With Everything I Am (The Three #2)(141)

She was talking about her parents and he wasn’t surprised her manner was listless. It was a defense mechanism, like her eyes going blank before getting the injection.

Missing her parents had to be worse, even than that f**king injection.

He slid a hand in her hair and pressed her cheek to his chest saying, “Honey.”

“You should know, this happens a lot,” she told his chest matter-of-factly.

“That’s okay.”

“If I have trouble sleeping, I’ll find another room so I won’t disturb you.”

His fingers gripped her head and he said, “That’s not okay.”

“I like this room but really I don’t mind.”

He pulled her head away from his chest and maneuvered it so they were face-to-face before he growled, “I do mind.”

He didn’t know what he minded more, the thought that she would move somewhere else to sleep or the thought that she didn’t mind not sleeping with him.

Something was f**king wrong and it was more than just thoughts of her dead parents. She liked to talk and she couldn’t sleep and he’d never f**king get to sleep after what Lucien told him and that goddamned dream.

So they were going to talk.

“I need you to explain something to me,” he announced and her eyes slightly narrowed in confusion.

“Callum, it’s the middle of the night.”

“You’re awake. I’m awake. We’re talking,” he told her and she sighed.

Not a fluttering, sweet sigh. An annoyed, I’m-putting-up-with-Callum sigh.

“All right, Callum, what do you want me to explain?” she asked, a sarcastic emphasis on “me” which made his already tight gut tighten sharply.

He ignored it.

“When we had our discussion after Regan returned my wedding band…” he began and felt her body get stiff against his but he ignored that too and carried on. “You said, when you gave me my ring, you didn’t know if it meant something to you. Then you said it did. I’d like you to explain that.”

“Would you like me to explain that, in, say, I have a choice as to whether I do or not? Or are you telling me to explain that, in, say, I have no choice as to whether I do or not?”

Her questions were a quagmire in which he knew, if he gave the wrong answer, he’d find it very difficult to extricate himself.

Therefore, he answered carefully, “I’m asking you to explain it, Sonia.”

She stared at him.

He waited.

She pulled in breath and said in a voice that was no longer flat but defiant, “All right, I will. You can be very kingly,” she told him absurdly for he was bloody well a king. “I’ve realized now, with time, that this is you but back then it worried me because when you get kingly, you forget I exist. This bothered me and I suspected you didn’t care anything for me but only your duty to me as your queen.”

Callum’s jaw tightened before he clipped, “Tell me you’re f**king joking.”

“I’m not,” she replied instantly. “I’d never been around a king so of course I didn’t get it. But even after you claimed me, which in my people’s world is a pretty significant thing and, as I’ve been told time and again by your people is an even more significant thing, you forced me into a shower. Then into a car. And then you didn’t speak to me for hours. I melted from your world.” She stared at him calmly and finished, “I think it was five, ten minutes after you’d made me yours when you forgot I existed except as your duty to put me in the truck and take me down the mountain.” She continued to stare at him a moment before aiming dead on target and hitting a bulls-eye. “That, Callum, didn’t feel very good.”

He could imagine it didn’t and he did do that to her.

Exactly as she said.

Except for the fact that she ceased to exist.

“Sonia –”

“No,” she interrupted him, still calm. “I get it now. You don’t have to worry. I get it. You had a lot on your mind, more than I knew or understood. Now I understand. I was being selfish.”

No longer angry, he explained gently, “You weren’t being selfish. You didn’t understand what was going on.”

“Well, yes, true but now I do so it’s not a big deal, okay?”

He slid his fingers through her hair while he said softly, “Baby doll.”

Her body tensed and she asked, without a flat voice, without calm, sounding impatient and annoyed. Not adorably impatient and annoyed but something different. Edgier, angrier but almost desperate, “Now that I’ve explained that, can I try to get some sleep?”

Something was still wrong. Something she wasn’t giving him. Something she was holding back.

Knowing that, suddenly he asked, “Do you love me?”

She instantly sucked in breath and tried to pull away.

His arms got tight.

She started struggling.

He registered his surprise at her actions and his gut registered worry when she just as suddenly stopped.

She’d been pushing against his chest with both hands but she bent her elbows, bowed her back and dropped her forehead to rest on them.

“Yes,” she whispered to his chest, uttering that one word in a way that sounded like it was torn from her. But the chest she muttered into felt like iron bands, bands that had been clamped tightly around it for centuries, were finally released so Callum could, for the first time in his life, actually breathe. “Yes,” she repeated in a whisper to his chest as he looked down at her hair shining in the firelight. “I fell in love with you during my first dream when I was seventeen. And I fell in love with you all over again Christmas Eve when you wiped the tears from my face during the general’s scene in White Christmas.”