“Hey, William,” she said.
“You knew I was here?”
“I saw you come in.” She looked over her shoulder at me and gave me a smile. “Do you want to join me?”
I stripped down to my boxer briefs. I’d debated wearing these this morning. Now I thanked my lucky stars for allowing me to have that debate. My clothes were off in a flash and I heard Sian laugh.
“You don’t want to think about it?”
Wearing nothing but my boxer briefs, I went to the edge of the pool and sat beside Sian. With my feet in the water, I wrapped my arm around her. “I’ve got nothing to think about if it means being with you.”
She smiled and rested her head against my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I’m better now.”
“You looked like you were having a hard time.”
“I did?”
She nodded.
“I’m not used to being trapped up like this. I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it either. I guess we’ve all got to do what we’ve got to do.” She shrugged. “Your dads wouldn’t make you do something if they didn’t think it was for your own good.”
This made me snort.
“Or not,” she said.
“I don’t know. I guess I’m not in a good place with my dad right now.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. I guess I … I’m angry at him. He helped Alexander.”
Sian put her hand on my thigh. “Come on. We all know that wasn’t true. My dad clearly manipulated them all.”
“But he should have seen it, Sian. If he’d seen it, we wouldn’t be in this position. We wouldn’t have to stay here. There would be no question of what you do. You’d be ours.” Fuck. I wasn’t supposed to guilt her or attempt to manipulate any of her decisions, and yet, here I was, doing exactly that.
I gritted my teeth.
“What do you mean?” Sian asked.
I shook my head. “I can’t … we’re not allowed to talk about it.”
“You can’t just say something like that and think it will all be better. That’s confusing, Will. Please.”
Running a hand down my face, I released a breath. “I’m not allowed to tell you what I want from you. It’s part of the agreement. After everything that has happened—” I stopped, debating if I should tell her the truth.
“Will?”
“I don’t want you to go.” I looked at her. “It’s your life and I get that and I respect it. Of course, I do, but that doesn’t mean … I don’t want you to leave me, to leave us. I know there’s a wonderful world out there and you can do whatever the hell you want and part of me wants you to go and do that away from all this bullshit, but at the same time…” I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t finish.
“It would mean I’d leave you and you don’t want me to.”
With my lips pressed together, I nodded.
Silence. I hated fucking silence.
“Sian, I … I love you.” I looked her in the eye as I said it. I wasn’t going to give her this giant ball of guilt and then not tell her my reasons for it. She deserved to know the truth.
“Will?” Her voice was a soft whisper.
I held my hands up, and I hated it because it meant letting her go. “Look, I get it, okay. We’re a foursome. We come together, and we’ve got a shitload of baggage with us. I can’t speak for the other guys. If you go, I know I can’t follow you, but … know that everywhere you go, whatever you do, I will love you for the rest of my life.” I looked her in the eye and saw tears were glistening inside them. “Don’t. Don’t cry.”
“How can I not when you just said that to me?”
I cupped her cheek. “You needed to know how I felt.”
“How can you love me?” she asked.
“Have you met you?”
“I’m…”
So she didn’t say anything to spoil the moment, I kissed her. I’d never told another woman how I felt. I never felt love. Sian wasn’t like anyone else. I didn’t want her to be. I loved her. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, making babies, enjoying a life with a long future ahead. I didn’t understand how the others could for a second think of a life without her. Allowing her to leave us. There was no logic in that. We weren’t perfect, I got that, but I knew we were a lot better than the Alexanders of this world. We wouldn’t hurt Sian. Not intentionally, anyway.
Breaking the kiss, Sian worked her arms around my neck. Her eyes were closed and then she slowly opened them when she looked at me.
“Where you go, I want to go,” I said. Screw The Society and everything else related to it. I didn’t care what I had to do to prove to Sian, I would.
There was just no future without her, not for me.
“Will, I don’t think that’s possible.”
I rested my hands at her back, staring into her eyes. Her brows were drawn together in a frown as she nibbled on her lip.
“Why? Don’t you want me? Us? All of us?” I asked.
“I … I don’t know. I … this is all so much.”
Well, she hadn’t declared her undying love for me, but she also hadn’t told me she hated me and couldn’t wait to leave. As far as I was concerned, we were making progress. Slow, but we were.
I waited.
Patience was never one of my strong points, but it would seem when it came to Sian, I was willing to take whatever I could get.
“The thought of leaving makes me feel sick. Like there’s this hole.” She touched her chest. “And I look at the door and I think about leaving. Just forgetting my mom, dad, The Society, and that school, and I feel free. But every time I think of leaving you or the others, and I can’t seem to move. It’s like I’m frozen in place and I can’t go anywhere.” She touched my cheek. “I don’t know if I’m in love with you, William. I don’t know what love really is. I don’t feel the same way about you that I did with Drew.”
“That’s good. She was your nanny and a woman, not that it’s a problem. I didn’t mind if you dug Heather.”
This made her laugh, and I wanted to make her smile. Within a few seconds, she’d taken my heart and nearly crushed it, and was slowly stitching it back together now. Did she even realize what she was doing to me? How she made me feel?
“It’s a good thing. I don’t want to leave you, Will. I don’t want to leave any of you and it scares me because I don’t know if I can be everything you need me to be. I look at your dads and I see how sad they are. I want you guys, no one else. There’s no way I want to be passed over.”
I cupped her face, tilting her head back. “You never will be. You hear me? I won’t let that happen.”
“Do you think your dad said the same thing to my mom?”
“Forget about them. We’re not them, Sian. There’s no Alexander waiting in the wings to take you away from us.” I slammed my lips down on hers because I just couldn’t stand not to kiss her anymore. I needed her lips on mine, her body wrapped around me.
Running my hands down to her ass, I felt her circle her legs around my waist, and I broke the kiss. “Please, I need to fuck you. I need to be so deep inside you, you can’t think.”