Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 110360 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 441(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110360 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 441(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
“Devon,” she whispered, resting her hand on the side of my face. “I don’t think you’re a liar. I overreacted because I was hurt.”
“I should have told you. It was an uncomfortable conversation that I should have faced head on. But I didn’t. I cowered, and then when Henry dropped that bomb, you got hit by the shrapnel. That’s on me.”
“I’ll agree that it would have been better to hear it from you.” She leaned toward me, dropping her forehead to mine. “But the way I reacted. All the vile stuff I spewed. That’s on me. In the car, on the way back, I couldn’t figure out why you having a past with her made it feel like my chest was on fire. Every way I tried to make sense of that burn, only fanned the flames. So I blamed a pattern. Then Sebastian. Then, when none of those felt right, I just blamed you.” Her face scrunched adorably. “I made assumptions about you. Unspoken expectations, because you had always set the bar so high, that I didn’t recognize that I just kept inching it higher.”
“You shouldn’t have so much faith in me.”
She framed my face with her hands. “Yes, I should. Honestly, I should have more faith in you. You’re a good man, Devon. Not because you’re perfect like that pedestal I put you on, but because you care enough to put in the work.” Her thumbs brushed along my jaw. “You cared that Sebastian had gotten in my head about the overalls. You cared that I didn’t feel normal. You cared that you being in the house would upset my dad. And you didn’t just acknowledge it. You fixed it.”
I flicked my gaze to the side. “That’s just who I am. It’s probably why I’m so damn good and so damn bad at this job. I think three steps ahead so you don’t have to. I see the problems before they happen so you never feel the fallout.” My jaw tightened. “But this time, I covered my own ass instead of focusing on you. And watching that truth hit you the way it did?” I swallowed hard. “I’ll never be able to fix that.”
“And that’s how I know I was wrong,” she said softly. “That’s not a crack in your foundation.” Her fingers tightened just slightly against my face. “It’s the strength that makes your foundation unbreakable.”
A weight settled heavy in my chest.
I didn’t feel unbreakable with her. I felt like I was dangling on the edge of a crumbling cliff. No net. No way back. Just time ticking away until the earth finally swallowed me.
Even after deciding I was all in with her.
Holding on with both hands.
There was still one thing I hadn’t said.
And it might have been the biggest omission of all.
“I want this with you,” I confessed. “More than I have ever wanted anything in my life.” I exhaled slowly. “But you terrify me, Lofton. Because I love you. The colors I know. The colors I’m going to learn. The colors we’re going to make together. I love all of it. Two months, and I already love you all the way down to the marrow in my bones.”
“Baby,” she whispered. “I love you too.”
I closed my eyes for a beat, letting that sink in and then travel to every dark and guarded place that existed within me.
“And that’s why I know the fear is real,” I said, opening my eyes.
She smiled. “What?”
“You’re my Clara.”
She went absolutely still.
I let her.
Because that was the whole of it, right there in three words.
The weight of that truth was suffocating. I wasn’t talking about the future in the abstract anymore. I wasn’t running threat assessments, or preparing for the worst, or building exits into something I hadn’t fully walked into yet.
I was already in it.
All the way in.
With absolutely no way out.
Or any desire to find one. No matter how much that scared me.
“I sat in that equipment shed with your father as he looked out at you in that round pen and saw his wife. Not a memory. Not a ghost. Just—her. Present. Real.” I shook my head. “I saw what this kind of love does to a man when it ends. That’s going to be me, Lofton. And I don’t know that I can survive that.”
“Baby,” she whispered. “That’s not just you. That’s love. It’s always going to be scary, even for big bad bodyguards like you.”
I shot her a glare, but it only made her smile.
“I get it. I grew up watching that love and it was devastating to discover it’s not as common as it should be. But you’re sitting here terrified of the ending before we’ve even gotten through the beginning.”
“I can’t help it. I can see it happening. Start to finish. All the ways it can go wrong or more than likely all the ways that I can fuck it up. And then I’m a different kind of Lawrence Beck, wandering through life without you.”