Chapter Twenty-Seven Lily #2
For a woman who’d spent her entire adult life avoiding risk, I didn’t miss the subtext of what he was saying. But he wasn’t being preachy. If he were, it would have been easy to dismiss it.
“Why?”
Instead of answering right away, Barrett turned and washed the cookie dough off his hands, using a towel left on the counter to dry them before he turned, gently prying the spoon from my grip.
My face heated as he stood between my legs, one hand braced on the counter just to the side of my hip; the other, he used to scrape the spoon into the bowl again, collecting no more than a teaspoon of remaining dough.
He held it up to my mouth. After forcing a swallow, I licked my lips and opened my mouth, waiting for him to set the spoon against my tongue. His eyes were locked on my mouth, but instead of giving it to me, he turned the spoon and fed it to himself.
I scoffed, smacking him in the stomach as he ate the dough. He gave a lopsided grin that echoed in the unsteady thud of my heart.
When he pulled the spoon out of his mouth, I had to fight the urge to lock my thighs around his hips, wrap my ankles around his ass, and make him stay right where he was. The counter height in this place was perfect.
“What point are you trying to prove, other than you’re a criminal tease?” I said icily.
It said something about Barrett that my bitchy little outburst didn’t deter him in the slightest.
“When things are good enough, important enough”—he held my eyes unflinchingly—“when we love them enough, we take the risk, because we damn well know the reward is worth it.” Like he hadn’t just tossed out the fucking L word, Barrett held up the empty spoon and gently tapped the tip of my nose with it.
“You do it too. It just doesn’t feel as scary because you’ve never gotten sick.
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, or it’s not real. ”
I snatched the spoon out of his hand, and he emitted a quiet laugh, nothing more than a pleased little rumble in his chest, and oh, how I wanted to press myself up against his body to feel it.
I knew what it was like now, to be held by him, and his little risk/reward speech was feeling very real as I considered the ramifications of shifting forward a few inches.
“Have I rendered you speechless?” he mused.
“No. I’m just thinking.”
He hummed.
Unthinkingly, I laid my hand on the side of his throat. “Do that again,” I commanded quietly.
The look in his eyes made my stomach tremble, but he lifted his chin and did as I asked. Lower this time, and longer.
I closed my eyes and dropped my hand.
“Do you get sick of the hard parts of your life?” he asked, his thumb gently rubbing the side of my thigh, back and forth, back and forth. It was an absent-minded touch, almost like he wasn’t even aware he was doing it.
Because it was easier, I kept my eyes closed while I answered. “Sometimes,” I whispered.
“When?”
It would have been simpler for him to reach inside me and pull the words out himself. In front of him, after last night, this was the most difficult thing he could’ve asked of me.
“It keeps getting harder to pack up and leave. To find somewhere new and feel that excitement. Sometimes I’m just .
. . tired. But I don’t know how to stop.
” My hands curled up into fists in my lap, a last-ditch effort to keep from reaching out to him.
“That’s all I ever wanted growing up. To see everything.
My parents didn’t have much, so living simply wasn’t hard for me.
And I saved and saved and saved to take a trip as soon as I turned eighteen, right after I graduated from high school.
It was the first time I got on a plane. First time I saw the ocean. ”
Barrett’s fingers drifted over my cheekbone, gently tucking some hair behind my ears.
Holding up my body was too hard; my spine collapsed like wet cardboard under his gentle touch, and I sank forward, allowing him to hold me up for a little while. My forehead rested against his shoulder, and Barrett curved a strong arm around my waist, his hand moving up and down again.
Being able to hide in his embrace allowed me a moment to open my eyes.
“Then when they died, I couldn’t stay.” My tears were gone after last night, and for that, I was thankful. “I sold their house, put some stuff I couldn’t part with in a storage unit, collected what life insurance had been left to me, packed the dog in the car, and took off.”
Barrett remained quiet, his nose dipping briefly against my temple as he inhaled slowly, then let it out again.
“Stopping feels like I have to face everything I’ve lost.” Summoning whatever courage I had left, a hidden reserve that should’ve been long gone, I lifted my head and looked him full in the face.
“Sometimes I want to,” I admitted in a broken whisper.
“And sometimes I don’t think I’m capable of it.
That I’ll run from it for the rest of my life. ”
Barrett cupped my face in his hands, and I closed my eyes again, overwhelmed by the warmth and strength in that hold.
“Then stay somewhere,” he said urgently. His thumbs brushed over my cheekbones, and my eyes couldn’t stay shut anymore. “Just for a while. How are you going to know until you try?”
The flutters in my stomach turned to giant wings—panic spiking with each great big whoosh along my insides, so intense that it stole my breath. “Don’t do this.”
His eyes were bright, intense in a way I hadn’t seen before.
“Don’t what? Don’t tell you that I want to see more of you?
That I want to take you out on a date? That I want to watch movies and explain football and see you with my kids and take you to bed?
That I want to wake up next to you and let a hug from you be the best part of my day?
I want more, Lily, and I cannot let you leave here without knowing that. ”
The heavy press of overwhelming emotion made my throat close up, and I pinched my eyes shut again, shaking my head until his hands moved from my face.
But he didn’t drop them, and he didn’t back away.
He simply shifted them down until they held each side of my neck, his thumb underneath the line of my jaw.
Barrett was unmoving in the face of my fear.
“Look at me,” he said gently, firmly. “Please.”
Everything he’d listed sounded like a life someone else was meant to live.
Movies and kids and football and baking cookies and snowstorms and letting him take me to bed.
Simple hugs at the end of the day. Warmth and family and affection and .
. . and love. There was a part of me screaming for all those things.
I wanted to be the one he came to when the whole world questioned him. Wanted to sit at school concerts with him by my side. Letting him hold me every night the way he held me before.
And bed. Yes, I wanted Barrett to take me to bed. I wanted to finish what we’d started last night, so much so that my heart screamed itself raw, hissing wildly to scare away the fears still holding my brain prisoner.
But it was those things—the memories of goodbyes I hadn’t been ready to say, coffins and stupid flowers and empty words from people trying to make me feel better, knowing I was facing down a lifetime of missing the people I loved—that were the loudest. I didn’t want them to be, but they were.
For ten years and four months and seven days, they’d driven all the decisions, and I wasn’t sure how to pry them away from the steering wheel.
When I forced my eyes open and saw the way he was looking at me—the heart in his eyes—I did the only thing that felt right.
I told him the truth.
“I just took a six-month job in Florida,” I said unevenly. “I can’t give you what you want.”
I expected him to step back. For his hands to drop from my skin. His eyes to shutter and his mouth to form a firm line.
But none of those things happened.
“Don’t run from this,” he said evenly. “I’m not going to hurt you, Lily. I’m not going anywhere.”
My hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt, anger and frustration—at him and at myself—fused with a white-hot bang inside my chest. I wasn’t mad that he was so unfazed. I was furious that, more than anything, I felt a desperate itch to believe him.
Eclipsing it all was head-spinning desire, and instead of running away from it, from trying to justify why we couldn’t, I leaned all the way in and let it crash over my head.
Barrett’s eyes flashed when he clocked the change in my face.
Which was why I made a small noise of annoyance, gripped his shirt tighter, and pulled him down toward me, one hand sliding up behind his neck while his mouth slanted over mine.