Page 78 of Cowboy SEAL Christmas

He started disentangling himself from her, suddenly not so worried about the cold. Sometimes cold was better than warmth. “I’ll go start the coffee.”

“Wait.” She held on tighter. “I have to ask you my question.”

He stiffened in spite of himself. He would have rather she not been able to feel that physical reaction, but he couldn’t exactly take it back. “You really want to do that again?” He hoped he sounded dismissive. He was afraid he sounded pained.

She burrowed closer, pressing a kiss to his neck. “Yes, I really do.”

“All right.” After all, yesterday’s question had ended in sex. Even if that had made everything weird. Weird sex was still sex, and the sex was good, no matter the circumstances.

Damn good. The best. Seriously, what the hell was wrong with him?

“What experience with therapists made you hate them so much?”

He should have predicted that was where she’d go with today’s question. He’d laid the seeds, and it was his own fault for allowing them to sprout. If he’d been thinking, if he had any self-preservation skills left, he would have made up some story in advance.

He should lie, and even as he told himself to come up with one right that second, he knew…

She’d asked him not to lie to her and he’d agreed.

“The fire thing… Well, believe it or not, people don’t take it lightly when you set fires indoors at weddings.” He said it lightly, even as his gut clenched against old memories of anger, confusion, pain. Having to sit at that table with a bunch of strangers while Mom and Evan sat with his kids at the head table. He’d realized at some point he was sitting with the help: photographer, reverend, florist. A little boy, left alone at his mother’s wedding.

Even now, he didn’t feel much regret at fooling around with the lighter he’d found in the bathroom. Even now, he got a grim kind of satisfaction remembering the way the flame had licked up the paper decoration that had hung in the hallway that led back to the main reception area.

Warped, sure, but he could accept warped. He wasn’t a liar, and he didn’t hurt people. He’d take messed up in the head over anything Evan was.

“Imagine that,” she murmured. Her leg was curled over his, her arm over his chest. She reached up and began drawing her fingers over his cheek, down his jawbone, then back up. Sweet. Comforting.

Just as he had last night, he felt a tightening in his chest. When she’d been crying over Colin, thinking she was a failure when she was the best mom he’d ever known. That clutching, painful knot that hadn’t dissipated till he’d reached out and held her while she cried.

Now the clutching, painful knot was there in his chest because she was offering him the same. Comfort. Touch. Care.

“Evan wanted me punished or sent away, but eventually they agreed on counseling. Over the years, that would be a constant. I don’t know how many offices I was dragged into, how many people tried to twist what I felt into something else or shove a pill down my throat so I felt nothing at all.”

“That isn’t what counseling should be,” she whispered against his neck. “I’m not a psychiatrist, but counseling isn’t about telling you what you feel.”

“But that’s what they did. Told me what to feel. Told Evan what he wanted to hear. I was warped and damaged and a threat.”

She leveraged up on her elbow, looking down at him, her eyebrows drawn together. “That can’t possibly be true.”

“And yet…”

“No, I meant…you’re none of those things. I’m not denying that those things happened to you. I’m expressing my utter confusion.”

“He paid them off, Monica. Or threatened them. I don’t know. But they were workingforhim.”

“Surely… You take an oath. You… Surely someone told him go to hell.”

He snorted a laugh at the idea of anyone saying that to Evan Milan. “No, not a… Well, I suppose there were a few they had me see that… I’d forgotten that.” Forgotten in all his bitterness and rage that therehadbeen a few friendly faces. It was just he’d never seen them again.

“What?”

“Therewereshrinks they took me to who we never went back to. I suppose they didn’t fall in line with what Evan wanted them to say.”

Monica was quiet, her fingers still trailing up and down his jaw.

“Would you?” he asked, even though it was a stupid question. Of course she never would, and if she would, she’d never admit it.

But she was quiet for a few moments as if she was really considering it. “For money? No, I couldn’t manipulate a patient for money.”

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