“I know. I could tell as soon as you walked out of the warehouse yesterday. The dinner we just had drove the point home.”
“I expected to feel ... nervous ... when I was trapped in that room. And even for a few hours afterward. Sure. Fine. But it’s been more than a day, and I’m nowhere close to getting my groove back.”
“Yesterday was traumatic, Britt.”
“Yet you seem to have bounced back.”
“I haven’t. Yesterday was my worst day.” He spoke upward, to the night sky. “Worse than the day of the fire in St. Louis. It wasso bad, I’m still dazed by it. I can’t stop replaying the things that happened. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that could have happened to you ... and almost did. At the same time, I’m incredibly relieved that none of those things did happen.”
“I wish I were relieved. Instead, I mostly feel scared and helpless, which are two things I can’tstandto feel.” She adjusted her position to face him. Likewise, he faced her. She ran a fingertip down his cheek and along the edge of his jaw.
“Why do you think—” he began.
She kissed him. Because she was desperate to. Because kissing him would blot out everything else, including his probing questions.
Need rose between them like a flash flood. His hands slid into her hair and she gloried in the lithe power of his body.
She’d wanted this kiss to drown out everything else. Perversely, it was forcing her to confront too many things simultaneously. Her love for Zander. Her vulnerability. Her fears and weaknesses and shortcomings. She could feel herself beginning to crumble beneath the enormity of it all. Tears burned her throat.
She could either trust Zander more than she’d ever trusted anyone, crumble, then deal with the embarrassing rubble. Or she could do what she’d always done—hold herself together and resist the temptation to crumble. Her ability to hold herself together was one of her greatest sources of pride. The bedrock of her personality.
She broke away and scrambled to her feet. The blanket puddled on the ground.
He regarded her with glowing eyes for a long moment, then straightened to standing.
“I can’t do this right now.” She couldn’t deal with her emotions for him while struggling to acclimate to the fact that she’d been stuck in a car, hooded, then chained to a pipe while a man lost his life in the adjoining room.
Tread cautiously, Britt. He’s trying to support you the bestway he knows how. Don’t hurt him.
She didn’t want to hurt him. No part of her wanted to hurthim, but she wasn’t stable enough right now to handle the zigzags of joy and defenselessness that loving him brought.
———
Zander fought to keep his face neutral.
Britt’s words didn’t have to mean disaster.They don’t have to, he told himself fiercely. Yet he was already panicking inside.
His chest was still rising and falling rapidly from the intensity of their kiss. In his peripheral vision he could see a scattering of lights at the base of the shoreline across the Hood Canal. The shifting and swelling mass of black water between him and that shoreline mimicked the unsettled tide of his soul.
“I’m ridiculously attracted to you,” she said. “Ridiculously. Over-the-top attracted to you.”
“Then kiss me some more.”
“I want to.” Her turbulent eyes, set into the warrior princess face he knew so well, communicated conflict. “At the same time, kissing you ... talking to you, being with you ... makes me feel like I’m going to fall apart.”
“Why?”
“I think because ... when I’m with you, I’m aware that I’m with someone I can count on.”
“Good. Because you are.”
“Not good, because yesterday and today I’ve felt all wobbly and weepy in your presence.”
“Be wobbly and weepy, then. It’s fine with me if you are.”
“It’s not fine with me, though.” Her chin firmed. “I don’t want to depend on anyone’s strength but my own.”
He knew her complexities better than just about anyone on the planet. He wanted to help her. He wanted her to trust him. He wanted to shatter the detachment she was using to keep herself separate from him. But this time he didn’t know how.
