Page 16 of If You Fight

I cradled her face and kissed her, loving the feel of her soft lips against mine. I’d missed that so fucking much.

“I’m sorry. I just can’t think of you doing that again. It hurts too much.”

A single tear slid down her cheek as her lower lip quivered. “I thought I could stay so strong, Ryder. I want to. I want to be the person who said all those things when I was lying in that hospital bed. I meant every word. I did. But now that I’m back in that apartment where everything happened, I don’t know. It’s like little bits of my strength chip away every day I’m there. I’m afraid I’ll wake up one of these days and there will be none left.”

I pulled her to me and held her close as she began to cry. I’d wanted her to be strong too, even if I hadn’t wanted to go along with her plan to get revenge on Oliver.

She sobbed against my chest as I asked, “Did he do something to you? I want you to tell me.”

If he did, I wasn’t sure I could hold back from doing what I wanted to do to him.

Serena shook her head and looked up at me as she dried her eyes. “He says the same thing all the time. He threatens to hurt the two of us if he ever finds out who I was with. But he’s had some big acquisition at work to deal with, thankfully, so I haven’t had to see him much at all.”

“That’s good, at least. I hate thinking about him there with you. I lay in bed at night worried I’m going to hear sirens at any minute and I’m going to race over there and find you—”

I couldn’t finish that sentence. Every damn night I dreaded hearing those sirens because I knew she’d be dead if I heard them. And then I’d have to live with the fact that I hadn’t protected her when she needed me most.

“He doesn’t care enough about me to try again, Ryder. It wasn’t me he wanted to hurt.”

Pushing down my emotions about him intentionally killing our child, I took her by the hand and walked over to the chair. More than once this past week, she and I had cried all the way to the soup kitchen about losing the baby. I didn’t want to cry anymore. I didn’t want to think about him or her anymore.

I pulled Selena onto my lap and wrapped my arms around her, loving just having her next to me. Something about feeling her against my body made everything else in life fade away until it was just the two of us. It had been like that ever since that first night we got together years ago, and still all it took was having her with me to make my world livable again.

To make me believe in the dream.

Lightly tracing her finger along my jaw, she looked over at the half-empty bottle of whisky on the table and asked, “Why do you drink so much?”

“To forget.”

She gazed into my eyes. “Does it work? Because if it does, I want to drink too. I want to forget.”

I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t work. It just makes me think more.”

“Then why do you do it?”

Sliding my hand through her hair, I stopped and twisted a section around my finger. “Because after I spend hours sitting here alone every night thinking of how much I’d hate myself if you were hurt and I wasn’t there to protect you, the alcohol finally knocks me out and I can at least get a few hours of sleep.”

Serena pressed her lips together. “I’m sorry. If only I was as strong as I want to be or even if I was like Janelle, you wouldn’t have to worry all the time.”

Just the thought of being with her sister made me smile, and her mood brightened immediately. “What’s so funny?”

“Me with Janelle. That would never happen.”

Searching my face for more of an answer, she finally said, “I told you what she thought you were brought here to be. Remember? She thought you were here to be a stud and swore to me she’d never sleep with you.”

I slid my hands down Serena’s arms and folded the cuffs of her sleeves. “The other night she was singing a different tune, but there wasn’t going to be any way in hell I’d ever sleep with her.”

When I’d finished fixing her sweater, she placed her palms against my cheeks. “But you’d sleep with me. Did you want to before I came to your room that night?”

Thinking back to those early days when I was new at the estate, I said, “I don’t know. I wasn’t sure what to make of you. I just knew Janelle was a bitchy little rich girl. But you seemed different.”

Her eyebrows raised and she smiled. “Different, huh? Why’s that?”

“Your big brown eyes always seemed to be looking at me, and I wasn’t sure what you were seeing. Or what you wanted to see.”

Serena ran her finger along the collar of my dress shirt and shyly admitted, “You were so foreign compared to everyone here. I wanted to know everything about you, but I didn’t know how to do that. So I watched you whenever I could.”

“So I was foreign? What if I had been like everyone you were used to?”

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