Lucy nodded. “A lot.”
“But you didn’t judge us,” Rosie said. “You didn’t say one thing about a wrong decision, a cowardly one made by our brain in an attempt to protect our heart. You understand because you’re Polly. You love everyone, are kind to people even when they don’t deserve it. But the person who deserves the most love and kindness right now is yourself.”
Lucy nodded. “And Heath is not a blameless saint in all of this. Not from where I’m standing. You both made wrong decisions. And he has no fucking right to treat you the way he has, riding around on his high fucking horse.” Her voice was pinched in fury.
“Do not blow up his car,” I said suddenly, wiping a tear from my eye.
Lucy widened her own in a faux look of innocence. “I wasn’t even considering it.”
I raised my brow.
“I might’ve been considering it,” she amended. “But Keltan doesn’t let me handle explosives anymore so you’re safe.”
I wasn’t.
I was the farthest from safe I’d ever been in my life.
Chapter Twelve
I should’ve been getting more accustomed to seeing him.
But I had the same reaction to him outside my apartment building the next morning as I did to seeing him outside the shelter. In the Greenstone security offices when I got back from Europe. Seeing him outside my door before I left to Europe. Seeing him standing in front of me while I was wearing a wedding dress and he was telling me to run away with him.
Pain.
And a sense of strange relief in that pain.
A safety.
His gaze was the same as it had been since I left him on my doorstep.
Blank.
I guessed I deserved that.
No, I knew I deserved that. Despite what Rosie said the night before.
I was trying to be kind to myself. But I also had to be honest with myself.
Me lying to myself was what got us here in the first place. I had to own that blame.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him when he pushed off the wall and moved slightly toward me, but sure to keep distance between us.
“It’s Thursday,” he said by response, by greeting.
“I’m aware.” I was getting almost good at mimicking his cold tone.
Almost.
Or I was failing utterly and completely.
“You read to the kids at St. Mary’s on Thursdays,” he said.
I froze.
He didn’t rush to fill the silence. In fact, he didn’t fill it at all.
So it yawned on until I was recovered enough to speak.
“How do you know that?”
His face didn’t change. “Work at a security firm. It’s my job to know shit.”
It was his job.
“Right,” I whispered. “And I suppose there isn’t much shouting or sassing or cursing I could do to stop you from this ridiculous security detail?” I asked, realizing with everything that happened with Lucy and Rosie last night, I had not been able to further plead Lucy to work her wiles on Keltan to back off.
I made a mental note to call him.
Because this could not go on. Forget Craig doing me any kind of harm, this would kill me.
Something rippled underneath Heath’s glasses at my words. “You don’t shout, sass or curse.”
“I might if it would make a difference,” I shot back, if only to fight the fact he knew that simple yet intimate fact about me.
“It wouldn’t,” he said, voice iron.
I knew as much. Rosie and Lucy did shout, sass and curse during the times they had been tangled up with males who wanted to protect them.
Regularly.
I knew it didn’t make a difference. But then again, their stories were a little different than mine. They definitely didn’t involve them getting married to another man and having the man who they’d rejected tail them around after the fact.
The men they shouted, sassed and cursed actually cared about them.
“Right,” I repeated, this time slightly louder than a whisper.
Despite the facts, I should’ve been arguing this. That was what pretty much every other woman I knew who was involved in a somewhat similar situation did. Granted I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the now infamous Sons of Templar courtships. Mainly because I was always falling in and out of love, out of majors, and always into some form of trouble.
But I did follow them intently. Because they were the real-life version of a fairy tale. The stories weren’t pretty. Each of those women and the men had gone through types of pain no fiction writer could reproduce and certainly not market to children. The kind of pain that made a version of a happy ever after seem impossible.
But they got it.
All of them got it. And it filled me up with all sorts of hope and notions of love that no other book or movie could do.
But no way in heck did I want any of that for myself. There were explosions, kidnapping, all sorts of violence. Battles. The Sons of Templar lived for violence, so it stood to reason that it would be involved in their courtships.
As much as loved that it all worked out in the end, I didn’t want that for me. No matter what people might think, I had no need for dramatics in my love life. It seemed like it on the outside, what with the revolving door of boyfriends.
But I didn’t want that violence.
So it was why I was reluctant to fight Heath when he fell into step with me as I walked to my car. Because I knew him. Or I knew who he used to be. And back then, before the world had chipped away at each of us, he was stubborn, alpha and protective. He’d changed a lot. But that hadn’t. It had only intensified.
If I tried to fight him on this, I’d lose. I forced myself to breathe through the pain of his physical nearness and emotional distance.
He didn’t try to fill the silence as we walked to my car. He looked straight ahead with a tight jaw and his eyes hidden by sunglasses. I was glad of this. I didn’t want to look into his eyes. I couldn’t see the blankness in them this early in the morning.
I got to my car. And realized I didn’t have my keys in my hand. This was something that happened every morning when I didn’t leave them on the coffee table in the apartment, of course. I’d have thrown them into my bag and then spent five minutes digging through it to find them again. It didn’t bother me when I was alone, I was never in a rush anywhere, anyway. Even if I was late. Because rushing when you were late was a sure-fire way to somehow make yourself take twice as long to do everything like find your keys in your purse. I wasn’t usually bothered by the extra five minutes looking for my keys.
But five minutes more in front of a silent Heath was about as appetizing as five minutes of waterboarding.
In fact, I would’ve preferred the waterboarding.
“So, you’ll forgive me if I don’t know the procedure for something like this,” I said, looking into my purse, desperate to fill the silence. “Are you riding with me or...?”
I dragged out the question in a prayer. I could not handle being in an enclosed space with him. The clutter of my car was nothing compared to the emotional junk of our past rattling along through L.A. traffic.
“Fuck no,” he clipped immediately.
My flinch was hidden by jerky movements to look for my keys. My hands finally felt the fabric of my keyring. I clutched them but didn’t yank my hand out of my purse, or lift my eyes. I didn’t trust myself to do that.