Lance obviously picked this up in my tone, because he picked up everything. He did not react outwardly, nor did he say anything to the four words that men usually ran from. He just folded his arms and jutted his chin up slightly, which was his way of telling me I had his attention.
Well, that and the fact his eyes were searing into my skin.
“There is obviously something between us,” I continued, somehow keeping eye contact and enough courage to bring up the thing that I’d been feeling sick about all day. “I know you’re an intense guy and a big badass alpha male, so some of the smoldering looks and what people would call overprotectiveness can be explained away with that. But I’m also a woman. One has been out of the game for awhile, that’s true. I haven’t known a proper, healthy relationship with a good man, so my experience is rather lacking. But women know when something is going on with a man. Even a woman like me. Especially in this situation. Because this” —I waved my hands between us— “whatever this is, it’s not normal. I’ve tried to ignore it, talk myself out of even having this conversation. I’ve tried to think of all the reasons why having this conversation, having you in my life is a very bad idea, but I’m still here. Talking.”
I swallowed roughly and ignored my sweating palms and butt at Lance’s intense, and silent gaze.
“I used to be afraid,” I continued. “Of pretty much anything. I grew up with parents who I knew to fear before I learned to talk.”
Lance’s jaw went harder at the mention of my parents, his body wired. I wondered if he’d looked up my history. I didn’t doubt Greenstone had the ability to find out my real name, and find my parents, if they were alive. I had no idea. After Robert had proposed, I moved straight out of the trailer park and in with him. He told me I should cut them off.
I thought it was because he cared for me, didn’t want me connected to ugly, vile, abusive people. But no, he just wanted to replace them with more ugly and vile.
“I went straight from that life to one with Robert,” I said, shaking myself out of thoughts about my parents. “First, I was afraid of screwing things up with him, because he was so perfect, because he was cultured, and I so wasn’t. Even before he showed me what a monster he was, I still spent most days afraid I’d say something wrong at one of his father’s parties, eat with the wrong fork when he took me to a fancy restaurant, be the wrong kind of person for him.” I rolled my eyes remembering how large my problems had seen then. “It took me a long time to realize that he not only saw that fear, but he relished it. He made sure to create more. And when he couldn’t in those ways, he moved onto more traditional, sure-fire ways to make a woman fear a man.”
Lance’s arms were no longer crossed against his chest. They were long against his sides, hands fisted, shaking.
A visible, visceral reaction to my words? The pain in them? Or just me saying out loud the ways that Robert had hurt me?
Probably a combination of all of it, and other things that I didn’t know enough about him to think of. But another reason that showed me that this conversation was a good idea. This was beyond the reaction of a good, albeit scary intense alpha male who had only professional feelings toward the woman he was meant to be protecting.
So I had to keep going.
“Once I left, the fear didn’t leave me,” I continued, taking a breath. “It got so bad I could hardly breathe around it. Everywhere I looked, I saw him, coming to drag me back. Coming to kill me. To take my son from me. Then that fear, his fear, it slowly receded. It never really went away. I wish I was a strong enough woman to say that I stopped fearing him as I started to build my life. It wasn’t that. I just got too busy to give myself the luxury of fearing a memory. I had different things to fear. Like losing my job. Like not getting enough shifts to cover bills. Fear of being a bad mother, not bringing my son up right. Not giving him the childhood he deserved.” I smiled. I knew it was melancholy, because I was filled with it. “I’m coming to learn that being a mother is being in a constant state of fear. I would like to say that having this bitter emotion following me around from ever since I could remember makes me somehow numb to it. But that’s not the case. I’ve never not known a state of fear. And when Nathan was taken from me, I was shown the highest peaks of terror. Then he walked through that door holding your hand.” A tear trailed down my cheek with the memory of it.