Page 30 of Hold on Tight

It was, she knew, and yet this thing, whatever it was, with Jake felt different from anything she’d ever known. Definitely a whole different ball game from what she’d felt for Aaron.

Aaron, despite whatever weakness had compelled him to accept her father’s money, had been a terrifically nice guy. He played games with Sam, he got along great with her parents, he treated her right without fail.

In bed, he was attentive, creative, and energetic. They had a lot in common—they enjoyed going to the movies together. Reading similar books. Hiking, kayaking, biking, either alone together or with Sam in tow.

If she had stayed in Florida, she was pretty sure he would have proposed. Even after their fight, even after she’d broken up with him, he’d insisted he wanted to earn back her trust. He said he’d keep an eye out for jobs in the Seattle area, because he’d miss her like fury. He said he’d find a way to show her how much he loved her, that her father’s money had meant nothing to him.

She’d expressed doubt, but his pleading had softened her and she hadn’t told him not to bother trying. Because the truth was, Aaron would make a good husband and a good father.

Even if he had sometimes bored her to tears.

Kissing Jake had been, as Jake had so eloquently put it, a dumb fucking idea. But the furthest thing from boring. It had woken her up—not just the eager dampness between her legs, not just the tight demand of her nipples, but something else. The way it had been that night at the lake, the physical connection reaching deep into her, grabbing at some emotional truth she wanted to but couldn’t hide. How much she liked him. How deeply shefelthim.

He took a step toward the living room. “I should go.”

She should let him go. She should let him walk away, for so many reasons. And yet her pulse beat hard, at her throat, in her wrists, between her legs, an insistent rhythm, a vibrant counterpoint to good sense.

Jake shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mira. It’s not you.”

Had he really said that? The thing about that cliché, the thing she had always hated most, was that it worked so damn well. There was no argument against it. It was the perfect put-down, the definitive end point.

“It’s me. I’m—a mess,” Jake said.

Don’t argue with him. Tell him he’s right. Tell him you’re a mess, too, and you’re in no position to be involved with anyone. For, say, the next five years. Let alone someone who comes with the baggage he does. Let alone someone whose DNA is in a Gordian knot with yours.

But what came out instead was, “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

“What?”

God, what was she doing? She hadn’t jumped out of her father’s frying pan to fall into some other alpha asshole’s fire.

Words were somehow still coming out of her mouth, and they had the pressure of truth, the heat of conviction behind them. “You look at you and you see a mess. I look at you and I see a good-looking guy, a guy who was badly injured but who is obviously doing a great job of rehabbing. A guy who helped me out of a fix today.”

He was shaking his head again, but she kept going. “I see the stuff I read about you online yesterday, which was all about what a good soldier you were. I see the emails you sent me, which told me you’re good with kids, good with your mom. So if there’s something else I’m supposed to be seeing, you’re going to have to spell it out for me.”

“Fine,” he said. He crossed his arms, his face grim. “I’ll spell it out. I’m here today, but barely, because it practically killed me just to haul myself out of bed and get myself here. I haven’t done anything since I left Afghanistan except eat, sleep, and learn to use this hunk of metal, because it’s a full-time job figuring out how to be human.”

She waited. Because she knew there was more. Because she could see it in the coiled, angry set of his shoulders, in the rage behind his eyes. Because she knew—she wasn’t sure how—that he hadn’t said these words to anyone before, and that his saying them to her was the beginning of something that mattered. To her. To him.

“You think you want me, but if you knew, you wouldn’t.”

“Try me,” she said.

That only made him angrier, the words coming rapid fire.

“I don’t have a job. I don’twanta job. I’ve only ever wanted to be a soldier. I don’t know how to want to be anything other than a soldier. I drink too much, but nottoo muchtoo much because I don’t want to be my father. And I can’t get it up, except for when some psychiatrist at Walter Reed put me on antidepressants and I got hard-ons for three hours at a time and couldn’t get myself off.”

She winced.Yowch.

She hurt for him. For the boy he’d been that night at the lake, for the soldier who’d lost his leg, and something much bigger. For the man who had laid out in raw detail all the ways he believed himself not a man. She wanted to wrap him in her arms and stroke his hair and move her lips against his cheek and his ear, whispering words of comfort she couldn’t even articulate yet.

He wasn’t done. His breath was coming as fast as it had when she’d grabbed his waistband. “So I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I am bad fucking juju. I’m not what you want in your life. And I am most definitely not what you want in Sam’s life.”

The echo of her father’s words brought her back. To the world she was trying to build here for herself and Sam, one where bossy men didn’t tell her what to do or what to feel. One where her father didn’t get to decide who she should sleep with, who she should expose her son to, how she should live.

And neither did this guy, because he was too damn pathetic to get to make decisions for her. “You know, if you don’t want to have sex with me, that’s fine. I get it. Your life is complicated enough as it is. And yeah, I can see, getting mixed up with us would be a lot for a guy in your situation. But don’t tell me what I want. And don’t tell me what’s good for Sam. Just man up and say you don’t want this.”

He raked a hand through his hair. The anger and the wild hair conspired to make him look frightening, but she wasn’t scared of him.

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