‘You can’t help.’ He spoke flatly, with finality, and Olivia shook her head slowly.
‘Maybe you should let me be the judge of that.’
Ben stared at her; his hazel eyes seemed to burn right through her, his jaw so tight she could see the muscles bunched. ‘You want to know?’ he finally said, and it wasn’t a question. ‘Fine. You can know. You deserve that much.’ He took a breath, let it out slowly. ‘I nearly killed a man once.’
She blinked, her mind trying to process that statement, which was so not what she’d been expecting. Although she hadn’t known what to expect, but...it hadn’t been that.
‘Okay,’ she finally said, and Ben raised his eyebrows, his mouth twisting unpleasantly.
‘Okay? You think it’s okay that I nearly beat a man to death and left him for dead in the street?’
She blinked again, scrambling now for something to say, to think. ‘No, of course it’s not okay. But I feel like you’re trying to shock me, maybe make me feel disgusted by you, as if that’s something you’d actually want.’ She didn’t know where the words came from exactly, but she knew they were true. She lifted her chin and tried to stare him down. ‘And I’m not going to do that, Ben. I won’t make it that easy for you.’
‘Nothing about this is easy.’
‘So tell me more. Who was this man?’
‘One of the sailors who jumped me in Marseille.’
‘And you defended yourself.’
‘Don’t try to justify it, Olivia.’
‘I’m not...’
‘Yes, you are. You want to, because you don’t want to believe what kind of man I am.’
‘And what kind of man are you, Ben?’ Olivia challenged. ‘A monster?’ He didn’t answer. ‘This is why you thought I would hate you,’ she said slowly. ‘Why you thought I would be disgusted by you. Why you got so angry when you saw that bruise.’
He shook his head impatiently, stalking away from her. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘Then tell me.’
He paced the room, one hand driven though his hair, his head bowed. Olivia watched and waited. Finally he spoke. ‘I’ve been angry, more or less, for fourteen years.’
‘Angry,’ Olivia repeated. That wildness.
That wildness she’d felt inside him, that energy that excited her...that was anger?
‘What are you angry about?’ she asked as Ben continued to pace.
‘It doesn’t matter. The point is, I can’t control it. I let it out when those sailors jumped me and one of them ended up almost dead.’
‘Yeah, I got that part. But I think it does matter. How can you deal with your anger, Ben, if you’re not willing to acknowledge...’
‘I don’t need psychotherapy, Olivia,’ he snapped. ‘I just need to control my emotions, and I can’t. That’s why I’ve pulled away from you. Why I haven’t been in a serious relationship, ever. Because I don’t trust myself.’
‘Do you think you’ll hurt me?’ she asked slowly, and Ben turned to face her, his face contorted with what looked and felt like agony.
‘I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I gave you that bruise...’
‘A bruise, Ben, not a broken nose!’ She shook her head. ‘I was the one who wanted it wild and even rough.’ And just saying that could still make her blush with the memory of it. ‘You would have taken my virginity on a bed of rose petals. Literally.’
He just shook his head. ‘You didn’t know...’
‘No, I didn’t,’ she cut him off quietly as she took a step towards him. ‘I didn’t know you had all this anger inside you, but I sensed something good inside you, Ben. The flip side of that anger, maybe. A passion that was honest and real and exciting to me.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I see it in the way you cook. In your drive to succeed. In how you kissed me. I like your emotion, Ben. Your wildness.’
‘Only because you didn’t know the truth of it.’
‘That you beat up a sailor who jumped you fourteen years ago? No, I didn’t know that, but it doesn’t...’
‘Maybe you should read the hospital report before you excuse everything away,’ Ben told her in a hard voice. ‘A broken nose, a shattered cheekbone and a dislocated jaw. And I just walked away.’
‘With a knife wound,’ she reminded him and he just shrugged ‘How did you find the hospital report?’
‘I looked for it later. I wanted—I wanted to make sure I hadn’t killed him.’
She felt tears crowd her eyes and she blinked them back. ‘So how long are you going to torture yourself for one mistake, big as it might have been?’ she asked in a shaky voice. ‘One episode doesn’t define you, Ben.’