“Right.”
Apparently that wasn’t the answer he was looking for.
Ian stood up abruptly and paced away, scraping a hand through his hair, growling in frustration. Two paces forward, halt, hand through his hair again, and then he stalked back toward me, grabbed me by the arms and hauled me to my feet.
“Ian? What—what are you doing?”
He didn’t answer. Not in words, at least. He grabbed my arms and shoved them behind my back, imprisoned my wrists together in one of his massive paws. His big body was crushed up against mine, and he used his grip on my wrists as leverage to shove me harder against his body. All my softness was smashed up against his hardness. His other hand slid around the other side of my body, the edge of his wrist knifing past my neck, gripping my ponytail in his fist, roughly tugging so my face was tilted up to him.
“Tell me to go away, Nina.”
I just stared at him, saying nothing.
“Tell me you don’t love me.”
I swallowed hard, licked my lips. Blinked, tears sliding down my face, heart slamming against my ribs like a caged animal seeking freedom.
“Tell me this all has meant nothing to you. That I mean nothing to you. That you can live without me. That nothing will ever be the same after London. After that night.”
It wasn’t that words were lodged in my throat, it was that I had no words to begin with.
“Say fucking something, Nina.”
“I—Ian, I…” I had nothing. I couldn’t disagree with him, but all my fears were coming to life, all my insecurities, everything that had ever held me back, it was all there in my head, telling me even coming to England had been a mistake, flirting with Ian on the plane had been a mistake, letting him ravage me and kiss me and fuck me and change me had been a mistake, running away had been an even bigger mistake, and what happened with Lucas had been the biggest mistake of all.
“Ian, I’m sorry.”
His grip loosened, and an even stronger fear snaked through me: he was about to let go, about to walk away. And that fear dislodged a torrent of words.
“Ian, I’m so, so sorry. I shouldn’t have run. I shouldn’t have been such a fucking stupid coward. I shouldn’t have left you. I shouldn’t have come to Oxford. I shouldn’t have slept with Lucas. I should have…I should have…”
“But you didn’t.”
I felt the tears slip down. One, two, three. A dozen. All sliding silently down my cheek. He didn’t wipe them away. He didn’t let go of my hair, or my wrists. I was pinned against him, head tilted back on my neck, breasts crushed against the hard wall of his chest, his arms circling me.
“I’m sorry, Ian.”
Instead of answering, he bent, teased his lips across mine. Tease, tease, tease. Lips brushing mine, tongue scraping over my upper lip, teeth nipping at my lower lip. Hips, grinding in slow, torturous, erotic circles.
I was crying, heartbroken, sorrowful, and he was turning me on? How was this possible? It was, though. Through my tears, I felt my nipples tighten, felt my core moisten, felt my belly clench and my lungs contract, blowing out the last of my oxygen.
“Ian?”
And then he kissed me. Not like before. Not gently. Not as a reminder. This was…claiming. Demanding. Punishing. It was a rough kiss, teeth clacking against teeth, breath blasting against breath, lips mashed against mine. He jerked me closer, towering over me, tugging on my ponytail until I was off-balance, leaning back on my heels, head craned as far back as it would go. And he kissed me and kissed me and kissed me, as if sucking the memory of the last three weeks right out of my soul via my mouth.
I thought my lips might split, might bruise. Thought he’d kiss me and then let me go, let me topple backward and then stride out the door.
Instead, he broke the kiss and left me gasping, eased back a step so I could regain my balance, let my head tip forward, released my wrists. Left me standing on my own power. Just stared at me, eyes hot and needy and furious with…
Love.
Fuck. He loved me?
Jesus, he loved me.
And he was waiting for me to decide what I wanted. I could refuse him, here and now. Play it safe. Make some excuse and get Lucas to take me back, go for the easy, safe path. Lucas would love me too, I knew that. He’d forgive me, and he’d take me back, and we’d have intense and overwhelming sex, and he’d make me come half a dozen times every night.
But…
He wouldn’t be Ian.
“I’m scared.” It wasn’t even a whisper, really, more a fragile breath, a delicate exhalation. “Of being loved. Of loving. Of not being good enough. I’m scared that you might be attracted to me now, but in a few years, you won’t be. That I’ll gain thirty pounds and you’ll leave. If we…we went with this, got together and made it work, I know you’d love me. We’d get married. I’d get pregnant, and I’d gain fifty pounds, and some of it would never come off. And then I’d have another kid, and there’d be a few more pounds that just wouldn’t come off. And then one day…one day I’m not the same woman you married, and—and—”
He shut me up with a kiss. A gentle one. The gentlest. A butterfly’s wings fluttering the air, the touch of a summer breeze, the sunlight on closed eyelids.
“This is still about your weight?” He didn’t tip my face up, this time. He spoke to the top of my head. “Nina, sweetheart. Love sees beyond the numbers on a scale. It sees beyond the circumference of your waist, or your hips, or your chest. It sees beyond an extra five or however many pounds you may or may not gain. Sweetheart, love, real love—it’s a decision. Not just an emotion, or attraction. It’s not hoping it’ll work out somehow. I’ve been through that. I’ve loved someone and had it fall apart because we weren’t both totally invested. I won’t do it again. And you know what, if you can’t trust me to love you whether you weigh a hundred and fifty pounds or two hundred and fifty, then this won’t work.”
“I’m just supposed to trust you won’t care what I look like in twenty years?”
“Exactly. It’s a risk, Nina. You won’t ever know with one hundred percent certainty. That’s why love is scary. I’ve risked, and I’ve had my heart broken. More than once, actually. But here’s the thing: when you left, when I woke up alone and all your shit was gone, it was worse than when I realized Jamie had never really truly loved me, that she’d been in love with Chase Delany the whole time.”
“Wait, Chase Delany from Six Foot Tall?”
“Yeah, that Chase Delany.” He sounded irritated to have to acknowledge it. “She was in love with him the whole time, and was just using me to hide from it, because she was scared. And when she broke up with me, I tried to play it cool, but it fucking hurt. I was an asshole about it, I guess, but I’d just had my heart shit on. And like I said, when I realized you’d bolted, that hurt worse than what happened with Jamie. It took this long just for me to decide if I had the balls to let you explain. To decide if I could risk my heart yet again.”
“And you did.” This, through slowing tears.
“And now you’re telling me you’re holding out on me because you’re worried you may put on a bit of weight in a few years? If that’s what’s bothering you, then why don’t we go eat a bunch of cheeseburgers and we can get fat together? I don’t care, Nina. More than that, I love you exactly how you are. You’re beautiful to me, as you are. And assuming you have the fucking stones to try this with me, I’ll still love you in five or ten or fifty years, regardless of how you look. Because you’ll be beautiful to me then, too.”
“Jesus, Ian.” I could barely get the words out, because I’d lost it all over again.
“Nope, no Jesus here. Just me.”
“Shut up,” I laughed. “What about—”
“Logistics are easy, Nina. Quit making excuses.” He drew a breath, let it out. Cupped my cheeks in both of his hands. “Tell me you love me, or tell me to leave.”
CHAPTER 10
I pushed myself up against him, let myself melt into him, ran
my hands up his chest, clung to the back of his neck. I turned my face up to his, blinking slowly. Parted my lips. I felt every inch of his hardness, the mountain of his muscles, the heat of his breath, the expectant blaze in his eyes. I lifted up, ready to kiss him until it all went away—
He pulled out of my arms, shaking his head. “No, Nina. You can’t kiss your way out of this, either.”
“Ian—”
“Tell me you love me, or tell me to leave.”
“Stop fucking interrupting me!”
“Then answer the fucking question!”
“It wasn’t a question, it was an ultimatum.”
“Yes, it was.”
“You can’t just strut around issuing ultimatums, Ian!”
He looked irritatingly calm. “Sure I can. And I’m not strutting.”
“Ian, goddammit—”
“I can demand you face up to yourself, Nina. To me. To us. You walked away, and we’ve both admitted what we felt that night. And we both know that was just the moment when we both really realized what was going on with us. You walked away, Nina. And I came after you.”
“A month later!”
“Yeah, well, I have a job, a life, a career. This is real life, Nina, and in real life, you can’t just drop everything and jump on a train to claim the love of your life. Especially when you don’t know—I didn’t know why you ran, Nina. If I’d been sure you loved me, if I’d been sure it was just fear, I may have. If you’d said something, like ‘this just won’t work, I can’t do long distance,’ something like that, if you’d left me anything at all to work with, to go on, I may have been willing to walk away from my brand-new job. Because, yeah, I do believe that the right kind of love is worth sacrifice, is worth walking away from jobs. But you just vanished, Nina. You left without a word, without an explanation, and you left me with nothing but doubts and worries and what-ifs.”
“You’re right,” I admitted.
“I know I’m right!” He brushed my cheek with his thumb. “But I’m here. And I’m willing to start from where we are now, from right here. But not if you aren’t willing to be real about this. If you aren’t willing to risk, to admit, to…to be really, really fucking real about this, then what am I doing standing here with my heart in my hand?”
He was right. He was so right.
In romance novels—the great measuring stick against which all of my experiences are compared—when the heroine is faced with this kind of make it or break it, now or never sort of decision, the choice seems glaringly obvious. Like, duh, you stupid cow, go get him! Say yes! He loves you, what are you waiting for?
In life, though, nothing is ever that obvious, or simple. I mean, yeah, he loves me. He’d come after me, and he was still here claiming to love me even after finding out about Lucas. But nothing in my life had ever prepared me for the reality of loving someone, or being loved. My parents loved each other, and they loved us girls, too. I knew that, intellectually. Mom and Dad have been married for thirty years; you don’t make it that long without loving each other. But I’d never seen them be affectionate with each other. Never heard them say “I love you” to each other. And I’d also never been told by them that they love me. It just wasn’t their way. I’d never told any of my previous boyfriends that I loved them, and they hadn’t said it to me.
I grew up knowing in an abstract, mental sort of way that my parents and my sisters loved me, knew it because we were family, knew it because family loved each other. They took care of me, provided for me, spent time with me. We went to the zoo, to movies, to concerts, the odd holiday Mass, to dinner and to lunch. We were family. Family loved each other. My parents were together, never argued in front of us, were never mean or cruel. My dad may not have understood or agreed with my choice in career or degree, but I knew it didn’t compromise our familial bond. I wouldn’t be disowned over it; get-togethers might be a bit strained for a while, but that’s it.
But all that? It’s totally different than trying to come to grips with the reality of someone totally unrelated to you claiming to love you, someone who owes you no loyalty, no bond of blood. That’s not so easy to understand. Not when “I love you” is such an unfamiliar phrase. Ian didn’t have to love me. He chose to. Because he wanted to. How the hell was I supposed to be able to just…deal with that?
“Nina?” Ian’s voice, nudging me out of my thoughts.
I’d spaced out, apparently, turning everything over in my head.
I looked up at him, looked deep into his pale, beautiful blue eyes.
And then, just like in my beloved books, it all became clear.
Dude, epiphanies hurt.
It just hit me, like a ton of bricks upside the head, like a spear to the heart.
I loved him. I mean, of course I loved him. How could I not? How could I ever doubt it? A flash of memory: Ian, in the moment just after withdrawing from my body, kneeling over me on my bed. Big, beautiful, sweat-coated, sex-sated. His eyes boring into mine, shining and blue and intense, seeing me, knowing me. Getting me.
Loving me.
That moment when I pulled him down and rolled into the nook. Falling asleep in his arms. Hearing him tell me he loved the way I’m shaped.
Jesus. How could I have walked away from that?
A tear trickled down my left cheek. Then the right. Then a dozen, a hundred, all sluicing freely down my face. Ian didn’t wipe these away. All I could do was stare up at him and cry, feeling the full force of everything between us, in him, in me.
“Say it,” I whispered.
A step closer to me, his body back against mine, sheltering, heat billowing, hardness against softness, his hands on my face. Blue eyes on mine, unwavering. Brave and bold, so much more courageous than me. “I love you, Nina.”
Something inside me swelled, burgeoned, and then cracked from fullness, and kept expanding. Tears fell hotter, and harder. And then I laughed, hiccuping, wiping away tears.
“I’m such an idiot,” I said, between hiccups and laughter and tears.
“Nina—”
My turn to interrupt him. “I love you, Ian.” It came out as ILOVEYOUIAN, though, rushed, too loud, and all in one breath.
He let out a half-sigh, half-laugh. “Can you say that again, only slower?”
“Kiss me first.”
“No.”
I frowned. “No? Why not?”
His gaze heated. “Because if I kiss you again, I’m not going to stop. Not at just one kiss. I won’t be able to stop until…oh, next Tuesday, at least.”
It was Friday, just FYI.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh. So say it again, and more slowly. So I can hear each little syllable on those lush lips of yours.”
“I have lush lips?”
“The lushest.”
I sniffed, and cupped the back of his head. Tugged his face down, rubbed my apparently lush lips against his. “I love you, Ian Stirling.” I whispered it, because part of me was still scared that if I said it too loud, it would all go away, or turn out to be a dream.
“There you go.” He bit my lower lip, tugged it, let it go. “One more time? It just sounds so good.”
I giggled. “Now you’re just teasing me.”
“Maybe a little. Haven’t I earned a few teasing rights?”
“Maybe a little.” I was breathless, suddenly, because his lips were at my neck and descending lower.
“How about a little game?” He pressed his lips to my skin at the apex of the V of my T-shirt. “I’ll kiss you, and help you out of these pesky clothes. But if you want me to keep going, you’re going to have to keep telling me you love me. And once I start getting to the really good stuff, I’m going to want to hear it real loud, just so there’s no more confusion.”
“Oh. Um. Okay?” Kiss me? Clothes off? That’s all that registered. His mouth on my skin, his hands on my shoulders sliding down to the hem of my shirt…that took up all my brain space.
And then he was kneeling in front of me, peeling
my shirt up and up—and stopping. Stopping? His mouth touched my belly, my sides, the lower edge of my ribcage…and then stopped.
“Ian?” It was a raw plea, in the form of a question, in the form of his name.
He got it, though. “Did you forget the rules of the game already?”
“Maybe.”
“You want me to take your shirt off?”
“Yes.”
He pressed his lips to my skin just above the button of my jeans. “You want me to strip these jeans off?”
“Yes.”
He flicked open the snap. “You want me to kiss away the last month of your life?”
“God…yes. Please, Ian.”
“Then play the game.”
I’d forgotten the game. Something about…something. “How does it go, again?”
He laughed, a low amused rumble in his chest. “Tell me you love me, Nina.”
“I love you, Ian.”
He lowered the zipper of my jeans, gathered a handful of denim at the backs of my knees and gave a good tug, bringing the jeans down around my thighs. I gasped at the suddenness of it, and at the fact that my underwear came down an inch or two as well, baring the top of my opening. His lips touched that sliver of intimate skin, and I let out a moan. His fingers gathered denim, slid it down around my ankles, guided my feet out, and then I heard the soft plop of my pants hitting the floor some distance away. Air on my bare legs. Underwear off-kilter around my hips, pussy slightly bared, Ian’s lips on my flesh.
And then his hands skated up my hips and over my belly, caught my shirt in his fingers and shoved back up to just beneath my breasts. “Say it, Nina.”
Oh. Now I get it. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
“Ha. Nice try. That only counts as one, though.”
“No fair.”
“I’m playing to win, you know.”
“Me too,” I said.
He pushed my shirt up over my breasts, kissing my sides and belly, and then his palms brushed against my breasts over the cups of my bra. He stood up, tore the shirt off over my head and tossed it away. He closed the distance between us, the few inches that there was, and his palms raced over my back, toying with the straps of my bra.
Big Love Abroad (Big Girls Do It Book 11) Page 19
