He didn’t finish, and I wanted to both beg him to tell me what he was going to say and thank him for stopping.

Sure, maybe Anson saw me that way, but… “You don’t see the way my father looks at me. He’s disgusted by who I am, and I feed off that. Sometimes I want to shove it in his face just to try to hurt him the way he hurts me. I don’t know how that makes me a good person.”

“Fuck your dad. You’re a better man than he could ever be. There’s nothing disgusting about you.”

“Do you want to know the worst part?” I asked, my voice soft and broken. I kissed his head again for strength, touched him, held him close. I wanted to shut my mouth but needed to get this out too.

“What, baby?” he asked, and my breath caught. Anson had never called me that before. I’d never wanted anyone to call me that before either.

“I still want his approval. I base my success on his standards. I work hard, hoping that one day he’ll recognize it and love me for it. The whole thing makes no sense. We don’t even believe in the same things. He hates almost everything I stand for and fight for, yet the only reason I’m a fucking senator is because of him, and I hope that somehow that truth, and what I do, will make him love me. I don’t even know why I fucking care.”

It took a moment, until Anson pushed up on his elbows and looked down at me, until he swiped a thumb under my eye, to realize a tear had slid out. I’d never said any of that out loud before, and sure as shit never said it to a lover.

“Fuck. Ignore me. I can’t believe I said all that. I think you broke me.”

He didn’t laugh at my attempt to lighten the mood.

“You care because caring is who you are. It’s normal to want your family’s approval. To want to make them proud and to want their love. I know hearing it from me won’t change how you feel, but you deserve better than him. He hasn’t earned your love. He doesn’t warrant your pain or even a second thought from you, and I…”

My pulse sped, and my heart skipped a few beats. “You what?” I asked, needing to hear it.

“I don’t know if I should say it. I don’t know if now’s the right time—hell, if it ever will be.”

“It is, Anson.” I touched his cheek, kissed the tip of his nose. Waited. Hoped. Didn’t even feel weak for needing it in that moment.

“I’m in love with you, West. I’m in love with you, and I don’t know what that means for us. I don’t know where we go from here because I’m not ready to come out. We just won the Super Bowl. I only have a year left on my contract, and I’m going to need a new one. My family doesn’t… We live on opposite sides of the country and have busy schedules and—”

“I’m in love with you too.” I’d tried to bite back the words but couldn’t hold them in any longer.

“You are?” he asked with so much awe in his voice, it nearly broke me.

“Yes. I don’t think I can make that shit go away.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“I don’t want to either,” I told him, and meant it. “I’ve never been in love before,” I admitted with a tentativeness that wasn’t typical of me. I was…in awe of this, of him, of this feeling he’d inspired inside me. Anson smiled, and I fucking felt it deep in my chest. “God, what the hell are you doing to me? You’ve ruined me, and I like it.”

Anson laughed, and I pulled him down and kissed his smile because I had to taste it. I didn’t know where we went from there, how anything between us would ever work, but I wasn’t walking away. I didn’t think I could ever walk away from Anson Hawkins.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Anson

Wind rushed around me, making me feel alive. My heart thudded, felt as if it were running laps in my chest, fueled by nothing but pure adrenaline. I tightened my hold with both my arms and legs around West as he took a corner, both of us leaning into it on the bike. There was almost nothing like this feeling. I rode myself, loved it, but being there, riding with him, holding on to him…

I never thought I would have someone. I never thought I’d have this—love and a relationship, spending an afternoon out on a motorcycle like other couples did all the time.

It was easy right then to tell myself it would always be like this—that we could spend our days off together, that life would be simple, that love would make it so. But deep down I knew that wasn’t true. Soon I’d have to go back to Georgia. I had a commercial to shoot and endorsement commitments to fulfill. Even though it was now the off-season, I couldn’t just let everything go and spend all my time with West. Plus, he would be back and forth between California and DC anyway, and I was in the closet, and— Fuck. I hadn’t wanted to go there today. For once, I just wanted to enjoy the time we had.

Tags: Riley Hart Atlanta Lightning Romance
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