I smiled at that and then lifted my hand to brush over the bruise on Magnus’s jaw…the one I’d given him. I hadn’t missed the other faint bruises on his body where I’d lashed out at him the day before when he’d stopped me from leaving. “Magnus,” I began, but he shook his head and his hand came up to rest on my wrist.

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “We both hurt each other yesterday.”

I nodded. “I didn’t sleep with Shelly and her friend,” I blurted out. “I was just pissed that you’d been ignoring me and I wanted to get back at you…” I shook my head as I realized how incredibly stupid I sounded. “It was childish…”

Magnus sighed and turned us so he was lying on his back and I was tucked up against his side. “We really did a number on each other, didn’t we?”

I let my fingers toy with his chest hair as I considered his words. “Can we just start fresh, Magnus?” I whispered. “Can we just put all that shit behind us?”

“Yeah,” he murmured. “Clean slate starting now.”

Magnus’s fingers were running up and down my back and I couldn’t hide the shiver of pleasure that rippled through me. He was right. Being here like this with him was perfect.

“Dante, would you do something for me?”

I nodded against his chest, enjoying the sound of his heartbeat.

“Will you tell me who hurt you?”

I stilled at that and then lifted enough so I could look at him. “No one hurt me. No one ever raised a hand to me,” I said, confused as to why he’d even ask that question.

“I’m talking about the kinds of wounds that don’t leave bruises behind.”

I stiffened and shifted my eyes away from him. “Why does it matter? I thought we were starting over.”

“Because I don’t want the past to determine our future.”

Future.

Is that what I was looking at with Magnus? A future together? The idea seemed ludicrous to me, but I couldn’t ignore the flare of excitement that went through me. What if I could have what the other men in my life had with their partners? Would I finally be a part of a real family?

I lowered myself back down to Magnus’s chest. No way I could look him in the eye while I told him about all the shit I’d done in the past. Maybe this would be a good thing – maybe Magnus would finally realize who he’d really asked to stay. He’d come to his senses and I could go back to being the brash, untouchable Dante. He was a hell of a lot easier to be anyway.

Yeah, I could do this…the sooner this thing with Magnus ended, the sooner life would go back to normal.

Chapter Sixteen

Magnus

“Not sure where to start,” Dante murmured, his breath skating over my chest. I could tell that talking about himself was the last thing he wanted to be doing, but I didn’t want to call the whole thing off.

Because I needed Dante to see that he was more than how he saw himself. But I couldn’t fight a battle against an enemy I knew nothing about.

“You mentioned Brazil…is that where you’re from?” I asked.

Dante nodded.

“You don’t have an accent,” I pointed out.

“My mother moved to the US when she was in her early twenties. She met my father who was Italian American and they got married. He died of a heart attack when I was seven.”

“Were you close to him?” I asked.

“Yeah…he worked as an engineer so he was always busy, but he always made time for me. He helped me with my homework, took me to ball games and fishing…typical father son stuff, I guess. After he died, my mom decided to go back to Brazil to be closer to family. She’d discovered she was pregnant with Aleks a couple weeks after my dad died.”

I waited patiently for Dante to continue since I guessed he was trying to gather the strength to re-visit a time in his life that clearly hadn’t been pleasant.

“She met my stepfather a few months after we got to Brazil. She’d gotten a job as a receptionist at the auto plant where he worked. They got married about a month before Aleks was born.”

“Did you like your stepfather?” I asked.

“I never really got the chance to, I guess,” Dante admitted. “I could tell from the first time I met him that he didn’t like me. I heard him and my mom arguing about me a few years into their marriage. My mom wanted to know why he treated me the way he did and he admitted to her that he hated having to live with the proof that she’d been with someone else…that she’d loved another man before him.”

I quelled my anger at that. “How did he treat you?” I asked.

Tags: Sloane Kennedy The Protectors M-M Romance
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