by Nicole Helm
But her hand was pressed there, against his shirt. He could feel the warm, firm imprint of it, and things inside of him seemed to shift, reach out for that touch. He had the horrifying, unstoppable desire to tell her.
Everything.
And then, as if on cue, the lights cut out.
* * *
It was still light enough outside that they weren’t plunged into total darkness, but it broke whatever moment they’d been having.
Gabe stepped away from her, and all of that churning emotion Monica had seen in him, felt in him, was gone. She supposed tied up and buried deep, deep down again.
She’d seen glimpses of it here and there, but she’d never allowed herself to be quite so vulnerable in return. She’d never allowed her voice to break or her hand to touch him gently. Even though she hadn’t gotten anywhere, she felt cracked open at the possibility she could maybe break him.
With care. With concern.
What would she do with what spilled out? Would she be able to stay this person who only wanted to know him, or would she fall back into old, bad therapist habits to protect herself and maybe even him?
“Should get a fire started before it gets dark out,” he said, his voice all military, unemotional command.
She stayed where she was, leaning against the door, as he stalked toward the hearth. She simply stood and breathed and watched him start the fire they’d let die last night.
Last night, when she’d allowed herself to be thoroughly, repeatedly taken by this man, and she couldn’t even muster up any feminist outrage over the word taken because what was taking if she was giving?
Which did not have to be relegated to the bed. Maybe this was temporary, but even if temporary they should have a better understanding of each other. They weren’t having sex and then never seeing each other again. All of her future was tied up, at least peripherally, in Gabe Cortez.
She pushed herself off the door. “Truth or dare?”
He snorted. “What?”
“Truth or dare,” she repeated, only feeling moderately stupid, but maybe if she was stupid, she’d catch him off guard for once.
“I’m not a teenage girl at a slumber party.” The fire crackled to life, and his temper crackled with it.
She would not be deterred. “Fine. No game. A deal.”
He unfurled from his crouched position over the fire, crossing his arms over his chest as he did so. “Fuck your de—”
“I will ask you one question,” she said firmly, and maybe that was her mom voice that usually made Colin jump to attention, but Gabe didn’t need to know that. “You have to answer said question to my satisfaction. No lies, no evasions, no half-truths.”
“This sounds like a barrel of laughs and all, but—”
“In return, you can ask me two questions. Same rules apply.”
That had him hesitating, which she’d count as a point.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I want to get to know you better.”
Oh, what storms raged beneath those calm, dark waters in his eyes. Under the taut way he held his body. She wanted to reach out again, but instead, she faced him. A fighter’s stance. Ready to fight for something more. What exactly, she didn’t know, but she’d fight until she did.
“Everything that’s happened in this cabin is temporary. That’s what I want, and you said the same thing. That no one would respect you if this went any further than this week.”
It felt like a slap, no matter that it shouldn’t. It was true. She’d said those things. He didn’t want more with her. She needed to accept all that. “I know what I said.”
“Then what does it matter if you understand me?”
“We have to be friends after. If we leave not having understood each other any better, there’s no hope we accept the…there’s no hope I accept…” God, she hated struggling for words. “There’s no hope we put this behind us. Because we’ll be in the same sniping place we were before, but we’ll know the sex is good. And every time we snipe…” She gestured at the couch.
“So this is all because you’re afraid you won’t be able to control yourself. That’s sad, Monica.” He grinned that empty, sharp grin.
She didn’t react, didn’t budge. She simply held his gaze. “I get one question. You get two. That is the deal I’m putting forth. Aren’t you curious?”
“Why would I be curious?”
She nearly wilted at that, but he was studying her too hard, as if looking for that wilt or stab of hurt or…or maybe he was looking for something else. Something that would never make sense to her.
She only stared. Maybe her eyes were a little too wide and she wasn’t as collected as she’d been, but she wouldn’t give in to him. Not this fake, mean side of him that had to be protecting all that softness inside of him.
That sharp, empty smile slowly changed, turning down at the corners as his jaw tightened. “I have a condition,” he finally ground out.
She tried not to let her elation show. “All right.”
“Two rules. One, you have to ask first. Two, we play this little game once a day, and only once, until our deal is over.”
“Christmas.”
He shrugged.
That would give her six more days of questions, although she’d be in Denver for the last two. Four days of in-person questions. Which meant she had to be careful, and she had to choose wisely. “Okay.” Okay.
“I don’t suppose you have any alcohol I could black out with first?”
Her lips curved ever so slightly. “No, I don’t keep alcohol in the cabin.”
“Figures,” he muttered. He glared all around the cabin as if it had done him some personal affront. With the quickly fading afternoon light sneaking in through the windows, bouncing off all that snow outside, he glowed close to gold.
Someone should sculpt him like that—scowling and bronzed, the picture-perfect image of an angry, vengeful god.
Except, for all Gabe’s bluster, she didn’t think he had vengeance in him. Anger, yes. Fury, absolutely. But the thirst for vengeance required a kind of belief that you could bend the world to your will.
It struck her as interesting and confusing that confident, and at times bossy, Gabe seemed quite comfortable with the fact the universe ran the show and the rest of them were just pawns.
“Ask your damn question,” he ordered, bossy as hell.
She had so many questions. A million whys and hows and whens. But she had to be careful. Strategic. What were the things she needed to understand about him to go from being lovers to friends?
She supposed the simplest place to start was a question she’d already asked him before. “Why’d you join the military?”
He sucked in a breath, then let it out slowly. A coping mechanism he’d developed all on his own. “My stepfather didn’t give me much of a choice.”
Then he was silent. She waited for a while, thinking he’d find his voice again and explain that, but he didn’t.
“So, my turn?” he asked instead.
She frowned at him. “No. You have to answer it to my satisfaction, and your stepfather not giving you a choice isn’t an answer. It’s a sentence that creates a million other questions.”
“I’m sitting for this,” he muttered, stalking over to the couch and collapsing rather dramatically on it. She moved slower, lowered herself onto the corner of the couch carefully. She wanted to touch him, wanted to curl up next to him, with his arm around her, and have this conversation as if…
But there was no as if. She kept her distance, and she watched his scarred hand rather than his face. “How did your stepfather make you join the military?”
“Powerful man. A powerful man who always hated me.”
“Hate is a strong word. Sometimes when we’re young—”
“I was young, and then I wa
sn’t. He hated me. This was no up-for-interpretation, stepdaddy grounded me a few too many times. Hate. Pure, unadulterated hate. I was a stain. He loved my mother—well, his version of love. I was his not-fair-skinned, not-easily-folded-into-the-family reminder she’d loved someone else. Although in fairness, I did start a fire at their wedding. Quite on purpose.”
Monica gasped. Silly, all in all, considering she’d heard far worse. Still. She couldn’t imagine… She couldn’t…
“It was the first time they sent me to therapy. Hardly the last.”
He said it so offhandedly. So…dispassionately. She could hardly reconcile this man on the couch with the man she’d gotten to know over the past six months. “You…”
He gave her one of those rueful, awful smiles as if the world was a cruel, cosmic joke all the time. “Have to save questions about that for tomorrow, I guess.”
Except, now that she’d started it, part of her didn’t want to know how this story ended. All she wanted to know was that he was whole and real and here. A good man. She didn’t want to know about the tragedies that had shaped him—they hurt too much.
But she’d opened up Pandora’s box, and here was all the hurt he’d tried to convince her to avoid.
When would she ever listen?
Chapter 18
It was a strange thing to be having this conversation, Gabe thought. Not because of the place or time or even her, but simply because he’d never expressed any of this to a living soul.
Oh, he’d told his mother plenty of times that Evan hated him. Before they’d married even, he’d begged his mother to stay away from the man with cold eyes and cruel words.
She’d been lost somehow. Evan’s money or charm or sick ability to find the weaknesses in people and destroy them with it.
Destroy everything.
She cleared her throat. “Why did you… You were a boy and you… At a wed…” She shook her head as if she couldn’t wrap her head around it.
He almost wasn’t sorry for letting that part slip out. He wanted some of her horror directed at him. He might have been the injured party overall, but he was certainly no innocent victim.
“Why did I set a fire at my mother’s wedding?” he asked flippantly, but how could he be anything but flippant when he’d somehow confessed all these old horrible things to her? What was there to explain? He’d been angry, hurt, scared, and he’d lashed out in a way he still couldn’t fully remember deciding to.
“I guess you’ll have to save that question for another day, too,” he said, smiling blankly at her.
It didn’t provoke her anger as he’d hoped it would. She simply looked sad. The color had leached out of her face and her eyes looked impossibly blue. Impossibly…kind. But kindness didn’t last. Kindness, care, love—it all faded. Always.
He’d answered her first question, now he’d ask his two, and then he’d find a way to get out of here. Besides, what could this question really reveal about him if he told it right? “Have any experience with emotional abuse?”
“As a therapist, some,” she said softly.
“That’s what he did. He never hit my mother that I knew of, but he broke her down just the same. Changed her, manipulated her, until she was someone else. Someone who didn’t care about me. Because as long as she cared about me, she couldn’t give everything to him. And even then…he did everything in his power to get rid of me.”
Gabe tried not to catalogue the long list of things, and the way his mother had slowly and methodically withdrawn her support, her love, until he’d been left completely alone, used only as free babysitting and a target to blame anything that went wrong on.
But he didn’t have to give those pieces to Monica either. This wasn’t about all the things that led up to the worst, and it wasn’t even about the worst. He’d never, ever give her that part.
“When I was seventeen, I got into some trouble, and he used that. Said I had two choices, I could join the army or he’d make sure I was punished by the full extent of the law.”
Her pale eyebrows drew together. “But you joined the navy.”
“I didn’t have very many choices, but I wasn’t about to let him pick which branch of the military I went in. As fuck-yous go, it wasn’t great, but it was all I had.” He flashed a grin.
She clearly found no humor in it. “And your mother… She just…”
“She just stood by him while he gave me that ultimatum. She never said anything. Not even goodbye. He gave me the choice. I took my things and left. The rest is history.”
She swallowed, and he could tell it stuck in her throat. Her shiny eyes were a dead giveaway she’d been moved by his story.
Moved by pity. Which he wanted less than nothing to do with.
“It all worked out.” He rubbed his scarred shoulder. “Mostly.”
“Do you have any contact? Does she—”
He recoiled some, hated himself for the show of weakness. “I answered your one question, fully and wholly and with a few more details than I needed to. Your questions for today are done.” Why he sounded more raw than forceful he didn’t want to examine.
She bobbed her chin, then uncurled herself from her position in the corner of the couch and moved over to his corner. She slid her palms over his cheeks, gentle and… It felt like admiration. Like she was in awe of him.
A trick of the fading sunlight and the crackling firelight, surely.
Then she lowered her mouth to his and kissed him. It was gentle, sweet, and it said a million things words never could. He wanted to shove her away from him almost as much as he wanted that to last forever. Gentle kindness and care.
She slid into his lap, and he wanted to focus on that. Arousal only. But he was afraid if he let that take over, it would come to mean more than he could ever let it. So he pulled her back by the shoulders, ending the kiss.
“My turn.”
Again, she only nodded, still holding his face, still looking at him like she wanted to soothe it all away. As if it were possible.
“Did you love your husband?” He shouldn’t have asked it, but it had more power than his control, apparently, the need to hear the answer he already knew. If she said it, in his lap, looking him in the eye, then he’d know. He could eradicate all these horrible hopes out of his dreams.
“Yes,” she said in a whisper, fierce and so full of truth it felt like a stab. “I’ll always love him. He was a good man, and he’s why I have Colin.”
She would always love another man, a dead man, the father of her child, and all Gabe could ever hope to be was peripheral. He’d come behind the memory of a good, dead man, and the needs and wants of a very much alive child who deserved everything his mother wanted to give.
“What’s your second question?” she asked softly, and he ignored the tear that had fallen onto her cheek. She was probably crying for the dead husband anyway. Why would she ever cry for him?
“Why me?” He hated himself for this question more than the first. The first was pathetic, but at least it was a reminder. This was that hope again, that little voice that whispered, Why wouldn’t she cry for you? “Why only me since him?”
“I’m not sure I have an answer for that, Gabe.” She let out a shuddery breath. “There was school, there was Colin, and a million armors I didn’t even realize I wore, but I guess more than that… I never argued with anyone the way I argued with you. At first, that was annoying. No, it’s still annoying, but it set you apart. You didn’t keep your distance. You challenged me. People had stopped challenging me a long time ago.”
“Challenging you on what?”
“I don’t know. People treat you differently when you’re a mental health professional. I mean, you should know that, you treated me like a scourge. But usually it’s more avoidance or a careful way of talking. People seem…afraid sometimes, like I can read into things, put things together, co
nfront them with truths they aren’t ready to confront. It can be hard to have friends who don’t look at you a little sideways.”
He knew something about that. People were careful with wounded soldiers too. Even his mother called him on occasion now that he’d been hurt. She’d never come to see him, but she had reached out. All the people he’d met since he’d been in that accident had treated him differently than he’d been treated before. It wasn’t always a bad different, but it was different.
“Gabe,” she said, her voice a pained whisper.
He didn’t know what she was asking him for, didn’t want to know. The only thing he knew was that when she kissed him, he needed to end it. Stop this. It was going way beyond his control, and he needed to nip all of it in the bud, blizzard be damned.
He sank into it, into her, instead. This kiss, this sweetness, some unspeakable thing he’d never have the words for.
Comfort. Care.
No, it couldn’t be that. So he stripped off her shirt in a quick, rough motion, but when she returned the favor, her hands were slow, gentle. She lifted his shirt off of him like he was delicate glass.
What a bizarre joke.
He maneuvered them so she was straddling him, so he could move her against him. So he could increase the pace, the heat, lose themselves in something hot and edgy instead of all this soft sweetness.
But she wouldn’t let him move fast. She slowed everything down, no matter how hard he tried to fight it. She kissed him gently, lightly, and the minute he took it deeper, hotter, she drifted away, planting kisses down his chest.
When she reached the waistband of his jeans, she unbuttoned him, unzipped him, slow, tantalizing movements. She slid onto the floor and pushed his legs apart. She looked up at him once, only once.
Part of him wanted to look away from all that, but he wouldn’t be a coward. Maybe he couldn’t extricate himself from this like he should, but he wouldn’t look away.
She tugged at his pants, and he lifted so she could pull them all the way down and off, taking his boxers with them. She ran her palms up his thighs, still watching him. He watched right back.
