Page 135 of Steamy Ever After

“You’ll freeze.” He glanced down her front where her jacket fell open.

The stained, damp dress clung to her skin and her nipples stabbed through the material. He swallowed, once again hating the fact that he found her figure so enticing.

“You don’t have to make me cake. You can stay.”

She growled and rolled her eyes. “My God, you are such an idiot.” She yanked the door and he forced it shut.

“What then? What will it take to make you stay?”

“Why do you care if I stay or go?”

“I don’t. But I don’t want to feel responsible when they find a corpse in a red dress on the side of the road after the snow clears.”

She glared at him, her eyes shot with pink and that damn bruise on her cheek appearing darker by the minute.

“Why won’t you put ice on that?” he snapped. “Is it just another way to make people feel sorry for you?”

She shoved him hard and yanked open the door.

He grabbed her elbow and jerked her back inside, shoving her against the wall and caging her in with his body. “You can’t go!”

“Why?”

His gut hollowed, leaving only the unspoken truth. “Because what if I’m the reason you drove off the road in the first place?”

The room fell silent.

Her gaze darted to the dated carpet and all he could hear over the echo of his words was her unsteady breathing. He held her arm in a tight grip, not bruising, but unbreakable.

“I didn’t mean what I said at the bar,” he rasped, needing her to tell him he hadn’t hurt her. “It was just…a joke.”

Tears welled in her eyes.

“Erin…” God, he hated knowing what he needed to say. “I’m…sorry.”

He’d humiliated her, but he hadn’t said anything they all weren’t already thinking. “It wasn’t your fault.” She just wanted this excruciating day to end. “The roads were icy. I’d been drinking. I was going too fast.”

“But your eyes…”

She frowned and looked up at him. “What?”

“When I found you, your makeup was all smeared like you’d been crying.”

Her lips firmed. She hated showing any sign of vulnerability around people she didn’t trust, and she trusted no one.

She wanted to deny it and say something snarky to put distance between them, but as he called her out, her emotions ganged up on her and her throat burned. This caring side of Giovanni didn’t match the annoying, do-anything-for-a-punchline asshole she’d always known.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she repeated, two tears slipping past her lashes and disappearing in the tacky pattern in the carpet.

His hand tightened on her arm. “Why are you crying?”

She shrugged. Her body ached, she was wet and cold and exhausted. She had no place to go, no one that wanted her.

Suddenly overwhelmed by her bleak circumstances, she sucked in a breath that jerked about her lungs like an inside-out sob. She looked at him with such desperation, truly believing this wasn’t his fault, but desperate to find someone who could make sense of her life for her.

“Do you ever hate who you are so much, that you wonder if the world would be better off without you?”

His brows drew together and his grip softened, his thumb rubbing ever so subtly over her arm where he held her. “Yes,” he rasped and her gaze jerked to his eyes, finding nothing but sincerity in the dark depths.

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