Page 101 of Hard to Handle

“I’m here,” I murmur to him. “I’m here.”

My mind races over scenarios—he was cut from the team, something happened to his family . . . over and over—as we stand there in this silent desperation.

“Christ, Dekk.” He runs a hand through his hair as he walks to the windows and then back to me. His shoulders sag. He stares at me with total defeat.

“Are you okay?” It’s one of a million questions on my mind and the safest of them all. He’ll talk when he wants to.

“Yeah. I think.” Tears well in his eyes and the sight of them—of a man completely vulnerable when I’ve never seen him that way before—undoes me in ways I can’t quite fathom.

They say he trusts me.

They say he needs me.

It’s a poignant thought that gets thrown to the wayside to be thought about later when he’s gone and I’m alone . . . but right now, he needs me.

“I was going to go home . . . but . . . it’s just. I didn’t know where else to go.” His voice is barely audible, his admission mixed with the confusion in his eyes, enough in itself to tell me what he needs. To remind me out of the blue of something my mom used to say to us when we were at a loss for words. “I needed you.”

Those three words slide around my heart and embed themselves in my soul.

He came to me.

He needs me.

“Come with me.” I reach a hand out to him and even though he stares at it with question in his eyes, he takes it.

I lead him down the hallway of my apartment toward my bedroom. If I’d told anyone I was taking Hunter Maddox to my bedroom with no intention of taking my clothes off, they’d think I was mad.

But I am.

And he’s so lost in his own head, in the heartache overwhelming him, that he doesn’t think twice when I turn the covers of my bed down, climb in, and pull his hand for him to join me. With his eyes on mine, trying to relay a story his lips won’t yet speak, he toes off his shoes and climbs in with me.

His arms go around my abdomen, he lays his head on my chest so I can rest my chin on it, and he holds on.

We lie like this without saying a thing, just me providing comfort and him taking whatever it is he needs, until his breathing evens out, and eventually he falls asleep.

With my hand running up and down the length of his back and the realization of how damn good it feels to be needed, I slowly drift off to sleep too.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

DEKKER

I WAKE WITH A START.

The sun is streaming through the blinds I never closed last night and the bed beside me is still warm, but I remember everything about what happened.

There’s a thump in my living room and I slide out of bed, groggy, still sleepy, and still concerned for Hunter.

“Hunter?” When he doesn’t answer, I head down the hallway just in time to see him walking toward my front door. He looks back over his shoulder and our eyes meet. “What are you doing?”

He still looks like hell—eyes red, brow furrowed, like he hasn’t slept in years, when I know for a fact he just got a solid seven hours.

“I—uh—I’ve got shit to do.”

“Hey,” I say when he turns his back on me again. He was going to skip out without saying a thing. Hurt flickers through me that I try to justify and rationalize, and then give up all hope on. “What’s going on?”

“It was a moment of weakness.”

“What was?” I ask, but I already know the answer.