“No. No.” He jostled everything on her vanity again. His fist was rigid, all his veins nearly popping from the knuckles. “I mean yes. Fuck.” His inhalation swelled through his chest, tightening the T-shirt’s fit around his bulging muscles. “She’s from my past. Far in my past. But she was never—” He hitched short, taking another of those unnervingly distracting breaths. “She and I were never—well, we didn’t share things like you and I did.”
She slunk to the lip of the tub, weighted by her troubled curiosity. “But…you wanted to be, yes?” She ignored the new rise of his tension. Maybe he had to confront all this as much as she did. “Brickham. Nobody cries out for someone in so much pain and need unless they are yearning for some kind of a relationship or connec—”
“Or unless that person’s dead.”
Well, there was a new kind of fist. Only his statement didn’t rock the vanity. It shook the air itself. And all her nerve endings. Every inch of the new crack in her heart. Jayd’s mouth opened but no sound came out. Her mind yielded nothing but mental lint. A useless blank.
“And for the record, I don’t yearn for relationships,” he finally bit out. “Because I don’t do them. Period.”
“Because of her?” Jayd rasped. “Asha?”
“Jesus wept,” he muttered, clawing both hands to his thighs. “No. Because of me.”
She shook her head, hoping to line up the point she was obviously missing. “You? Why?”
“Damn it.” His shoulders hunched, joining the clench of his knuckles. “I simply don’t go the distance, sweetheart. I’m not that guy. You don’t want me to be that guy. Don’t tell me you haven’t gotten that part yet.”
Jayd surrendered to a scowl, matching his own. “Sure,” she retorted. “I have completely gotten it, Brickham. That is why I went ahead and asked my silly question anyway. Just to irk you, right?”
The sarcasm was thicker than gourmet peanut butter but did the job for which it was intended. It stuck to him with stubborn tenacity—to the point she almost prepared for another of his hoarse apologies.
Almost.
Instead, he stretched the very threads of his shirt while hauling in a new breath. He slid his hands higher up his thighs, dragging with such force that Jayd was compelled to follow along with her gaze—until she could not. Well, not without confronting the prominent bulge between his legs. The medical scrubs were a sad substitute for his dark jeans in terms of hiding the dimensions of his body. Especially right…there…
“You do a lot of things to me, Pixie, but irking me isn’t one of them.” He had the sense to refrain from asking why she had not gotten that yet either. “Do you test my sanity sometimes? Well, yeah. But do you also surprise me, enchant me, and occasionally turn every cell in my brain upside down? Oh, hell yeah. That too.”
He tilted his head to one side as the opposite end of his mouth notched higher. Jayd liked the warmth that spread through her chest, rising to make her own lips twitch.
“Every brain cell?” she jibed. “But only occasionally?”
He chuffed with low sensuality. “Gotta spare me a few for stuff like breathing, walking, and shitting.”
The smoky tendrils in her chest became floating sparks through her body. Her lips twitched again. “That sounds do-able.” But then she gave in to a small smile. “Maybe even go-the-distance-able.”
So much for the smile. Or anything like it that might have been coming from Brickham.
She had counted on a change in his demeanor. She just didn’t know how huge. The darkness that took over his features was like night clouds across the moon. His subtle push away was just as gutting. If he wasn’t still clinging to his thighs, which kept her connected to him in some odd way, she likely would have gotten up and given up, no more questions asked.
They passed the better part of a minute, locked in that tense hell, before he broke the air with his serrated rasp.
“I’m sorry, Pixie. You’re mistaken about that. I mean it.”
Jayd drew in air on painful lungs. Well, now she was irked—in all the violent senses of the word.
“Says who?” she jabbed. “You and that grand jury behind you, my friend?”
“Don’t need a jury.” He channeled his darkness into a strange and troubling ease. “Life handed down my verdict a long time ago. I’ll be in solitary for the rest of my life. You know a lot of that origin story already.”
Her breaths were still acts of agony. She showed him just how much by letting the sting behind her eyes turn liquid.
“A lot of the story is not all of it,” she sobbed out. “If Asha hurt you that badly—”
“Christ,” he muttered. “I’ll only say this one more time, okay? It wasn’t her. It’s never been her.”
She compressed her lips, holding back a string of frustrated profanity. “Respectfully speaking, that still tells me nothing.”
One of his brows cocked. While lowering it, he hauled in a labored breath. “Tell me… Did you like everything we did in Paris, princess?”
Princess. There it was again, more awful and despicable than before. “I believe you already know the answer to that, Sir.”
Sir. Capital S this time, communicated by her hard emphasis. Though the man’s features hardly shifted, she sensed she had gotten past his thick skull this time.
“Adept answer,” he stated. “Registered and accepted.”
She nodded, unable to dim a subtle preen. “Merderim.”
“But if we were having this conversation in my normal world, in my real life, it would’ve gotten your ass reddened.”
It was a nice preen while it lasted. “Pardon me?”
“All of that…in Paris…was only wood shavings on my normal playing board.” His answer was more brutal to bear because he changed not a millimeter of his stance. If anything, he seemed huger now. Crueler. “Hard lives spit out hard men, sweetheart. You have to know by now that I’m one of them. And goddammit, how I wish that were some trite excuse to save your feelings, but it’s not. It’s my truth, and it’s not going to change.”
He finally did move, but only to fold his arms across the expanse of his chest. His gaze intensified to a sharp cobalt shade.
“At some point, I thought there might have been hope for me,” he went on. “To get…gentler, I suppose. Once there weren’t so many pressures on all my edges, maybe they’d get rounded off, and I’d be okay for a woman to hold for longer than a few moments in time.”
He blinked. In that single second, everything about him changed again. His shoulders sagged. The thunderheads had returned to his eyes. “But when those chances came, I turned them all down. I ran from the bevels. I ran toward the knives and the axes. My edges became my definition, my security…”
“Your identity,” Jayd filled in, nodding softly. “Like your very namesake.”
His nod was more a harsh tic of his head. “I didn’t want to redefine myself. I liked it where I was, despite knowing what I’d be giving up to do it.” He hitched his shoulders with the same gruff brevity. “This is me, Jayd. I’m a hard man. On myself and on others.”