What Grows Dies Here

From this.

Or myself.

“I mean it with you,” I whispered. “And that scares me.”

He smiled at me. “If this doesn’t scare you, darlin’, then you’re braver than me. Because I’ll tell you right here, right now… What I feel for you terrifies the fuck out of me.”

My bones shook with his words. The sincerity behind them.

“Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way,” I announced, clearing my throat. “You were going to tell me all of the tawdry details of your day job.”

Karson’s expression changed. Darkened. Not with anger, but with something else. Something that looked almost … uncertain.

Karson was like an immoveable object, impossible to destroy. He was bulletproof in my mind.

Seeing that vulnerability, the chink in his armor, made me like him even more. Settled him right into the center of me.

Now it was my turn to be tender. Though I was easily affectionate with people I dated, with my girlfriends, I felt overly aware of myself doing it with Karson. Aware that everything I did cemented something about us. Tangled us more permanently into each other.

But my affection for this man, my need to comfort him, trumped all my crazy about getting more intimate with him. It was closing the gate after the horse left the barn.

I lifted my hand to gently caress his jaw. It was silky smooth, his skin warm underneath my palm. Watching his body relax into my touch granted him permission to settle somewhere deep inside me, somewhere he’d never leave, no matter what happened.

“It’s not going to change anything,” I told him firmly. “Whatever you think is going to alter my feelings for you, however terrible. I can promise you that.”

He let the words sink in, seemingly assessing the weight of them. I’m sure a lot of people could say such things, thinking they meant them, but then faced with the reality of the situation found themselves ready to run.

At the beginning of this, I was poised to run. But as I said, that was closing the gate way after the horse had already bolted. This was a thing. We were a thing. And I didn’t do anything in halves.

“Jay has multiple businesses,” Karson finally broke the silence. “Some of them legitimate, most of them not.”

This, I already knew. I had kept these facts to myself but kept a close eye on Stella. I was not her mother, and no matter how much I wanted to protect her, it was not my job to make decisions for her. Just to be there for her when the consequences of those decisions—be them good or bad—manifested.

“I solve problems for him,” Karson continued. “Sometimes with his legitimate businesses, but mostly not since he has an army of ivy league assholes to deal with that.”

I grinned ever so slightly, thinking of those ivy league assholes shrinking in Karson’s shadow.

“Mostly, I deal with the less legitimate businesses.” He idly played with some strands of my hair. “He’s involved in various aspects of the underworld including keeping territories under control, taking a cut of gun running and dealing with other organizations hungry for his territory. But his main income and focus is prostitution.”

I flinched at this. Not because I had anything against sex workers—exactly the contrary, in fact. I believed that women in hard circumstances made even harder decisions, and the laws should not be punishing them for doing so. They should be altered to keep those women safe. What I had issue with was that Jay was essentially a pimp, something that hadn’t come up in my research. Pimps got a terrible rap, for good reason. Men should not be profiting off women selling sex. And that was the best-case scenario. Worst case, they took almost all of their money, beat them and trafficked them.

All things I did not approve of, not in the fucking slightest. In fact, I’d started a charity to help sex workers find their way out of those situations, giving them safe places to live, regardless of if they were still on the street or not. I hired private security for them if they were.

No one knew about this charity, of course, because it wasn’t completely legal. But my father’s slimiest lawyer had set it all up for me, and it made a small difference to an enormous problem.

But it did not make me feel differently about Karson. Especially since I hadn’t heard the rest of it.

So I waited for the rest.

“I already see your claws coming out,” Karson commented dryly. “Wanting to fight for women who, in most circumstances, are treated like shit by assholes making money off them.” His brows shot to his forehead. “Am I right?”

I raised my brow right back. “You’re certainly not wrong.”

Karson chuckled. It was a lovely sound, especially since it was occurring in the midst of such a topic.

“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” he murmured, leaning forward to kiss me on the head.

I melted at the gesture, just a little, until he pulled back, and I remembered he needed to say a load more for me to feel okay about this situation.