Boarlander Boss Bear (Boarlander Bears #1)(13)

Rushing forward, she closed the book and pulled it to her chest like armor. “It’s stupid.”

“It’s really not,” he argued, locking his arms against the mattress until his triceps bulged.

“It’s a scrapbook.”

“Do you make a lot of them?”

“No, just this one. I brought it in case I wanted to add a page after I met you.”

“Let me see it.”

“No. It’s private. No one has seen it, and I like it that way.”

“Why?”

Audrey gritted her teeth and looked away. No answer was best.

“Let me guess. You don’t want me to see it because that’s the real you in there. That’s the little pieces you have kept hidden from everyone. Right?”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand more than you think,” he said darkly. “I grew up an outsider, too. I had secrets to hide from everyone around me. It’s lonely.”

Tears burned her eyes, and she blinked them back. He did understand more than she’d assumed then, but she wasn’t ready to expose herself so deeply with only a moment’s notice.

“Audrey, I printed out every conversation you had on that matchmaking website. I wanted to read it so I could get to know you better, but three pages in, I was so pissed off I couldn’t read any more.”

Audrey hugged her scrapbook closer. “Why were you angry?”

Harrison’s eyes had lightened to a frosty color, and a muscle near his mouth twitched. “Because it’s not how this should’ve happened. It’s not how I want to get to know you. I want you to tell me all that stuff, and reading the conversation between you and someone else felt like stealing. I don’t want to steal that stuff, Audrey. I want you to give it to me.”

“Well, I thought I did,” she whispered. “I thought that was you, and you were falling in love with me, too…but I was alone in that.”

Harrison searched her eyes, then leaned forward and held out his hand. “Then let me catch up.”

Oh, she knew what he was asking for. He was asking for this huge piece of her that no one else knew about. He was asking for a part of her heart she’d kept only for herself. He was asking her to ignore the betrayal she’d endured and openly trust him.

Harrison Lang was the most dangerous man she’d ever met.

Audrey stared at the dingy, white, closed blinds of the single window and considered asking him to leave. She could tell him she wasn’t into him, she couldn’t do this anymore, or she’d simply been too hurt by the website betrayal.

But when she looked back at him, his eyes were steady, his palm still out, waiting, as if he really wanted to see this part of her. And if she didn’t do this now, she might never let anyone in.

“Please don’t laugh.”

“I won’t. I saw the first three pages, and they were really good. Sit by me and explain them.”

Reluctantly, she handed him the heavy scrapbook and sank onto the bed next to him.

The front cover had cutout letters of her name on a blue background and a white housecat with black stripes she’d glued to the tame-looking critter.

Harrison pointed to it with his eyebrows arched up in question.

“The scrapbooking supply store didn’t have tigers so I had to make one.”

“Please f*cking tell me you’re a white tiger.”

Her face cracked in a grin, and she closed her eyes to stifle the giddy sound in her throat. No one in her life had ever sounded hopeful about such things. “Yes,” she admitted in a whisper.

“Daaaaaamn. Woman, do you know how rare you are?”

“Well, yes, because I tried to track down a mate who was a tiger like me because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I didn’t know at the time if hooking up with a human was…you know.”

“Was what?”

“Taboo or gross.”

“It’s not. Shifters and humans hook up all the time. Creed’s mate, Gia, is totally human, and she gave him a little bear cub.”

“I figured that part out when I got ahold of the only other registered tiger. He was awful. He was interested in one thing. He was obsessed with talking about when I would go into heat.”

“Why?”

Audrey pressed her cool palms against the fire in her cheeks and said low, “Because I become crazy for sex, or mating, or whatever you call it. I guess it’s a big cat shifter thing. Anyway, I stopped talking to him when he turned raunchy.”

“Okay, you and I are going to talk more about your heat when you aren’t the color of a cherry Popsicle. Page one.” He flipped past the cover page to the first spread.

It was a series of pictures of her when she was born. Her dad hugged her close in one snapshot, and in another, her mother held her. Audrey was tiny and red cheeked, crying, and her mom’s head was angled down. All she could tell from this picture was that her mom had the same hair color as her. Her birthday was at the bottom in bubble letters.

Audrey pointed to the picture on the right. “That right there is the only picture I have of my mom.”

Harrison jerked his gaze to her. “Seriously? You can’t even see her face.”

“She didn’t like pictures. Dad said it was because she was like me, a tiger, and she liked to stay hidden. He snuck this one and gave it to me when I was seven and wouldn’t quit asking about her.”