Page 34 of Bear's Rejected Love

He didn’t look surprised. He looked tired and not from a sleepless night.

“Do you… have you… regretted that night? Is that what you see every single time you look at me? Something that never should have happened?” That soft question came out against her will. She’d always been so afraid to ask. She’d been afraid to think that way. She’d told herself it didn’t matter because it didn’t change anything, but the truth was, it did matter.

She wished she could have been a real mate. Someone that Roan fought for. Someone he was afraid to lose. She wished that he could find it in himself to look at everyone else here in his life that way. Like he’d rather lose himself than lose any of them. Like he’d walk through fire for them. Instead, he’d always appeared like he was trapped by them. By her family, by Denver, by her, by his clan. Like the weight of them was impossible for him to bear and when he was just too exhausted from holding himself up, he had to leave.

“Never mind,” she whispered, turning her face up to the dark sky. It must be cloudy. She couldn’t see the stars or the moon, but the animal in her felt them anyway. Her eyes burned, but she kept the tears trapped inside. She’d let them out when she was alone, in private, but not now. She’d humiliate herself if she cried now. She had no idea what hurt worse. His silence or the fact that she still wasn’t even completely sure what his answer would be. “There were happy times.” She’d always focused on those. Told Corbin about them. She’d created that world for him, so that he could know his father even when he wasn’t there and even when she doubted that she’d ever find him. “So many good memories. Do you ever think about that instead?”

He cleared his throat and when he turned to her, his eyes blazed. She was taken aback by the intensity there. “I thought about it all the time when I was in the lab. It seemed more like a taunt than anything, but maybe that’s what got me through.”

“Hope. That’s what brought you out the other side.”

“That and the medical proficiency of those bastards who refused to kill me or let me die.”

The loneliness, she realized, wasn’t just an entity for her. It was inside of Roan. Maybe it always had been. Once it was nestled deep in a person, it was like another being in their body. He’d never been able to shake it.

The need to reach out and set a hand on his hand, or on his arm, to make contact with his bare skin tore her open. There’d be no stitches for that wound. Not when she didn’t trust herself to touch him. Not when she knew it wasn’t her right to get close.

Roan inhaled so deeply that the breath crackled in his chest before he released it. Silence wove between them, filling up the slight space between their bodies on that step. She could feel his heat, feel him existing right beside her, but she couldn’t do anything about it. She felt a new helplessness seep into her. What was it she’d just thought about good intentions?

Whatever. She had to try. Not for her sake, but for the kids in that cabin right behind them. They were all in there, sleeping peacefully, thinking that everything would be okay.

One lone tear slipped down her cheek. She didn’t move to brush it away. She hoped that Roan wouldn’t notice, since he’d turned his face away again. “I want your word that you won’t try and leave. I can’t be constantly worried about it. I want your word and I want you to make good on it.”

“The way that I didn’t make good on the promise I made you?”

She gulped, her throat swelling shut. “That’s right.”

He heaved himself off the steps, a bundle of tightly coiled energy. He looked like a caged animal, stalking around on the grass right in front of her. She couldn’t see his face and she was afraid of the anguish that would be there if he turned. She was afraid she was ruining him with that simple, logical request.

“And when something inside me hurts someone? What then?”

He was so convinced that he was the threat, and he was the danger. Had he always believed that? Even back when they were little more than just kids? She let out a slow, unsteady breath. It felt like a stream of air hissing out of a balloon. Precious, vital air.

She chose to grasp onto what he didn’t say. He wanted to stay. He wanted to have a family. He didn’t want to step off into that pit and keep falling into that chasm of endless black. He’d fought to stay alive in that lab. He’d come looking for his people after. His clan. He wanted, at least on some level, to be a part of that again. He wanted it for the girls. He’d brought them with him. Silver too, when they thought there was no place for them in Greenacre, or at least that Greenacre might not exist because it was under threat.

He might not have sought her out, but he was looking for someone. He believed he wasn’t a good fit, that he wasn’t safe, that he was barely in control, but he’d chosen to let the girls live with him. He’d chosen the struggle and maybe even the internal pain of holding it together for them. He loved them all enough to leave and give up everything he’d found again after all that soul searching in the lab, if only that meant keeping them safe.

“Everyone knows that you’re no threat. The only way you could ever hurt the people you care about is to leave them alone.

She watched his broad back, the triangle shoulders heaving in that borrowed t-shirt. She waited for him to pull away or to push back against her the way he’d always done.

Instead, he faced her, balling his hands at his sides. “You want my word? You have it.”

When she expected more fight from him, he gave her his bleakness. He showed her yet again how endlessly tired he was. And then he walked past her and went back inside, and she was left out there on the steps, feeling again that keen, biting sense of aloneness, feeling that she’d taken a magnificent creature and slammed it into a cage.

Chapter 14

Roan

“Please don’t hate me, but I have something to say.”

Laughing would be inappropriate. It would be that mirthless sound that indicated that he didn’t find anything humorous, and that would just signal that he was a giant asshole. Tabitha already knew he was an asshole, he didn’t need a flag waving in her face to remind her, he didn’t want another reason for her to resent him.

Added to her list of a hundred thousand reasons, it’s probably not so bad.

“Has that ever stopped you before?”

She folded a dress and set it in the dresser in the girls’ new room.

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