I stopped moving entirely.
I even stopped breathing.
“I dinnae give a shite if ye were a bitch to your sister,” he carried on. “Or ye were arrested. I want to know the houseboat story, but I dinnae give a shite if ye come off bad in that one too. That isn’t the woman I fell in love with.” He pressed everything into me, his body and his hand over my mouth. “This is.”
I remained frozen beneath him.
“And dinnae take that as me giving a shite about any of that at all, lass. It’s you. It’s what made you. It was the path you took that led you to me. And since it was, I’ll take all of it and be glad to have it when it comes to you.”
Oh my God!
He’d just winded me again (without landing on me).
And he wasn’t done.
“Ye are not Helena,” he asserted. “You’re not one thing like Helena.”
Oh God.
I started squirming.
“Stay still,” he grunted.
I bucked.
He didn’t shift an inch.
God!
I gave up.
He kept at me.
“You were a girl who was lost. You found yourself, Blake. Dinnae lose yourself again because I was piss poor in communicating my shite to you.”
I went back to glaring.
“I got in my head. You mentioned we should be freaked at how good it was between us, then Rix told me about Alex, and I got stuck in my head. I did that because it started the same with Signe. Nothing but good.”
With that, I began struggling in earnest.
He took his hand from my mouth to grab both my wrists and pull them over my head.
“Get off me, Dair!” I shouted.
He transferred both wrists to one hand, held them easily (he was totally the worst!), and put the other over my mouth again.
GAH!
His face came so close, he had to be speaking against his hand. “You are not Signe either. My concerns were relevant. I got burned. I fell in love with a woman who didnae exist. That boiled up and it made me fuck up. I should have explained that to ye better. I should have explained where my head was at. But I treated you like a child. And I said shite to you that should never have come out of my mouth.”
“Yes, you did,” I said into his hand. But it came out “Hes, hu deh.”
His beautiful gray-blue eyes melted, and he whispered, “Baby, I’m so fucking sorry.”
Oh no.
That got to me.
