Lover (Court University 4)

“It was an accident. I was driving, an accident.” Her swallow hit her throat. “I was three months pregnant. They just wanted a picture…”

What. The. Fuck.

I shifted her, framing her face, and she blinked down more tears. I forced my breaths even. “They hurt you.”

“Not on purpose.” Her head dropped. “I saw them following me, and I tried to get away. I was by myself, and they were aggressive. They always were. They just wanted a photo.”

Lungs in an ice bath, stomach in a vise.

Her shoulders quaked. “It was a head-on collision. I lost the baby.”

I closed my eyes, folding back her hair.

“And it changed things, Ramses,” she retched. “Changed my ex-husband. Changed me. He dealt in his own ways. Drinking. Gambling.”

“Hurting you.” I tipped her chin in my direction. “He hurt you. Hurt you because of this, didn’t he?”

In the silence she forced me to wait for the answer, I could have shot my fist through a wall. It actually had me to the point where I was physically shaking.

She nodded without words, acknowledging my fear. I’d thought this guy was a coward before, but that hadn’t been the word.

To physically put your hands on someone, a woman, after something so tragic had happened to her? There weren’t any fucking words for that. None in the goddamn dictionary. The man belonged in a cell right next to my father, two assholes with too much power.

This guy had a faux power. Because what did it take to hit a woman? Someone, no doubt, a fraction of his size.

A grieving woman.

I braced Bri, rocking instead of doing something else.

“It was only the one time,” she said, like that meant something. “He turned into someone completely different. His grief made him a monster, a shell of himself.”

I folded a hand on her cheek. “Don’t justify anything he did. He doesn’t deserve it.”

And she didn’t either. What about her own grief?

I saw it right here in my arms: someone so guarded, hurting all the time.

I mean, a wedding had made her sad.

Happiness had made her upset that night of December and Royal’s union, in misery, and that was when I’d found her.

We had found each other in misery. Different reasons backed it, but we’d been in a similar place. I held heartbreak and the piss-poor decisions that resulted. She had a failed marriage, but the results the same. Different experiences, different events had broken us, and I now knew why she’d been in group therapy.

I now knew why she’d found me too.

It was like the universe knew we’d needed to be together that night, our wo

rlds of chaos united.

My attention shifted when Brielle sat up, easing off my lap. She took a seat beside me, and I hated the distance.

“I left him because of it.” She faced me then, frowning. “But you need to know what you’re dealing with. You need to know I have no desire to have children. Something like that, what happened changes people, and I’m not going through that again.”

I understood, nodding. “I get it.” I did, but she might not always feel that way. I shook my head. “But with time, you never know how you may feel in the future or even years down the line.”

Whatever she wanted to do, I’d wait. If that was where we were headed… of course, I would.

It blew my mind I was even having this conversation. Especially after the last year I’d had. Back at Brown, I’d unloaded a lot of crap into my life. Enough to make me leave. Enough to make me come here, but now, meeting her, it felt like a Godsend.