He bent closer, his lips against mine. “You need more, I’ll tell you now. You said you don’t abandon family and that may be true, but you’re doin’ it now because your family needs that and I did it then to you because you needed it, even if you didn’t know it. Wasn’t right that our friendship was turning into something physical, not when you were a teenager, not when I am the way I am.”
“And I didn’t get a say in that?”
“No, Rosie, you didn’t. Because whether you like it or not, I was the adult and you were the kid. We don’t come from the same side of the law and more, our fathers would kill each other if they could. Anything romantic was, and is, impossible.”
“So, you left,” I whispered, hurt and so angry, lost again like I had been at eighteen when he’d left.
“I did, not saying now I know what that did to you, turning you to Cricket like it did, that I would do the same now. Maybe I could’ve found the strength to keep my hands off you and still protect you from all the ugly in the world. But I didn’t, and Cricket’s death is just as much on me as it is you.”
“Yeah,” I told him, because I was honest and it was true. “It is.”
I’d been with Cricket to fill even a fraction of the void Danner left behind and after a year, when he still hadn’t returned, I decided having any kind of love was better than having nothing at all.
“Not gonna leave you again,” he told me sternly, in a voice low, smooth and dark as smoke curling around my body. “Swearing it right now.”
“Don’t know if I believe you,” I countered.
“Don’t fucking care, I’ll prove it like I’ve proved it before. I’ll show you.”
“You get me?” he demanded.
“I get you,” I breathed, then remembered myself, swallowed my instinctive willingness and rolled my eyes. “If you get on the same page as me, we shouldn’t have any problems anyway.”
The tendons in his neck were straining in a way I was trying not to find delicious. I wanted to focus on my anger, demand to know why he had left me. But now that I’d had those wide palmed, rough tipped hands on my body, I wanted more.
I wanted to gorge myself on his body until I had my fill so I could finally get Lion Danner out of my fucking system.
“You gonna keep your hands off me while you’re protecting me?” I asked, licking my lips at the thought of that gorgeous body back on mine.
He ignored the last bit of my statement and shifted his grip so his hand cradled the side of my neck. “That brings us to the good stuff. We started something last night. Actually, we started something about three and a half years ago when you were still too young, but we picked up the thread last night and I don’t mean to let it go again if I can help it. We’ve got to go slow, be careful, because our lives depend on it, Rosie. First sign of trouble, if I’ve got to leave you to keep you safe, I will. Do you understand that?”
The warmth of his declaration froze in my veins. “No. You just said you want to be with me. I’ve wanted you for fucking years. You can’t say that shit one second and then take away from me the next. You’re either with me or you aren’t.”
His jaw clenched, and his hand tightened hard in my hair. “I’m with you until being with you threatens to harm you, Harleigh Rose. You can fucking give me that.”
I threw up my hands, wrenching my head out of his hold. “I can’t believe you’d ruin the first time you’ve ever admitted you wanted me by being a fucking coward about it.”
“Coward?” Danner said, his voice octaves lower, cold and heavy like the weight of steel shackles against me. “Wanting to keep you safe is cowardly?”
Hurt that he’d ever even consider leaving me after everything we’d been through, after I’d made it clear in actions if not in words how much I needed him, burned through my insides like lava wrecking ruin over Pompeii.
I got into his face and hissed, “Yeah, Danner. You care about someone you don’t let them go in the face of a threat, you hold them tight, keep them safe and warm through the storm and hope to fucking God or whoever the fuck else that you both get out of it alive.”
Danner stood there, implacable as a stone statue, his eyes darkly shuttered as I finished my tirade and breathed heavily into the silence.
“You obey me, Rosie,” he repeated, this time in the dark tone that sent shivers down my spine. “You obey me in the field, and we do this, you obey me in bed, on the couch, in the back of my ‘Stang, where I decide to fuck you. You want this, those are my rules.”