Page 62 of Creatures in the Night

“How do you figure? You didn’t even kiss me,” I reminded him.

“Because knowing how much you didn’t want to marry me, I wasn’t about to let anyone else see just how much you didn’t want to,” he shot back. “I wasn’t going to take a chance on my wife pulling away from me just to prove a point, which is exactly what you would have done.”

I shook my head. “You humiliated me.”

“I granted you mercy,” he countered. “And because being a coward in this situation is easier than loving me, you’d rather push me into another woman’s bed just so that you’ll have a reason to continue to hate me. You need to feed your anger because if you don’t, you might just find yourself believing me and falling in love with your husband, and we can’t have that now, can we?”

He wasn’t wrong, and I hated that he wasn’t. “You talked about me so horribly that one of your men thought he’d be doing you a favor by getting rid of me. How can you not see how fucked-up that is?”

“I know,” he said, relenting a bit. “And because of my carelessness, I can barely stand to let you out of my sight, something that’s going to torture me for the rest of my living days. So, believe me when I tell you that I’d turn back time if I could. You think I enjoy losing my fucking mind every time that I don’t have eyes on you?”

“That’s only touching if it’s the truth,” I pointed out.

Noah stepped to me again, making me have to crane my neck back to maintain eye contact. “Shea, the only reason that I’m allowing you to keep your job is because I don’t want to give you another reason to not love me. If it were up to me, I’d tether you to my side with barely a foot of rope between us.”

“You said that you didn’t care how I felt,” I reminded him. “You said that my feelings didn’t matter.”

“When it comes to divorce, they don’t,” he clarified. “When it comes to everything else, your feelings matter more than you can possibly imagine. Why in the fuck else would I allow you to sleep alone while I made a life with someone else?’

I flinched at that reminder.

I couldn’t help it.

It was also exactly what Noah needed to go in for the kill. “Say the word, and I’ll sleep beside you every night, Shea. If you want me to beg, then I’ll beg. I’ll do whatever I have to, so that you stop trying to fucking destroy us.”

“I don’t know what I want,” I finally confessed.

“Yes, you do,” he countered. “You’re just too afraid or too prideful to say it.”

Once again, we were back to this being all my fault.

Chapter 39

Noah~

I had her within reach, and knowing that she wasn’t lost to me entirely had me ready to drop to my knees and beg without her even having to ask. She didn’t like the idea of me and other women any more than I did, and this was all about her pride. I’d left her alone to come up with her own conclusions about my behavior, and that’s where I’d gone wrong the most. Had I just fucking explained myself, then we wouldn’t be in this goddamn mess.

“I’ll do whatever you want me to, Shea,” I repeated. “With the exception of divorce, naturally.”

“I just want to be able to believe you,” she finally admitted.

“Are you sure about that?”

Her brows furrowed a bit at my question. “What do you mean?”

“If that’s really what you want, then you’d give me the chance to prove myself,” I reasoned. “How can I prove how much I want and love you if you won’t let me be around to do that?”

I watched her shoulders sag, and it really was a motherfucker to see her so upset and beaten down, especially when it was mostly my fault. I kept talking big about honoring my vows, but I’d been doing a shit job of cherishing her like she deserved. It was a huge responsibility to be in charge of someone else’s happiness, and it was a huge burden when you failed at that particular job.

“I don’t know how to fight you,” she sighed tiredly. “Not when you don’t fight fair.”

“I’ll never fight fair when it comes to you, lass,” I informed her. “If you think that I don’t mind getting my hands bloody for my family, then you’d be surprised at what I would do for you.”

“You hurt me,” she finally confessed. “From the very beginning, you’ve been doing nothing but hurting me, and it started when we first met. It started with you telling me that there wasn’t much to me.”

“And that was my mistake,” I granted. “The people that are close to me or have worked with me a long time know that my accent only comes out when I’m being sarcastic or close to losing my patience. Of course, you couldn’t have known that about me, but I hadn’t been thinking of that at the time. When I said those words to you, they’d been because I’d just seen your co-worker all over you, but also because I’d been being facetious in that regard. I’d said it because I hadn’t been expecting much from you, but I’d gotten the opposite instead. When I said that there wasn’t much to you, I’d meant that you were already turning out to be more than I had bargained for.” Her eyes began to water again. “I’m not sure that you realize just how fucking beautiful you are, baby.”

“Don’t do that,” she whispered brokenly.

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