A tremor raked through him at that, and I let my fingertips wander, gliding down the strong angle of his cheek. The man so beautiful he was making it hard to focus on what I needed to say without getting distracted by what I wanted. “But I also see someone who is hurting.”
He snatched me by the wrist.
I gasped.
“Pain is just a reminder of your sins.” His confession was nothing but a growl.
I searched his face.
“Of what you’ve done,” he rumbled.
My chest quivered at the rake of his harsh words. Blow after blow.
“Of what is to come.”
“And what is it that is to come? What are you waiting for, Leif?”
“Something I would never implicate you in.” His face pinched in misery. “I . . . I should go.”
I gave him a tight nod, not even surprised by the rejection because I could physically feel his pain.
He pushed to his feet. He hesitated as he stared down at my daughter. Everything ached when he reached out and brushed his fingertips through her hair, sheer affection on his face.
His jeans ripped and stained with his blood. Shredded from his surrender.
This man who would have died for my daughter.
He walked out the door without looking back.
That energy shivered and shook and cried out. Demanding to be heard.
My attention moved to Penny. My child fast asleep.
Safe.
Warm.
Loved.
We’d been through so much in our lives, but never once had I been so terrified as this. Faced with losing the one thing worth living for.
And Leif, he had returned that to me. Given us another chance.
He had sparked something in me from the second he’d crashed into my world.
Fire and ice.
I’d thought he’d been purposed, but never had I imagined he could have been purposed for this.
For something greater than I’d prepared myself for.
And I recognized it, so distinctly.
His pain.
The way he viewed himself, as if he’d been condemned to live without.
Alone.
Destitute.
As if he believed he truly didn’t deserve or have the right.
I was on my feet before I knew they were under me, the weakness I’d been feeling all day swept away by the desperation to touch.
To feel him alive under me, too.
For him to understand the man I saw in him.
To return a little of the hope he’d restored in me.
I raced out of the suite and down the hall toward the massive bonus room, the one that opened to the wall of windows and overlooked the pool and yard.
The storm bared down. Gusts of wind that lashed through the trees. Sent them whipping and shivering and howling beneath the moon that burned through a thin break in the clouds.
The man was a shadow beneath, his shoulders hitched high as he strode across the yard toward his little home.
If he even had one.
The man lost.
A wanderer who raged as he searched through the earth for where he fit.
I wanted to carve out a place for him. Show him what it was like to belong. To be treasured and loved, the way he showed without asking for a thing in return.
I burst through the door he had exited, pummeled by a squall of wind.
A fierce fury that blasted through the air.
“What if I don’t want you to go?” I shouted above it. “What if I want you to stay, right here, with me?”
In the distance, he froze, as if he had been impaled by the plea. Staked to the spot.
Slowly, he turned. Rain began to pelt from the sky.
“I keep telling you that you don’t want me. That you don’t have the first clue what you’re asking for.”
Brown eyes flashed beneath a streak of lightning. The man momentarily lit in a bright flash of light.
Afire.
Aflame.
Before he returned to shadows. To the darkness.
“You’re wrong, Leif. I want you. I want all of you. I want your hurt and your fears and your sorrows. I want your beauty and your songs and your mind. You’re wrong when you say it’s my beauty reflected back at me when I look at you. Not when you’re the epitome of it. I feel it, Leif. I see it.”
His face pinched in pain. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
My hands clenched. “I know that. Why do you think I’m standing here?”
“I can’t give you what you deserve, Mia.”
“Then give me what I want.”
A sound left him that was somewhere between a groan and a roar, the rain beginning to pound as he hovered and hesitated and tried to resist.
I saw the second he snapped.
The moment I whispered, “Please.”
He crossed the space like some kind of warring avenger, on his way to plunder and annihilate.
To steal.
What he couldn’t know was what he was steadily stealing was my heart.
By the time he got to me his hair was soaked, rivulets of water twisting down the hard contours of his striking, glorious face. His jaw set in stone and his body a rigid, powerful force.