This was not feeling like this beautifully renovated house was a home unless these three bears were in it.
This was love.
And the realization didn’t feel like relief.
It felt like terror.
Because…
“What’s going to happen when they figure out you’re not worth it?”Dennis’s voice cut like acid through the beautiful feeling I’d just discovered inside myself.“You’ve been playing at being happy, but what about when you get scared or depressed? What if you go off on them again? Start acting crazy. You think they want the real you—the broken, damaged, ruined version they’ll get when this love high wears off?”
Suddenly, all the guys lying around me flared their noses. And not in the good way.
“Bell?” Ravik’s voice sharpened with suspicion. “What’s going on?”
He sat up. They all did.
“Why did your scent just…” Boone asked, his blue eyes on high alert.
“Sweetheart, what happened?” Zion asked, stroking my hair like I was some kind of animal he had to soothe with pets.
My chest tightened. They were so nice. So good to me.
“And you’re toxic!”Dennis reminded me inside my head.“You’re poison. All I had to do was follow the smell of the rot.”
My breathing stuttered.
And Ravik shook his head. “Talk to us. You promised you’d do that the next time you got overwhelmed.”
But I couldn’t talk to them.
“They’ll see what you really are. What you’ve always been. Too much. Too needy. Too broken. Unfixable.”
I couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t think.
The fear spiked so hard, I could taste metal.
And they could smell it. The fear. The panic.
They knew something was wrong.
And I couldn’t tell them.
Couldn’t say:I love you, and it terrifies me because I’ll ruin this like I ruin everything, and you’ll see I’m not worth keeping, and you’ll be taken away from me somehow, which is why you should never let yourself love people?—
I had to go. Had to run. But when I tried to rise from the bed, all three of them curled their hands around some part of my body. Zion at my wrist, Boone at my ankle.
Ravik’s hands cupping my face. “Bell, talk to us!” His eyes blazed with anger. “You promised. No running. No isolating. You talk to us, dammit!”
“Dads? Dads, what the hell?” Before I could answer him, a new voice sounded, ringing with authority—kind of like Ravik’s. “And Uncle Walker, is that you?”
We all froze.
Turned toward the doorway.
A man stood there in a full-on Mountie uniform, staring at the four of us—naked, tangled together in bed, me in the middle, clearly mid-panic attack.
