He couldn’t do it ever, ever again.
Oh hell. What had Serena done?
Cole had been leaning on her, emotionally and physically, surrender written into every line of him, and the intimacy of it had floored her. When he’d pulled away, he’d done so with such reluctance, all stoic reserve, as if he’d allowed himself too much in that single moment of letting go. It had only made her want to give him more.
This simmering attraction she’d felt from the first moment she’d seen him had bubbled over—and he’d loved it, was the thing. She shivered, spine still pressed against the fridge he’d backed her into. He’d returned her kiss with so much passion, like a dam breaking, and her skin thrummed, glowing and perfect, his touch and lips burned deep into her flesh.
But he was on the other side of the room now. He might be farther if there was anywhere left for him to go.
And she could already hear it. Regret.
She shook her head. “Cole—”
“I can’t.”
He might as well have hurled the words themselves at her. They stung like tiny blades between her ribs.
“You can’t?”
“No.” Eyes haunted, expression wretched, he gazed back at her. His knuckles were white where they gripped the edge of the counter behind him, like it was the only thing holding him up.
She paused. Because that wasn’t I don’t want to or Sorry but I’m not interested. Maybe she should let it go, but she could taste the heat of his kiss on her tongue. Could feel his chest pressed against her breasts and the growing hardness between his hips.
“Why not?”
His mouth opened, only to snap shut again. “I just—” He cut himself off, seeming to start and stop again a dozen times. But then he drew himself up taller, flexing his jaw as he shifted his weight to his uninjured leg. That terribly broken, terribly proud look of his passed across his features again, and he dropped his gaze. “Could you hand me my crutches, please?”
She very nearly said no. She’d held the damn things hostage from him before, and she wasn’t afraid to do it again.
What on earth would that prove, though? Bullying him into talking to her wasn’t going to help anything, and it hurt some tender place inside her to see him stuck like that. Unable to move or get away.
Sighing, she peeled herself from the fridge, crouching to gather them up. She took a couple of steps toward him before offering them out. When he went to take them from her, she stopped short, not letting go.
“Why not?” she repeated.
He tugged harder, pulling the crutches from her hands. This time she didn’t resist.
It was an awkward shuffle as he got them situated under his arms again. A pang zipped through her as he leaned his weight into them and used them to turn himself around. Showing her his back, he pulled in a huge breath that rattled his shoulders. He hung his head.
“I made a promise,” he said. “My wife. What happened to her that night. I could have prevented it. If I hadn’t—” He craned his neck to peer at her over his shoulder. “I can’t be with anyone. I won’t.”
“Oh.”
The ache in her heart grew and grew. How long had he been living like this? He’d told her when they’d first met that he didn’t have anyone he could call. No family and no friends. The loneliness of it twisted inside her gut.
Part of her wanted so badly to try to change his mind, to show him what he’d been living without. But there’d been a finality to his statement.
He only cemented it as he faced away from her again. “I’m sorry. Kissing you back. It was a mistake.”
Dropping her hands to her sides, she swallowed. It hadn’t felt like a mistake to her. She wasn’t about to apologize for starting it, not when it had felt so good. So right.
Gritting his teeth, he eked out, “I’ll understand if you want to go.”
For a long moment, she stared at him. He wasn’t kicking her out this time at least, but he was pushing her away all the same. And it struck her.
How many other people had he edged out of his life?
How many times had Serena’s sister tried to edge her out of hers?
She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. It wouldn’t be easy to forget the slick press of his mouth or the heat of his hands on her, but she could put it aside for now. He needed her. He needed someone.
Decided, she bent down to wrap unsteady hands around the carton of eggs he’d hurled. She rose to stand and made her way over to the counter, hoping against hope as she opened the lid.
She let out a breath. “Here,” she said, voice gentle. “Look.”
All the eggs on one side of the carton had smashed, thick yolk bleeding out from the shattered shells. But there were still a few intact. A few that could be saved.
“How many did we need again?” she asked.
In a slow, uneven movement, he turned to look at her. His gaze darted down to the carton in her hands and then up to connect with hers. There was something pleading to those dark, stormy eyes.
Throat rasping, he answered, “Two. Do you think we can salvage that many?”
“Yeah.” A low tide of relief swept in. They were speaking the same language here. Both working to say the same thing.
She’d only known this man for a little over a week, and she hadn’t been lying when she’d said she liked her life the way it was. She liked her job and her friends, and she loved taking care of her family.
But already, she liked her life better with him in it. She liked the thrills he shot through her when he looked at her. The touch of his hand and the lilt of his voice. The set of his eyes.
She liked the way he kissed her, too.
Maybe, at least for now, he couldn’t bring himself to give her what she wanted. But she was patient. She could prove herself worthy of his trust.
And in the meantime...
She plucked two whole, perfect eggs from the mess they’d made of the rest of them. Meeting his gaze, she nodded. “I think we’ve got everything we need.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cole could not stop staring.
Max’s head was bent to the problems Cole had set him to, pencil clasped between skinny fingers, his tongue sticking out of his mouth.
The skin around his eye bloomed with a vivid, vicious bruise.
Cole dug his nails into the palm of his hand, letting out a harsh huff of a breath through his nose. At the sound, Max glanced up, one eyebrow raised, and Cole forced himself to look away.
Not that that was any better. His gaze went unerringly, instinctively to where Serena sat grading papers on the couch. His throat went tight for an entirely different set of reasons at the sight of her. The soft fall of that golden hair and the pout of her lip.
His heart squeezed hard behind his ribs. Nearly a week had passed since his disastrous attempt to teach her how to bake. In the end, the biscuits they’d made had turned out perfectly, but it didn’t matter. The buttery, chocolate crumbs turned to ash on his tongue. All he could taste was her mouth.
All he could see was her face as he’d torn himself away.
Fuck, but it had been the last thing on earth he’d wanted to do. She’d felt so good beneath his hands, all her curves pressed against him. A part of him was desperate to storm right over to her this instant and lay claim to her again. Another part went icy and aching and cold.
Biting back a wretched little whine of disgust with himself, he dropped his gaze. Scowling, vision swimming, he did his best to stare a bloody hole into the surface of the table.
In the intervening days, Serena had tried to keep things normal between them—as normal as they could get for two people who barely knew each other and yet whose lives had become so suddenly and swiftly entwined. She’d taken him to his doctor’s appointment and invited him down to tutor Max again. She’d held her chin high, and her voice had stayed strong, but her smile had started cracking around the edges. One more thing he’d managed to ruin.
One more reason his decision
had been the right one.
Before he could belabor the point much further, Max lifted his head, stretching his arms out to the side before settling back down and turning his paper around so Cole could see. Thank God basic decimals didn’t take too much of his attention. He went through the work with a sliver of his focus, nodding in approval at the vast majority of it. Clucking in his head at whatever moron had been teaching the boy these concepts in the past.
It made him nostalgic, honestly. He’d never been much good at teaching, back before his career had gone off the rails, but he’d had a success or two. Watching Max discover a talent for mathematics brought him a certain sense of satisfaction.
Made him wish his professorship wasn’t another thing he’d managed to lose.
After correcting a couple of minor errors, he turned the page. “Think you’ve got one more section in you?” he asked.
Serena piped up. “His grandma’s not coming for another half hour.”
That hadn’t been the question, but Cole held his tongue. With a sigh of resignation, Max folded his arms on the table and rested his chin atop his hands. “Go for it.”
Cole did just that, aware all the time of the ears listening in from the other room. As he spoke, he kept having to restrain himself, to steer his gaze away from the edges of that bruise. To not glance over at Serena. To keep his thoughts about it all to himself.
As he scribbled out a handful of examples for Max to work, a harsh tone rent the air. He ignored it, pushing the page across the table. Max dug in. Over on the couch, Serena found her phone. She swung her hair over her shoulder and away from her ear, exposing the long, pale column of her neck, and Cole swallowed, looking away.
“Hello?...Oh, hi, yes.”
There was a rustling of papers, and out of the corner of his eye, Cole watched as she stood. She picked her way across the room and disappeared around the corner. A second later, the door to one of the bedrooms closed, muffling her voice.
Leaving Max and Cole alone.
Cole’s heart thundered in his chest. The mottled purples and blues around Max’s eye faded out to a sickly green at the edge of his temple, and he remembered what that felt like. Keenly.
As if he could feel Cole’s gaze on him, Max’s grip on his pencil tightened, his knuckles going white, his shoulders tensing.
Fuck. What right did Cole have? He didn’t know this boy or his situation; he knew nothing beyond the vague echoes of his own. There wasn’t any reason for him to get involved. For years now, he’d been doing everything in his power not to get involved.
Except when a teen on the train had been robbed in broad fucking daylight.
Except when a boy was being beaten to a pulp and nobody was doing anything.
Cole set his pencil down with a solid, resonating thunk. Max flinched, and that alone had bile swimming in Cole’s stomach, flashes passing across his eyes, but they weren’t what mattered right now.
“So.” He flexed his jaw, then pointed toward the boy’s eye. “Another wild pitch?”
Max’s whole body seemed to shrink, his spine curling in on itself. Fixing his gaze on the paper in front of him, he turned his pencil over, scrubbing the eraser across the page until it tore. “I fell.”
“Did you now.”
Max gave a single, jerky nod.
Cole’s vision tinged with red. He wanted to tear that school apart. That playground or that alleyway. Where the bloody hell were the fucking grown-ups?
“You need to tell someone.”
Finally, twin green eyes met his, fire tinging their edges. From behind thick lenses, they glared at him. “Like who?”
Cole’s throat ached. “A teacher. Principal. Your grandmother.” Your aunt.
Serena was a teacher, wasn’t she? Didn’t she know the signs?
Max shook his head. “Teachers don’t do anything. Tattling just makes it worse, anyway.”
Helpless rage filled Cole’s useless hands, a tide of memories welling up and threatening to pull him under. He knew the story too well.
And God. Fuck. He hated to ask, the very question punching through him like the kick that’d cracked his ribs, and for a blinding moment he was there. He tasted blood, and his breath burned, cold pavement stinging his palm.
The shattered fragment of his broken glasses slicing cleanly through his lip.
“Have you ever tried fighting back?”
Max dropped his gaze, his mumble barely reaching Cole’s ears. “How do you think I got this?”
Cole would kill them. He’d smash their laughing faces in with his own bare hands. Just like he had...
He bit down on the inside of his cheek. “Running away?”
“Works sometimes.”
As Cole looked on, Max bent his head back to his work, the scratching of his pencil the only sound besides the roar inside Cole’s ears. Because what comfort could he offer? He’d fought his way out of a scrape or two. He’d run. But mostly he’d existed until the anger ate his very lungs away.
Until he’d escaped. But the hot, red thing behind his ribs had never left him. He’d survived and he’d succeeded, but he’d lost a part of himself.
The part that had known how to stop.
“They’ll outgrow it eventually,” he said, and it was the worst imaginable reassurance. All he could offer was...“Or at least mine did.”
Max’s head snapped up, his eyes widening. “You got bullied?”
“Mercilessly. For years.” He tried to smile, but the tugging in his lip was a red-hot brand. A reminder.
“What’d you do?”
“The same things you’ve tried. But in the end, I mostly kept my head down.” He’d kept his silence. He’d let resentment drip like acid in his heart. “It gets better. And worse. But by the time you get to university...” The smile came easier this time, but not much. “It doesn’t matter anymore. You keep living your life.”
Outrage twisted Max’s features. Outrage and despair. “You have to wait until college?”
And Cole could just see it. The years and years spread out, never seeming to end.
“It might not be that bad.” His mouth flashed painfully dry with the weight of the lie.
What was he doing here? He was cocking this up—was absolute rubbish with children. With life.
Helen had fought so hard to convince him that he could be a father, but he’d known in his heart that she was wrong. And it all came down to this. An inability to relate to people and a violence in his limbs. A keen awareness how impossibly cruel the world could be to children—what it could turn them into. What it had turned him into.
His torment as a boy had started him down that road. He wanted so badly to spare Max the worst of it, to keep him innocent and sweet, but what could he do?
A spark of hope lit bright green eyes, and it fractured something in Cole’s heart. “What about at a better school? Like, a really, really good school.”
Cole struggled to swallow his groan. Upton. Of course.
“There aren’t any promises...”
“But it’d be better, right? At least a little?”
“Perhaps.”
But Cole had gone to a good school, and it hadn’t helped.
It seemed to satisfy the boy regardless. He attacked the numbers with the fervor he might’ve liked to turn on his tormenters. Like the decimals and fractions could save him.
What Cole would give to do that himself.
Well. He’d do what he could.
“I have to tell your aunt.” It wasn’t quite asking permission, but it wasn’t quite not that, either. It was trying not to break a child’s trust.
Scowling, Max opened his mouth. But before whatever protest was twisting his lips could make it out, the back bedroom door creaked open, and it was like a rug flopping over the whole thing. Max straightened in his chair, pencil moving across the page, and Cole was struck dumb as Serena padded back out.
“Sorry about that,” she said. She hesitated, pausing in the doorway to the ki
tchen. “You guys okay in here?”
Pleading eyes turned to Cole’s. And maybe it was the bruise. Maybe the glasses.
Swallowing, Cole nodded. “Brilliant.”
Relief seemed to ease Max’s shoulders. Appeased, Serena turned away, but the burning thing behind Cole’s ribs didn’t ease at all.
He had to say something. He had to do something. Before it was too late.
“Don’t forget to give those papers to your grandma, now, okay?”
Max rolled his eyes. Well, eye, considering the other one was almost swollen shut. “I won’t.”
Serena shook her head as she leaned down, holding out her fist for their secret handshake, counting the bumps and slaps in her head instinctively. When they were done, she ruffled his hair and pulled him in for one last hug. Then she tugged open the door, and he shot through it about twice as fast as she would like. She twisted her mouth to the side. She probably should’ve yelled at him to go slower, considering the spill he’d taken on the stairs at school the other day.
Or at least the one he’d said he’d taken.
Frowning, she crossed over to the window to watch him pile into her mother’s car, waving when her mom looked up. She returned her hand back to her chest, worrying at her necklace.
It wasn’t like Max to lie. He was a sweet kid, a good kid, but he was entering those preteen years where people changed. Already, he was getting quieter, more withdrawn. And he’d been having an awful lot of accidents lately.
Not for the first time, she wished Penny were here. Serena’s mom did the best she could with Max, but she wasn’t as young as she used to be, and Serena only had him a few hours a day. If something were wrong, really wrong...
“He’s being bullied at school, you know.”
Serena whipped around. It wasn’t as if she’d actually forgotten Cole was there. It was almost impossible to, what with the way his presence could fill a room. But she’d been so focused on Max.
Apparently, so had he.
While Max had been getting his stuff together, Cole had risen from the table. He’d gotten as far as the cutout between her kitchen and the living room. He leaned against the wall there now, crutches under his arms, a messenger bag slung over his shoulder. And the vision of him there, tall and proud, color high on his cheeks as he stared straight at her struck her dumb.
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