Fighting Solitude (On The Ropes #3)(49)

But it wasn’t. No matter how it had felt wrapped in his arms with his mouth pressed to mine. He wasn’t mine to keep. He never had been.

“This is so wrong,” I squeaked. “You’re… Mia’s.”

His arms spasmed around me. “Excuse me?”

“I swore this would never happen. No matter how much I wanted to.” My anxiety grew with every word spoken. My chest constricted, and my hands began to tremble. “She was my best friend. You…you were hers.”

He rocked back on his heels and glided his hands up to frame my face. Tipping my head back, he rested his forehead on mine and very calmly said, “This has nothing to do with Mia. This is about you and me. And us finally starting something that it sounds like we’ve both been fighting for a long time.” He kissed me again.

But, no matter what he said and no matter how much I wanted to spend a lifetime feeling his lips pressed to mine, it could never happen.

I twisted from him before he even had a chance to react or my body had a chance to change my mind. I only made it halfway through the ropes before he was dragging me back into the ring.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere!” I screamed at him. “Nowhere, Quarry. I’m not going any-f*cking-where. I can’t walk away from you no matter how many times I should have. Which is exactly why I’m still standing here right now, your cum all but dripping down my legs. It’s the biggest slap in the face I could have ever issued Mia, alive or dead.” I threw my hands out to my sides. “And, worse, I know that and still can’t seem to just walk the f*ck away!”

“Christ,” he mumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Gnawing on my thumbnail, I paced a circle around him and continued. “Honestly, I can’t see how you think there could ever be an us. She wanted to kill me when we were sixteen when she even thought I wanted you. God, if she only knew the half of it! Are you insane enough to think she would ever approve of me and you together?”

“What I think right now is that you’re currently having some kind of orgasm-induced nervous breakdown.”

I stopped and glared at him. “You think this is funny?”

“Not at all. But I’m going to let you rant and rave for a little while to get all that shit you’re spouting out of your system before I wade into the quicksand in your head and pull you out.”

“You can’t pull me out! It’s the truth.”

His body went ridged, and he cracked his neck menacingly. “You done yet?”

“Stop acting like I’m freaking out for no reason. This is wrong and you know it!”

And that’s when he moved. Fast.

Charging forward, he forced us both into the corner.

“We are not wrong! We could never be wrong,” he snarled inches from my face.

“But that doesn’t mean we’re right, either.”

“She’s gone, Liv. Mia doesn’t get to approve of anything. Stop acting like she’s sitting at home while we screw around behind her back.”

“But that’s just it. If she were at home, we wouldn’t be standing here at all. Would we?”

His lips thinned as he closed his mouth. He knew the answer to that question. He just didn’t want to say it any more than I wanted to hear it.

“That’s what I thought. You’re fooling yourself if you think I would ever be anything but a consolation prize. She’d always be in the back of your mind.” I attempted to duck under his arm, but he shifted to the side, blocking me.

“How long?” he growled.

“How long what?”

“You said if Mia only knew the half of it. So tell me how long you’ve wanted me.”

My mouth was locked and loaded to fire the scripted answer I had been telling myself for years, but that was when I realized I didn’t even have it in me to lie anymore. Quarry had admitted that he wanted something between us. I wouldn’t be able to fight him off alone. I needed all the guilt in the world to have my back in this one. Luckily for me, the overwhelming weight I’d been carrying since I was a kid was finally good for something besides threatening to break me.

“Before I met Mia? I had been in love with you every day since we first met,” I answered.

He held my stare with gentle eyes and then asked for my deepest, darkest, dirtiest secret. “And for how long after you met Mia?”

My chin quivered as I fought to keep the truth safely trapped in the confines of my mind—where, if I were a stronger woman, it would have stayed for all of eternity.

I wasn’t a stronger woman though. I was a woman who was irrevocably in love with the only man her dead friend had ever loved.

“Every single day,” I admitted. “Every. Single. Day.”

I was vaguely aware of Quarry’s mouth landing over mine. I even went willingly into his arms as he lifted me off my feet. It wasn’t as frenzied or desperate as it had been before.

It was slow and apologetic.

Comforting and consoling.

Deep and compassionate.

And it only made me feel guiltier—because it made me feel so much better.

Quarry continued to kiss me even as the tears fell from my eyes. His thumbs stroked back and forth across my cheeks, wiping them away as his mouth made unspoken promises I knew he could never keep.