And yet…and yet sitting here with her, knowing in my gut how badly things are going to go and how little I’m going to protect her, I can’t help thinking she would have been better off if I’d just let her go. If I hadn’t been so selfish, so lovestruck, so devastated at just the thought of being without her.
I don’t know what it says about me that I didn’t let her go when she still had the chance at a normal life, but I know it isn’t good.
“Don’t,” she says, her hand smoothing down my cheek.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re blaming yourself and I won’t have it.”
I laugh, but it comes out dark and bitter. “Who else is there to blame for this mess?”
If I’d been strong enough to walk away, or strong enough to insist on doing this my way, we wouldn’t be here right now. But I wasn’t and now the only woman I’ve ever loved is going to suffer for my weakness. The knowledge grates like few things ever have.
“I’m not even going to bother answering that question.”
“Believe me, baby, I know there’s plenty of blame to go around. But I’m not going to exonerate myself from this situation.”
“You don’t have to exonerate yourself. You didn’t do anything wrong. And besides, at this point does it really matter? Shouldn’t we be figuring out what we’re going to do instead of listing all the reasons we blame ourselves?”
“You are blameless—”
“Focus, Ethan.” She reaches out, taps my cheek sharply. “We nee
d to focus here.”
“Stu and I are already working on a plan. I’m going to call my mother’s bluff and hope it’s actually a bluff. If it isn’t, we’ll have a contingency plan waiting.”
“And what’s the contingency plan? Because, I have to be honest, I’m not real confident that your mom is bluffing.”
“Yeah, neither am I. Which is why we’re going to try to figure out what news organization my mom will leak the story to. And then I’m going to make sure none of them touch the story.”
“And how are you going to do that? You can’t go around threatening a bunch of members of the press, Ethan. Nothing good will come of it.”
“Like nothing good would come of me destroying Brandon?” The words slip out before I know I’m going to say them. Shit. Now’s not the time to pick at her for being compassionate—and for worrying about me.
“Really?” she asks, brow raised sardonically. “It didn’t take you long to decide I wasn’t blameless after all.”
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“You meant it exactly the way it sounded. And, you know what, maybe you’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t have interfered in your nefarious plot to bring down your brother. But I still think it was the right thing to do. The last thing I want is Brandon and his mob contacts focused on you.”
“So you’d rather have him and my mother focused on you?”
“Any day, baby. Any day.”
And just that easily, I melt. “You can’t go around saying things like that, Chloe.”
“Why not? It’s true.”
“Because I feel the same way about you. You’ve been hurt enough. I don’t want anything else to happen to you because of me.”
“You’ve already said that. And sorry, but that ship has sailed. You don’t get to spend all your time thinking about how fragile, how broken, how ruined I am. I survived being raped by Brandon, I survived being abandoned by my family and being all but tortured by my classmates. I’m not weak. I used to think I was, but I was wrong. And you don’t get to try to make me weak just so you can protect me.”
“Jesus, that’s not what I’m doing. Chloe, you can’t really think that.” She can’t really think that.
“I don’t think that. But sometimes, that’s the way you make me feel when you talk about protecting me. About not wanting to see me hurt any more.”
I stand up, walk to the window that looks out over the Frost Industries campus. I’ve built this company from the ground up. I started with almost nothing and now I have a financial and business empire. Sure, there were missteps along the way, but they were minor miscalculations. Small mistakes that I could easily recover from.