My mother would notice the bruised knuckles. The scarred hands. The watchfulness. The sense that violence wasn’t theoretical in his life.
My father would try to talk sports or business and get nothing polite in return. Kane would answer honestly or not at all. No performance. No smoothing himself into something acceptable.
Too blunt. Too rough. Too dangerous.
Not suitable.
Not safe.
Not the kind of man nice girls married.
And suddenly, I realized something that made my stomach twist.
How many choices had I made trying not to scare them?
How many boyfriends had fit neatly into their expectations?
Hank had been perfect on paper. Stable job. Good family. Polite. Predictable. A man my parents could brag about at church dinners.
And I’d convinced myself that was enough.
That wanting more was immature. Selfish. Unrealistic.
But lying here now, thinking about Kane?—
About the way my pulse spiked just remembering him?—
I wondered if I’d been fooling myself.
If Rose had figured that out first.
If Paris had been her escape from expectations, too.
The realization settled slowly.
Maybe attraction mattered because compatibility mattered.
Not just hobbies and income brackets and politeness.
But the way someone made you feel.
Alive.
Seen.
Safe enough to stop pretending.
Kane was reckless.
Dangerous.
Complicated.
But maybe …
Maybe he was also exactly the kind of man I needed.
And the scariest part?
