, loud, and didn’t seem to be scared of anything. I knew you hated to be home, hated all the rules your parents put on you, but you never let it stop you from having fun and being full of joy. I just wanted to be around you all the time because it was like having the warm rays of the sun touch everything that was so cold inside of me. You were the only person that ever made me feel like it was okay to be a lost kid that was really mad about his mom getting killed. You never once made me feel like I should be groveling in gratitude for the bare minimum the universe saw fit to lay at my feet. You were everything to me and then you were gone and I was lost all over again.”

That made my throat close up and I cuddled even farther into him. I hooked a leg across his thighs and looked up at him from under my eyelashes.