Page 37 of The Problem with Dating
On instinct, I flinched.
He was six-foot-three of undeniably angry muscle, and I just reacted.
Gideon froze.
Absolutely froze.
His eyes searched mine, and when time started back up again, he quickly pulled his hand back and took two huge steps backwards, placing a huge chasm of space in between us.
The silence was loud as hell, and horribly uncomfortable.
It was agony, actually.
My hands started to shake a little and my mouth had gone dry as Gideon just stared at me as if he’d never seen me before. Shock was quickly turning into embarrassment, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to look him in the eye again.
This was not how I thought today was going to go.
Chapter 20
Gideon~
This shit was not supposed to be this difficult.
When I reached for Echo’s phone, so I could answer it and tell that fuck of an ex of hers to quit calling her, I never, in a million years, would have expected her to flinch away from me. There was only one reason a person flinched like that, and I don’t think I’d ever been so livid in all my life.
Someone has put hands on her.
Someone mistreated her, and I was pretty sure it hadn’t been her parents. When Echo had spoken of them, it had been with absolute love and respect. All her stories had been happy ones, and she had told me how she had been truly devastated when they had been killed in that car wreck. So, that left the only other person I knew of that had been in her life.
Her fucking ex-husband.
I wasn’t sure how I found my voice, but I did. “How often?”
Echo straightened her back and placed her phone back on the counter behind her. “It only happened twice,” she replied softly, but her voice was strong.
“Only?” I hissed. “It shouldn’t ever fucking happen, Echo.” I wasn’t telling her anything that she didn’t know, but her flinching had fucked me up something awful. I didn’t have the best disposition around, and it turned my stomach that she could mistake my anger for an opportunity to abuse her.
“Well, it did,” she snapped back. “It did, and I’ve dealt with it.”
I let out a humorless laugh. “I highly doubt that, or else you wouldn’t have just flinched.” And then I almost doubled over when I thought of how many times, in this past week, I have wrapped my hands around her throat while fucking her. I’ve manhandled the shit out of her while we’ve been naked, choking her, pulling her hair, biting her, and even leaving bruises on her body.
The bruising.
Had she been thinking of him every time I’d gotten too aggressive? Did she see him in me and that’s why she flinched?
Fucking Christ.
“Gideon, what’s wrong?” she asked cautiously. “You…you look a bit…stunned.”
I couldn’t even fucking look at her. I turned my back on her and stepped into the living room to give me a moment to adjust to what I’d just learned.
I was a stranger to domestic violence. Sure, me, Sayer, and Nate had gotten into school fights when we’d been young and have even fought each other, but domestic violence? That was foreign to me-tous.I’ve never had any experience with that. My father positively adored my mother. He respected the softer sex, and he’d raised us to understand what it meant to cherish the women in our lives.
Sayer and Nathan would kill for their wives. Monroe and Andrea were the beginning and end of their lives. And even though Leta’s relationship with her father has improved over the years, she got a sterling example of how she deserved to be treated by how Sayer treated her mother. We did all we could to make sure that girl knew not to settle for less.
And Grant was steadily coming alone with the way we did things, too. Steven did a great job parenting my little dude, but we also did our part to make sure he grew up with a healthy respect for women.
Women were not mistreated in our family, and, right now, I wasn’t sure if I’ve been mistreated Echo or not. While she hadn’t complained or told me to stop all those times we’ve been together, I didn’t know how to curb my aggressive personality.
