The most brutal agony.
Lost faith and misguided intentions.
It seemed impossible his voice could come out sounding that way, and still the tenor of it be riddled with the greatest amount of hope. As if faith had found holes in the bricks of his fortress and worked its way in.
What it’d become was the most shocking kind of beauty. Something that spun both my spirit and relaxed my strain.
My body slowly swayed.
Drawn into the sound.
A deadly lullaby because before you even knew what had happened, you were enraptured.
Snared.
Hypnotized into believing that everything was going to be just fine.
Just like he’d done to my sweet, sweet girl. Exactly the way I wanted her to be. Soothed into a peaceful sleep where all the horrors of the day would be erased. Scrubbed from her memory and healed from her body.
We’d been lucky.
So very lucky that there was no way I could just consign it to chance.
Her wounds had been minor, but I knew what was left on her heart and mind was the sort of trauma that would leave a scar.
My gaze drifted to her, my heart in a clutch of agony and gratefulness.
I would never forget that moment—that single, bated second when I thought I’d lost her. That my child had been ripped away. Her life snuffed a century too soon.
Tremors rolled, and my stare traveled, drifting to the man whose voice had shifted to barely audible. Ragged, frayed words that whispered into her ears and filled her with calm. It was like he was offering everything he had to give, giving it away, any solace in his soul transferred to her.
Because there was no missing the outright misery that dented every line in his gorgeous face.
Eyes squeezed shut and his chest tremoring with the remnants of the song.
The tail-end of it drifted away as he begged for her to live with all she had.
To chase joy.
To always, always dance.
The lump in my throat grew to a fist, and I struggled to breathe around it, to clear the roughness when those eyes finally flickered over to meet with mine. “Did you ever want to be a dad?”
I shouldn’t have asked it. I was breaking about every rule that had ever been made.
Jumping right over respectful lines and clear-cut boundaries.
But this? This wasn’t a question for me. Wasn’t loaded because I was a single mother and wanted to somehow fit with him.
It was found in the torture that covered him in shadows.
The expression that took hold of his face made me want to weep. His words hit the air like the slice of a knife. “Once, Mia. Once I did. But guys like me? We aren’t made for the joys of this world. We aren’t destined for the good things. We are bred for destruction.”
My head shook in disaccord, unable to accept what he said. “I see your goodness, Leif Godwin. I see it shining out through all the darkness. I know it’s there.”
He laughed a gruff sound. “You’re just seeing what you want to see.”
My teeth clamped down on my bottom lip, my hand shaking like mad when I reached out and brushed back the longer pieces of hair from his forehead. “I see someone who is brave. I see someone who is fearless. I see someone who saved my daughter.”
A tremor raked through him at that, and I let my fingertips wander, gliding down the strong angle of his cheek. The man so beautiful he was making it hard to focus on what I needed to say without getting distracted by what I wanted. “But I also see someone who is hurting.”
He snatched me by the wrist.
I gasped.
“Pain is just a reminder of your sins.” His confession was nothing but a growl.
I searched his face.
“Of what you’ve done,” he rumbled.
My chest quivered at the rake of his harsh words. Blow after blow.
“Of what is to come.”
“And what is it that is to come? What are you waiting for, Leif?”
“Something I would never implicate you in.” His face pinched in misery. “I . . . I should go.”
I gave him a tight nod, not even surprised by the rejection because I could physically feel his pain.
He pushed to his feet. He hesitated as he stared down at my daughter. Everything ached when he reached out and brushed his fingertips through her hair, sheer affection on his face.
His jeans ripped and stained with his blood. Shredded from his surrender.
This man who would have died for my daughter.
He walked out the door without looking back.
That energy shivered and shook and cried out. Demanding to be heard.
My attention moved to Penny. My child fast asleep.
Safe.
Warm.
Loved.
We’d been through so much in our lives, but never once had I been so terrified as this. Faced with losing the one thing worth living for.
And Leif, he had returned that to me. Given us another chance.
He had sparked something in me from the second he’d crashed into my world.
Fire and ice.
I’d thought he’d been purposed, but never had I imagined he could have been purposed for this.
For something greater than I’d prepared myself for.
And I recognized it, so distinctly.
His pain.
The way he viewed himself, as if he’d been condemned to live without.
Alone.
Destitute.
As if he believed he truly didn’t deserve or have the right.
I was on my feet before I knew they were under me, the weakness I’d been feeling all day swept away by the desperation to touch.
To feel him alive under me, too.
For him to understand the man I saw in him.
To return a little of the hope he’d restored in me.
I raced out of the suite and down the hall toward the massive bonus room, the one that opened to the wall of windows and overlooked the pool and yard.
The storm bared down. Gusts of wind that lashed through the trees. Sent them whipping and shivering and howling beneath the moon that burned through a thin break in the clouds.
The man was a shadow beneath, his shoulders hitched high as he strode across the yard toward his little home.
If he even had one.
The man lost.
A wanderer who raged as he searched through the earth for where he fit.
I wanted to carve out a place for him. Show him what it was like to belong. To be treasured and loved, the way he showed without asking for a thing in return.
I burst through the door he had exited, pummeled by a squall of wind.
A fierce fury that blasted through the air.
“What if I don’t want you to go?” I shouted above it. “What if I want you to stay, right here, with me?”
In the distance, he froze, as if he had been impaled by the plea. Staked to the spot.
Slowly, he turned. Rain began to pelt from the sky.
“I keep telling you that you don’t want me. That you don’t have the first clue what you’re asking for.”
Brown eyes flashed beneath a streak of lightning. The man momentarily lit in a bright flash of light.
Afire.
Aflame.
Before he returned to shadows. To the darkness.
“You’re wrong, Leif. I want you. I want all of you. I want your hurt and your fears and your sorrows. I want your beauty and your songs and your mind. You’re wrong when you say it’s my beauty reflected back at me when I look at you. Not when you’re the epitome of it. I feel it, Leif. I see it.”
His face pinched in pain. “I don’t want to hurt you.”