Page 234 of Branded
“Oh, baby,” I whispered, arms tightening.
“He beat her to death, Raph. Hit her so hard that her face wasn’t—” Beth’s voice broke. “Well, it wasn’t her face any longer when I saw it at the hospital, and they blamed me.” Her voice broke again, and she sounded close to tears, so I just held her tight, running my hand up and down her back and waited for her to be ready to go on.
But when she didn’t speak, I asked gently, “Who blamed you, sugarpie?”
“My grandparents.” A breath. “The police.”
Fucking hell.
“My grandparents…fuck”—she blew out a breath—“I remember the expression on their faces when they realized I knew what was happening, and that I didn’t do something about it. God, the disgust and anger and—that stung so much, and seeing that I knew—knew—I’d done wrong. It was my fault that she was dead. My. Fault.” Rage was burning through me, but I tamped it down. “And then, when the detective looked at me like that, too…well, that fact burned itself on my soul. I knew it was my fault. I knew I was as big of a monster as I was because otherwise, why would my grandparents look at me like that? Why would the detective? It was me. I was the monster. I-I—” She broke off, and I buried my head in her hair, holding her tight, breathing slowly so that I didn’t add to her distress.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I murmured.
“I know,” she said softly, so softly that I could barely hear it considering my pulse was pounding in my ears as I strived for control. “It took me a long time to get there. Too long.” She lifted her head and sighed. “So that’s my secret, that’s the horrible, ugly demon in the basement of my soul, the one I tried to bury time and again—it was my fault my mom was dead. Because I might as well have killed her myself. Because me being happy to go to school, happy to pretend what was happening at home wasn’t actually happening. And then me being annoyed she was calling, and my grandparents and that detective—” A shake of her head. “I was young. It implanted itself deep. And I was punishing myself because I thought I deserved it. Doubly so when he managed to hire lawyers that got him off, when he didn’t even have to pay for doing that for her.”
“Sugarpie,” I croaked, taking her cheeks in my hands, and gently kissing her forehead. “God, honey, I’m so sorry.”
She leaned in. “Me too.”
I stroked a hand through her hair.
“So now you know everything.” She took a breath, released it slowly. “And now you need to stop worrying about me.”
I froze, leaned back enough to meet her eyes. “What?”
“You’ve been letting my past eat at you, and I spent too long doing that to myself, and I love you too much to let you do that and?—”
I’d frozen before.
But now I went absolutely still.
“—I haven’t come this far, you haven’t come this far for us to let it impact our future. And I’m not going to therapy and working my ass off to get my head straight, only for you to have yours?—”
“Sugarpie?”
Her words stopped coming, but her lips remained parted.
“You love me?”
Her eyes widened. “I—” Her teeth pressed into her bottom lip then that red-painted mouth tipped up, and she shrugged. “Yeah, love, I think I made that clear when I shared my mozzarella sticks with you all those months ago.”
She’d been calling me love for a while.
I’d noticed but hadn’t taken it in. Not what it really meant.
Not what all of it meant—the cheese sharing, the smiles, the sex, the time together, the therapy, and smiling at me through the glass at games, and shopping. Her staying up late and texting me when I got to hotels, learning about opponents, and giving me advice from Eva Moreno’s sports blog. Her hand in mine, her body pressed close, her mouth on my skin.
All of it.
So much.
And I was fucking greedy for more.
I wanted a lifetime of more.
“Fuck, I love you, sugarpie,” I groaned, wrapping my arms around her, and holding her tight.
“Yeah?” she whispered.
