I had decided too late that this was one toy I did not want to share with others, one part of my life I wanted selfishly to guard for myself.
All my life I’d sacrificed for my family, given everything to my mother and sisters, to Savannah and Adam.
Cazzo, I was tired of it.
Linnea turned her head against the seat to catch me looking at her, but she didn’t seem surprised by it.
“Done brooding?” she teased lightly.
I huffed out a surprised chuckle.
“It’s not a good look on you,” she continued blandly. “You should leave it to Adam.”
Another laugh, this one from the belly.
Oh, she could light me up. Every corner. Even the ones that hadn’t seen the light in years.
My stomach twisted with regret, a feeling that was alien to me.
Even after everything ended so cataclysmically with Savannah and Adam, I’d had no regrets about it. Of course, I would always wish it had turned out differently, but loving them, even for a short time, had fundamentally changed me. I was the man I was today because of that year in London.
If I could go back, I would still flirt with myduchessain the back seat of the Rolls-Royce. I would still follow Adam to the car in the back alley, rife with confused, irritated arousal. I would still give them both my heart in cupped palms.
So I wasn’t used to the sensation of sour-bitter regret on the back of my tongue as I thought about arranging for Linnea to date Adam.
Why couldn’t I, just once, have someone love me? Want me?
Why did I have to set it up so that was not even a possibility?
Did a part of me—fetid and small, a result of a father who had never loved or cared for me, a childhood full of poverty anduncertainty, of a mother who cried herself to sleep too often—believe I wasn’t worthy of happiness?
Did the artist in me trick my mind into thinking I had to suffer to create art?
I started at the soft press of Linnea’s thumb over the crease between my brows. She was up on her knees in the seat, bent at the waist over the console to reach me. Her hair had shifted forward over her arms, close enough to smell the salt of the sea caught in the strands. But it was her eyes that I fixated on, almond-shaped and that unique shade of indigo that seemed otherworldly.
“Hey,” she whispered as if she felt the bubble around us, knew that the reality was suddenly very far away. “You’re doing it again. What has you frowning like that?”
Words raced up my throat, and I had to glue my tongue to the roof of my mouth so that they wouldn’t all tumble out into her lap.
Instead, I swallowed thickly and shook my head slightly.
Her fingers traced over one brow and down the side of my face to cup my cheek. I leaned into the pressure, almost purring when she rubbed a thumb along the rasp of my stubble.
A little smile flickered at the edge of her mouth, but her eyes were questing around my features, searching for answers.
“Sometimes, I could glimpse your heartbreak out of the corner of my eye, but like a ghost, it disappeared every time I tried to look at it head-on. Until today. What happened?”
“You,” I said, the one syllable carving up my throat and over my tongue like a blood offering. My hand found her wrist, shackling it so she would not stop touching me.
She was a grounding rod when everything I felt was lightning.
“Me?” she asked, rearing back a little. “Have I done something wrong?”
My throat ached with the need to tell her everything, every chapter of my story, no matter how sad or shameful. I wanted to curl up in her lap like a fucking kitten and have her pet me.
I wanted to kiss her so badly it felt like life or death.
“Nothing,” I whispered, because my chest was caving in. “Only making me want you when you aren’t mine to want.”
