Page 87 of Hard to Hold

Because I want to be that person. He said he doesn’t trust anyone, but I want him to trust me. And honestly, I want to trust him too.

Because I’m slowly beginning to need him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

RUSH

I WATCH HER SLEEP.

She’s lying across the bed. The sheets have fallen around her so they’re positioned just below the swell of her breast, and one hand is resting on top of her heart. Shadows from the moon outside play across her face, and her hair is fanned out on the pillow beneath her.

Jesus.

My chest constricts as I try to figure out why the fuck there is a heavy lump in my throat.

We fought, I had every intention of setting her straight, end of story.

And yet it isn’t.

Far from it. She asked a simple question she deserves an answer to. A simple question that I would want to know if I were in her shoes.

What exactly is this between the two of us? Before Lennox, a question like that would have had me cutting my losses and moving on.

Isn’t that why I slipped, though? Am I hoping she’ll hold out until she realizes she’s right? That I really am the man she thinks I am?

But I didn’t chase, I didn’t give her the answers she wanted, and I didn’t give her the man she deserves.

Instead, I sat downstairs with a beer in my hand feeling like shit when every part of me wanted to come up here and tell her my story from beginning to end. The starved boy chasing a dream. The man who stepped in, giving him the chance at the academy, to the cashed-in IOU . . . and the necessity to ride this thing out for Rory’s health. For my brother’s future. Because he never gave up on me.

I want her to know that I’m protecting others, that I am the man she thinks I am . . . and not the selfish bastard everyone thinks I am.

I stare at her and panic hits.

Wouldn’t it be easier to walk away, chalk us up to some stellar sex, and then blame our demise on the moment being ruined? But standing here watching the rise and fall of her chest, all I want to do is slide into bed beside her and hold the fuck on.

Lennox quiets the shouting in my head. She placates the rebellion that fights from within. She makes me wish I’d never agreed to this thing with Rory so that there didn’t have to be lies and secrets between us.

There’s something about the way she looks at me, the way she treats me. As if I’m Rush McKenzie the man, instead of the football phenomenon everyone else fixates on.

But how can she know me? How can she get me like she does when all we’re supposed to be is a quick fling to help pass the time?

I sit on the bed and face her, my fingers reaching out to brush a piece of hair off her face, to touch her a necessity.

Just a fling, huh?

She stirs, those eyes of hers flutter open, and she immediately turns her cheek into my hand as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Almost as if there’s an instinctive trust in me.

I’m not sure why it gets to me when she does it, but it does. That lump in my throat grows even bigger.

“I’m sorry.” We both say it at the same exact time. Her lips—that I desperately want to lean down and kiss—turn into a ghost of a smile.

“I’m sorry, Nox.” And I don’t think I’ve ever spoken truer words.

“I didn’t mean what I asked. I phrased it wrong. You don’t owe me any explanat—”

“Shh,” I murmur. “I do. And—I . . . sometimes you do things because you have to. They’re not always what you want to do, but they’re the right thing to do.”

“Help me understand. Why would you—” Her confused sigh finishes her sentence for her. “How could you risk . . . how could you let people think you did something like this?”