Page 36 of Bear's Rejected Love

“You didn’t wreck anything by coming here. On the surface I might have looked like I was holding everything together, but underneath…” he stopped, he didn’t need to explain what a mess he was, she’d seen it for herself.” I do want to know Corbin. I truly, honestly do. If I were you, I wouldn’t have given me half a second’s thought after I abandoned you. I wouldn’t have wanted to share my son with a bastard like me. You’re generous, though. You’re not like me. You don’t want to make people suffer or spend the rest of their lives paying for their mistakes.”

“Experiences,” she corrected. “Not just mistakes. Though I want to think that leaving was a mistake. I think that’s a nice thought.”

“I just… I feel like… like I’ve forced you to be here. I feel like I’ve trapped you. I feel like I went about it all wrong. I don’t want you to be here, hurting and resenting and going mad in a cage without bars. I never meant to pull at the loose threads of you until you were completely unwound when you’d spent so long and tried so hard to put it all back together.”

The urge to stride across the room and take her arms in his hands and reassure her brayed at him again, like a pack of wild dogs.

“No. I’ve been an idiot. I’ve always listened to my fears and my doubts and let them dictate how I’ve lived my life. You had every right to ask me to stop. To give my word that I’d see this through. It’s not just me now. It wasn’t just me when I left you. I should have done better. I want to do right by you now. I’ll get my shit together. I’ll get it figured out. I know accidents happen. I’m sorry that you had to chase me down. I’m sorry you had to make me promise not to leave. I’m sorry that I’m always going to be a cagey bastard and that my first instinct will always be for survival.”

Tabitha tucked a folded sweater into the dresser and shut the drawer. She no longer looked like the young, slightly lost, far too hopeful, starry eyed young woman who he’d mated. She was no ghost from the past. She was a woman who had seen and done some living. She’d loved. She’d lost. She’d had a child and raised him. She’d weathered life. She was tough now, but still gentle. Still thoughtful. Still hopeful and sweet. He hadn’t been there to hold her and protect her. To shield her from the world. She hadn’t needed him to do that, and she didn’t need him to do it now.

“I think that some people are bent on self-destruction.” She chewed on her bottom lip in such a way that it made him notice and it made him wanther. He reached out and gripped the edge of the dresser closest to him. Out of the two of them, she was the one worth saving. She’d always been the one. “But I don’t think you’re one of those people. I think you’re just tired from trying to hold all the pain and grief in. You’ve been holding onto it when you should just let it go. You can’t have life without pain and fear and getting messy. It’s okay to make mistakes. All of that just shows that you’re pushing forward and that you’re still learning. It’s okay to learn how to be happy. No one will think less of you. Not me, not Denver if you got back in touch, no one from the clan, not your parents, if they could see you now.”

He swallowed. Looked at the curtains fluttering at the window again. The lace looked soft, not scratchy. Fragile, a bit like he felt now, as if suddenly he would burst open.

“If they could see me now,’ he said hoarsely, even though it went against his picture of self-preservation, “They’d be ashamed of me.”

“I think they’d understand that when you’re young, you think that keeping their memory alive is keeping that constant grief raw—and you were scared to let it go, thinking that to allow yourself to be happy meant that you’d forgotten them. They’d say that everyone stumbles and that’s okay. Mistake might just be a fancy word for regret, but all the same, we’re here and there’s so much life to be lived yet. Blaming yourself has got you nowhere, but at the same time, it also got you here. I can’t even begin to imagine what you went through at the lab, but you’re out. You’re here. If your parents could see you now, I think that most of all, they’d say that they know that you’re a good man and that they’re proud of you.”

His mouth dropped. He faced her, fury rising inside of him. “Are you insane?” He dropped away any pretense at a civilized front. Most people would have been afraid or even appalled, looking at the face he was giving her, probably one step away from an enraged beast or a shadowy monstrous thing at best, but not Tabitha. There must be something wrong with her because she refused to see it. She refused to see the ugly side of him. “There’s nothing to be proud of. I haven’t earned anything. I haven’t earned the right to be happy.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because the universe has decided that—-”

“The universe hasn’t decided anything, Roan.” She was digging into her never-ending supply of patience. She gave the smallest sigh. “You’ve decided. You’ve decided that you’ll do anything and everything to punish yourself. You don’t have to die that way and you certainly don’t have to live that way. There is nothing you have to pay penance for, there was never anything to pay penance for. What the universe has given you is another chance. A safe, beautiful place, people who care about you, friends, children, and a family. Just take it. Live it. Be happy, your world won’t come crashing down just because you allow joy in your life.”

She made it sound so simple. She was no longer the innocent young woman who hadn’t lost anyone or been through any trials herself, and yet she held onto her sweetness.

She could still get under his skin the same way. She could still reach straight to his vital organs and pierce them all with a single look, a simple word, one of her signature smiles.

He put up his hands, he had no desire to fight or argue with her, but it felt as if he was standing on a precipice. “It’s not that simple. You should see that I’m not—”

She moved in on him, getting up in his face. It happened so fast. She wasn’t angry or forceful like her bear had been in the woods. She took his arms so gently, her fingers creating white hot paths of lightning that buzzed through his whole body. They slid down to his hands. When she grasped them, he noticed how much larger and rougher they were than hers. She’d always been so much smaller and so much stronger. She had a special talent for happiness and even when he knew that it would tear him apart, he’d instinctively reached out for it. For her.

She’d felt dangerous as a mate, but he’d agreed to it anyway. His alpha and his clan knew how much he needed her, long before he was ready to admit that he had a need for anyone.

She was dangerous now, touching him, giving him hope, filling him with all the things that no regular person would say to him.

That was a lie, and he knew it. Anyone in Greenacre would tell him these things.

But no one in Greenacre was like Tabitha. No one in Greenacre was his mate.

The ties hadn’t dissolved. He still felt that same pull to her that was more lethal to him than anything he’d been injected with in that lab. Far more lethal and far more perfect a fit.

There’d been a time, more than that one night when everything came crashing together and crashing down, when he realized what kind of life he could have if only he was willing to open his heart to it. He wasn’t. He’d wanted to hang onto his pain because it was the one link he had left to the past. If he let go of his grief and moved forward without it, what would he have? Who would he be?

“You can, Roan. You can let it go. It doesn’t mean that you’re banishing the memories, or that they don’t still hold meaning. It doesn’t even mean that it won’t hurt anymore. You can have a good life. You deserve it.”

“No.”

He tried to pull his hands away, but she held them tightly, pressing into his palms with her index finger and the back of his hands with her thumbs.

“Yes, Roan. Say it. I want to hear you say it. If no one has told you this, then I’m truly sorry. We all just thought you knew. You weren’t responsible. You don’t have to keep punishing yourself or thinking that it’s right that other people hurt you or believing the universe demands your sacrifice. You aren’t a danger to anyone. You’re a good person. You deserve good things. You’re a part of us and we want you. We care about you. We love you.”

“No.” The denial came out half panicked, poison escaping from his bloodstream. “No! What happened to me, that lab, the fire, my parents,all of it, it’s proof that I’m—”

She shook her head fiercely. The pulse started hammering in his throat, slamming at his wrists. Her hold never wavered. “It’s not.” Why had he never listened, when anyone said that to him before? Why did he need her to tell him? Was it because she was the one he’d wronged the most, or was it because no matter how far he ran and no matter how hard he fought against it, he knew that she was the soul for his soul? “It’s not, Roan. No.”

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