Page 12 of Rowan: His Exception

"Claire." My voice cracks. "Go."

"I'm not afraid of you," she whispers.

"You should be. I'm not safe," I say. "Because I don't want to be safe. Because the last thing you need is someone like me noticing you, and I've already fucking noticed."

The color drains from her face, then comes back.

"That's not your decision."

“It is now.” I turn toward the shed. “Go join the group, Miss Calloway.”

I hear her breathing behind me, fast and shallow.

"You're not as scary as you think you are," she says, but her voice trembles.

I turn back. Smile. But it doesn't reach my eyes.

"Keep telling yourself that."

She holds my gaze for three seconds. Then she walks away, shoulders straight, not looking back.

I watch her go.

Fuck.

She's going to be a problem.

Chapter Five

CLAIRE

I don't look back.

The moment my shoes hit the gravel, I keep walking, spine straight, shoulders squared, pretending I'm not shaking or scared shitless right now. Trying my hardest to ignore the pulse hammering in my throat where his words still sit, hot and heavy.

I want you. I don't want to want you. The words won't stop. I turn them over, looking for the angle where they make sense, where I can file them away and move on.

I can't find it. He doesn't know me. He knows my name and where I'm from. He knows I showed up in Cedar Ridge in the wrong shoes with the wrong attitude, that somewhere behind me, I left a marriage that failed. That's it. That's the whole list. So why does it feel like more than that? Why does it feel like he looked at me and saw something I haven't even let myself look at yet? I don’t know anything about him. Only that he’s closed-off, former military…a walking warning label. The kind you read and then do the thing anyway.

So why me?

I'm no one special. At the moment, I'm not even pleasant to be around. I'm a mess, a woman trying to prove something to herself by climbing rocks and taking a walk through the woods. There are other women in this group. Prettier women. Women who actually know what they're doing out here. Who won’t talk back or challenge him, wanting to see what would happen.

But he looked at me. Admitted things that I know would cost him something. I saw it. In the tightness around his mouth, the way his hands curled into fists, physically doing everything in his power to hold himself back.

You know what?

Good.

Let the asshole struggle. Let him suffer. He obviously doesn’t give a shit if we do.

I round the corner of the nearest building, struggling to hold it together. Letting my hands tremble now that he can't see. Counting to ten as my therapist taught me back when I thought divorce was the hardest thing I'd ever have to do.

That was six months ago. Before I learned that grief comes in all different flavors…anger, regret, the particular loneliness of a bed too big for one. Before I signed up for a survival course I have no business taking, led by a man who looks at me like I'm something he wants to break.

Or break into.

I press my palms flat against my thighs and continue breathing. The sun's hot on my shoulders, and I focus on that heat until my hands stop shaking. Until I can pretend I'm not coming apart at the seams.