Page 40 of When You Are Mine

Kerris looked away from the unrelenting heat of his eyes chasing every emotion across her face.

“It’s fine.”

The silence of the gazebo swallowed her words almost before she’d even said them. She heard the inadequacy of it. The word “fine” lay flaccid beside the sensations she’d experienced with Walsh in that hospital room. She didn’t have to look at Walsh’s face to see him remembering. He dropped her elbow, his fingers curling into his palms, like he had to stop himself from touching her. From reminding her how it had been.

“That’s not how it’s supposed to be with the person you marry.” Walsh left space around each word as if that would help her understand.

“Maybe not for you, or for other people, but that’s how it is for me. I just don’t think I have the capacity to be affected that way.” She looked back into his face, silently daring him to call her a liar. “I’ve always accepted that what happened with TJ just turned a switch off in me. Not that I won’t be intimate with my husband, but…”

“That’s not fair to Cam, because his switch has not been turnedoff.” Walsh brushed a hand across his eyes, evicting a heavy breath from his mouth. “He deserves someone who’ll love him the way he loves her, want him the way he wants her. I know for a fact Cam feels more than ‘fine’ when he thinks about making love to you.”

Heated blood stormed Kerris’s cheeks. Despite the fact that she had just shared her most closely guarded secrets with this man, his candor on this particular subject embarrassed her. And his persuasions were pointless. Her decision on whether or not to marry Cam would not hinge on their sexual chemistry. Cam wanted whatever she had to give, and she could live with what she felt for Cam.

What she had with Walsh…it was emotion and feeling and passion. All the things she couldn’t trust to sustain her for the long haul. Those things could be gone as quickly as they flared to life. And he would never consider someone like her to start the dynasty everyone expected of him. She wanted forever, not a fleeting attraction.

“Let’s go on in.” She turned her back on him and placed one foot on the first step out of the gazebo, not bothering to address his last statement.

“So you’ve never talked to Cam about what happened with TJ?”

His question petrified her, left her afraid to even move or breathe with him at her back. The silence puffed up with all the evasions she could offer instead of the awkward truth.

“No. You’re the first person I’ve talked to about it since it happened.”

“Why me?” His voice was soft, but insistent, pinioning her arms and legs to the spot where she stood.

“I’m not sure.”

“Do me a favor.” His voice hardened and bounced off her troubled mind like pebbles against a windowpane. “Figure that out before you marry my best friend.”

She looked over her shoulder, lost for a moment in his unwavering stare. She refused to acknowledge the heat that flared between them. Without another word, she crossed the lawn as quickly as she could, hoping he would not follow.

* * *

Walsh watched Kerris cross the yard, his stomach a cauldron of heating, stirring emotions. He shouldn’t have followed her when he saw her slip through those French doors. He could tell himself what he told her. That he’d just been concerned, but the truth was an ugly thing he owed himself. He’d wanted to be with her alone and unguarded. Even as disgusted as he was with himself, he would have chosen these last few moments with her over every Bennett holding he stood to inherit.

He sat down on the gazebo bench, leaning his elbows on his knees and dropping his head into his hands. There was too much information to process. What she’d been through. That monster had touched her, hurt her. The primal beast inside him pulled against the restraining chain of civilized behavior. Not just because of the abuse she’d suffered, but at the thought of Kerris marrying Cam. He knew in his gut that would be disastrous for them all, but he didn’t know how to stop it without ruining the most important relationships in his life.

He shook his head, twisting his lips in self-mockery. How ironic that she derided fate, soul mates, and destiny. Hadn’t he held similar views? Hadn’t he always assumed he’d just marry the girl he enjoyed the most in bed? Someone who’d be a good mother to his children and the arm candy he’d need to impress his exclusive social circle? Someone to whom he could remain faithful, given how his father had disrespected his mother with his blatant infidelity. That idea was so tepid beside this hurricane of feeling for Kerris.

Meeting her rocked every notion he’d held about love and marriage. How could he explain the instant recognition he’d felt for her? The confusion of feeling he’d wrestled with all summer crystallized into something so frightening he could barely breathe as it permeated his consciousness. His heart had known, and his head was just now catching up.

Kerris was his.

Despite the differences in their backgrounds—the advantages he’d grown up with and she had never known, the family he’d practically been smothered by and the gaping void in her life where familial love should have been—despite everything about them that was opposite, they fit.

The kiss they’d shared in the hospital had been more than “fine.” It had been consuming, flaming, desperate. To hear that she didn’t experience a measure of that passion with Cam humbled yet confounded him. It angered him to think she would settle for less. That she would turn her back on something so rare. Fear wrapped steely fingers around his throat, constricting his breath. If she accepted Cam’s proposal tonight, it would set them on a course of inevitable destruction.

“Dammit.” He scrambled down the gazebo steps, racing across the lawn and into the house. “Sorry, Kerris. I can’t let you do it.”

Chapter Fifteen

Hey, I was wondering where you were,” Cam said when Kerris returned to his side and took his hand. “Ker, this is Sebastian. He owns that new gallery on Main we saw a couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh, that’s a beautiful space.” Kerris smiled at the man without really registering his features, still off kilter after her conversation with Walsh. “Did Cam tell you he paints? His work is amazing.”

“She has to say that.” Cam shrugged, modesty like a rented jacket on his shoulders. “She’s my girlfriend.”

“You’re a lucky man.” Sebastian’s eyes lingered on Kerris’s face. “I’ve actually seen some of his work. He’s very gifted. I was telling him I just got back from Paris. Still the strongest artistic community in the world. Such a convergence of culture and art and expression.”

---