Chapter Seventy-Four
Juniper
“L ike I said, it’s not you. It’s me.” He dragged a heavy, rough thumb over my bottom lip in the most sexually dominant caress I’d ever been given. “I’m an asshole. No two ways about it. I don’t make excuses or apologize for who I am. I also don’t fucking lie to you, woman. I’m not mad at you. Past is spent, and we need to talk, but I don’t want you getting the wrong message from me right now. Time-out on this?”
His actions warred with his words, and it all swam in my head like a barrel of lies.
“This,” I stupidly repeated, hating myself for breaking down and asking him not to go away again.
Staring at me with those piercing eyes that looked like he saw every broken piece of me, he didn’t say anything.
Of course he didn’t.
Why would he?
He’d already fed me his lines, but this man didn’t communicate with words.
Forcing myself to yank away from his mocking grasp, I moved as far away from him as I could without looking like I was afraid, because that would be the kiss of death. It always was with men.
Not that Blade hadn’t already tossed me aside for his own agenda anyway. I knew there was a reason why I was here. It had to come out eventually. No man, SEAL or not, was this selfless. He didn’t take me away from the crap in Miami just because he felt sorry for me, especially not if he knew who I was and what was following me. This man didn’t feel sorry for anyone, least of all himself.
“Yeah, whatever, fine.” May as well get this over with. “Talk.”
“I got a proposition for you.”
“Shocker.” Not.
He went silent again. So stupidly silent and still that I embarrassingly only lasted about five seconds before I looked back at him. “What?”
That lower voice he’d used before, the calm one, it came back. “I need that truce, woman.”
My heart started to pound erratically even though I knew what was coming. I’d have to be stupid not to. But I was still hanging on to denial like a lifeline. “You said it was a time-out.”
“Now I’m saying truce.”
I hated how even squatting with one knee of the floor, resting back on his boot, his arms crossed over the other knee, he looked larger than life. But not just larger. He looked like an impossible force of restrained muscle waiting to spring into action at any second. He looked exactly like what he said he was—a killer.
He also looked like he’d never suffered a single second of anything even remotely close to the ugly insecurities I’d cried all over him.
I didn’t want a truce.
I just wanted the one person in this entire shitty world I felt like I had connection with to not disappear and leave me alone again. Because now that he’d come back, now that I could breathe, that was what my traitorous mind was boiling this all down to.
I was alone.
Utterly and completely.
But for the past week, his bossy texts, his insane replies, his aggressive attitude, the swearing, the realness—it’d been life.
I hadn’t been drowning in fear of what lay around the next corner. I wasn’t hyper focused on being homeless. I wasn’t living solely to stay safe.
I’d felt alive.
More than any jolt of caffeine and sugar, more than any back-alley screw, more than my entire childhood, he made me feel like I’d been living.
Which was sad. The pathetic kind.
Except now he wanted a truce, and it felt like a slap in the face even though I logically and rationally knew there was nothing that could come of this, and I was only putting him in danger. But I’d still been holding on to the fantasy that this—whatever this was—could be my life.
Now I had to face reality.
I tried to mentally brace myself. “Say what you need to say, then take me home—I mean, back to Miami.” To my Jeep because I didn’t have a home. Whatever.
Leaning up on that one knee, he reached behind him.
My entire body stiffened.
Tracking me with that stark blue-eyed gaze that saw everything, he froze. “Not drawing on you, woman.”
“I didn’t think you were.” The irrational side of me had deep-seated trust issues and an ironclad memory, though.
“No, you just looked it.” He came away with a photo turned upside down and settled back on his haunches. “You good?”
“I’m always good.” I never was. I didn’t even know what that word meant anymore.
He stared at me for three more heartbeats.
Then he turned over the photo. “Proposition,” he stated without any emotion. “Trade for trade.”
I looked down at the picture.
My heart stopped.