But I’d missed him.
I’d realized what I was doing without.
I needed more, but I needed to figure out the landscape of what 'more' looked like.
I couldn't do that without him.
“Come upstairs with me?” he growled against my lips.
I nodded and pressed a softer peck on his mouth. “Of course. I’m still needed down here, but later…?”
As my words trailed off, he nodded.
Reaching up, I let my fingers trace his jaw and whispered, “I like this.”
“It was Wynter’s suggestion.”
I smiled at him. “It was?”
“She seemed to think it might help you.”
He'd...
God, he'd told her that?
Nervously, I asked, “You explained…?”
“I did. I think she wants us to be together.” Something flickered in his eyes. “She isn’t the only one.”
A shaky breath escaped me. “I want that too.”
“How do we make it happen?”
“You don’t look like Grizzly now,” I whispered, unaware that my heart was in my eyes.
He gritted his teeth. “I wish I’d known that before.”
“How… What—” I paused. “I couldn’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“You’d have killed him.”
“I should have. You denied me that.”
“I kept you safe, and he’d have lied, Rex. He’d have told you I asked for it.” My mouth trembled. “I-I couldn’t have taken you believing him and not me. I-I think that would have broken me more than what they did. Them telling me I was like my mom, that I was just a whore...” I shuddered. “No. It was for the best.”
His face flushed with his temper, but he didn’t argue. Just looked at me with gleaming eyes that burned like hot coals. “I’d have known the truth.”
“How could you?”
“You’re mine, Rachel. You always have been, and you always will be.”
“You never branded me.”
His brow furrowed but those goddamn eyes of his set me alight. “You were too young, and after, you broke up with me. Ever since, it’s not like we’ve been going steady, is it?”
It wasn’t like I could argue with him, even if a part of me wanted to.
“No,” I conceded with a grimace.
“Brand or no, you’ve had a ‘hands off’ sign to anyone who knows us both. I won’t mark you until you know for goddamn sure that you’re all in, Rachel, and you can’t tell me that you are now. I won’t believe you.”
It hurt, but I got it.
There was a ball of emotions in my chest that I couldn’t seem to unravel, and I stared at him, feeling lost and afraid yet somehow found and safe because I was with him.
“What is it, Rach?” he rasped. “Where’s this coming from?”
“It’s coming from the fact that I want your brand.”
“Don’t say shit like that unless you mean it," he reiterated, tiredly this time. "It isn’t fair, Rachel. It isn’t fucking fair.”
His anger burned away by that point, instead, turning to hurt.
Hurt.
I’d hurt him.
I hadn’t even meant to.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because you’re fucking breaking me, Rach. You’ve spent the last twenty years wrecking me, destroying everything I know about myself. Making me change and alter how I do shit to accommodate you.
“Every day, I wanted to kill whoever hurt you. Every fucking day. But I couldn’t. Because you didn’t tell me. You didn’t share with me. I had to wait. I knew that I did. It wouldn’t mean the same if I forced you to tell me, because that was just me, being another fucking bastard who owned a dick imposing my will on you.
“I was not about to be a man who took something from you like that. I was not going to be like them. But it hurt me, Rach. It hurt me not to fix shit. Not to make it better, not to make the world right for you again.” He pressed his fist to his heart. “It killed me to take Wynter away, to give her to someone else to raise, but I did it because having her near was killing you.
"I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, so I did what I thought was right—I gave her to Ally. She had more maternal instinct than Carol Brady—”
I knew the words burst free from jealousy. “How do you even know her?”
His gaze was measured upon mine. “She dated Link for a while. You have no reason to be jealous.”
Gritting my teeth, I turned away from him. “Things should have been different.”
“Damn straight they should have been,” he snapped. “In no way am I comparing this with what you went through, but Grizzly stole our future from us both; that didn’t just happen to you.
“You’re the love of my fucking life. You’re my soul mate, Rach, and I can’t touch you sometimes without thinking you’re about to leap out of your skin. I want to make him hurt like he made you hurt. I want him to suffer how you have. Because, baby, if I feel like hell, if I feel like my life is on hiatus because of him, how the fuck do you feel?
“Fixing is what I do for the people I love. I make shit right, but there’s no making this shit right. I can only do that by being there for you, to be whatever you need me to be for you, but I don’t even know if that’s enough. This has been our reality for almost two fucking decades, Rach—”
Staring into his tortured eyes, I reached up and pressed a finger to his lips to still his words. “You’re right. They stole from us both.” I sucked in a breath. “I’m tired of that being our reality, Rex. I’m tired of my life being stolen from me.”
I pressed my forehead against his shoulder, and as I did, the solid presence of the pooch on my belly made itself known to me. It was too small for him, but not for me to recognize.
The ability to raise Wynter had been hijacked from me.
The chance of living a full and happy life with this man had been robbed from me too.
And I’d let it happen.
I’d let them win.
His hands slid around my waist and he held me against him.
It felt so fucking good.
So right.
Our babies were the only people who should ever come between us.
No one else.
Nerves hit me, but his anger wasn’t what scared me. It never had been.
“Dance with me?”
I blinked in surprise at his request, my words blown from me as he snatched the wind from my sails. “Can you dance?” I blurted out.
His grin was sheepish. “Yeah. I can dance. Mom taught me.”
“Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that lesson.”
“I hated every minute of it,” he groused, “but she was right about one thing.”
He twisted us so that I no longer leaned against him as he guided us over to the edge of the dance floor so we weren’t making a nuisance of ourselves to the wait staff.
“What’s that?” I asked as I found myself back in his arms.
“There’d come a day when I’d want to dance with my woman and I’d thank her then.”
Heat filled me when I reached up and settled my arms on his shoulders just as his hands went to my waist, and slowly, we started to move against the other.