Adam awoke slowly, his eyes fluttering open, his brain trying to figure out where he was. The light was all wrong…

Kylie turned over, mumbling about carrots as she moved, and it all came back to him. He was in his rental. In Kylie’s bedroom, to be specific. In Kylie’s bed, to be even more specific. He lay back with a happy groan. Waking up with Kylie by his side, after the most mind-blowing sex he’d ever had…well, other than the first time he and Kylie had made love, that was.

Yeah, life was going pretty damn awesome. He stacked his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling, a feeling of déjà vu washing over him as he lay there. How many times had he done exactly this with Wendy? It was weird to be in the same house, the same bedroom, the same bed even, but a different woman. He waited for the guilt to come – the self-recriminating thoughts about how he shouldn’t be so happy since the love of his life had died in his arms and he hadn’t been able to do a damn thing to save her, but…it didn’t appear.

Instead, he felt a sense of peace wash over him and for the first time, he wondered how Wendy would’ve felt about him basically becoming a monk since she passed. Would she have wanted it?

Maybe it was just him wishing for this answer, but he couldn’t help but think that she wouldn’t. She’d loved him with everything she had, and he’d loved her just as much. In the year after she’d died, all he could think was that he wished he’d died that day in the stream, too.

Anything to escape the pain.

But she wouldn’t have wanted that. He knew that – he’d always known that – but for the first time since his wife’s passing, he believed that.

Kylie turned back towards Adam, stretching out her fingertips and grazing his side lightly. “I can smell the burning rubber all the way over here,” she whispered, her eyes still shut, her fingers dancing over him. “Whatcha thinking about?”

He chuckled and snuggled her closer to him. “That it’s damn nice to wake up next to you,” he whispered into her hair. Which was close enough to the truth. She didn’t need to know how messed up he’d become over the years, trying to deal with the pain of Wendy dying in his arms.

No one needed to know that.

“Liar,” she said softly, burrowing deeper into his side.

Speaking of liars…

“I know you think that I took you here to make wild, passionate love to you—” she snorted with laughter at that and he grinned for a moment before continuing, “—but I’d actually wanted some privacy to talk to you.”

“Talk? About what?” she murmured, her hand drifting across his chest and over to his suddenly very erect and very interested nipples.

He captured her wandering hand in his and held it tight. If she kept that up, they’d never get anything important discussed. His dick could wait for a minute.

It wouldn’t be happy, but it could do it.

“About what happened when you told Norm that you were pregnant,” he said seriously, and she instantly went rigid in his arms.

Bingo.

She probably had no idea that her body language was so revealing, but based on just that response, he was now damn sure that there was something that’d happened that night that she wasn’t telling.

And if he was right, it’d relate to that comment she’d made earlier about not being worth it. He was about 98.2% sure that this Norman guy (who really deserved to have his teeth rearranged and as Adam figured it, he was just the guy to do it), had screwed with her head big time.

“I already told you about that night,” she said, sitting up and pushing her hair out of her face. She crossed her arms across her chest. “There’s really not much more to say.”

“During our walk by that damn river,” Adam said mildly, “you told me that you told Norm about the pregnancy, and that’s when he revealed that he was already married.”

“Yeah? So?” she asked defensively. “What else is there to say?”

He rolled over onto his side, propping his head up with his hand, intentionally keeping his body language loose and welcoming. He reached out and stroked her knee. “Well, I’m going to guess that the conversation continued after that,” he said, keeping his voice even and calm. She was on the verge of hysterics, he could tell. It was building up inside of her, like a volcano just preparing to explode. “When he told you that he was married, what did you say?”

“I was in shock. I sputtered and yelled and cried a bit.”

“And what did he say in defense of it?”

“Just that he was gone from home a lot and it was hard for a man with his needs to go that long between each session of…you know…sex.” She waved her hand in the air dismissively.

“All right, so he said it was okay to cheat on his wife because he was incapable of keeping his dick in his pants. And then what?”

“And then what what?” Kylie repeated, her whole body so rigid, he was pretty sure he could use her as a ruler in that moment.

“Well, he didn’t divorce his wife and move to Sawyer, Idaho with you,” Adam pointed out. “You’re not engaged, you’re not married, and unless you’re hiding it pretty well, you’re not in contact with him. Are you?”

She shook her head, lips pressed tightly together.

“So after you two established that he’s a scumball and asshole extraordinaire, what did you guys discuss about the future? About the baby?”

Her gaze dropped to the bedspread between them and she began plucking at a loose thread. She didn’t say anything for a long time, and as Adam studied her face, waiting patiently for her to keep talking, he knew she was debating whether or not to tell him the truth. Whether or not their relationship was worth the pain of reliving that night.

Then, finally…

“He walked over to his jeans piled on the floor,” she said in a dead voice, “pulled out his wallet, and threw five one hundred dollar bills at me. Told me to take care of the problem. Told me I wasn’t worth marrying; wasn’t worth screwing up his life over. Told me that he’d been thinking he would stop coming to Bend for a while now, but that I’d been so needy, so desperate for him, that he’d continued to come just to placate me, but that we were over now. He put his clothes back on, and as he was leaving, he told me one last time that I better ‘take care of it.’ Then he walked out.”

Her voice was robotic, like she was reciting an entry from the encyclopedia, but the tears…

There were tears streaming down her cheeks that gave it away. No matter how hard she tried to shut herself down, the tears betrayed her. She didn’t make a move to wipe them away, almost as if she believed that if she didn’t acknowledge them, then they didn’t exist.

Adam continued to stroke up and down her thigh, trying to convey a sense of calm and peace and love. He felt like a world-class asshole himself even as he quietly asked, “That’s it? He just walked out?” He didn’t want to pry, he didn’t want to break her, but he could also feel something else there, something under the skin that she wasn’t letting out.

“He threw me around a bit, okay?!” she snarled, head jerking up, pale green eyes glowing with pain and hatred and anger and hurt. “Are you happy? He made sure not to touch my face but the rest of me was fair game. I’m lucky I didn’t lose the baby that night. He whaled on me, told me I was a dumb bitch, he couldn’t believe I’d gotten pregnant, couldn’t believe he had to clean up this mess. Told me I wasn’t worth his time. I wasn’t worth…I wasn’t worth anything at all.”

And then she broke.

The thing he hadn’t wanted to see but somehow knew needed to happen, happened right before his eyes.

She curled up in a ball on the bed, crying hysterically, screaming into the mattress, nothing making sense, shoulders shaking, deep shuddering breaths. Adam curled himself around her, his body shielding her from the world, from Norman, from everything. She shook and sobbed and cried for what seemed like hours. As he held her, he thought about the words she’d said, how this monster had beat her.

Adam had thought before that he knew what hate was. He hated getting stepped on by a cow. He hated lima beans. He hated not getting everything done in a day that he needed to.

But this…this was hatred that went bone deep. Beyond reasoning, beyond thought, beyond explanation, he hated Norman. Adam had never thought of himself as being a particularly violent man but in that moment, all he could think about was if he ever met this Norman, he’d kill him.

He’d kill him, and it’d be worth it. Because anyone who did this to a sweet person like Kylie…they didn’t deserve to live anymore.

“After he left,” she said dully, her words breaking into his anger and hatred, drawing him back into the moment, “I picked myself up off the floor. Everything moved okay, and I realized that he didn’t break anything. So I started packing. He knew where I lived and where I worked; I couldn’t stay there. I wasn’t about to have an abortion of my baby. My roommate came home in the middle of it and totally freaked out because I looked like a mess, but I just kept packing. I took everything I could fit into my suitcase, left everything else behind, and bought a ticket home on the Greyhound bus. I used his money to escape him. I think the irony is rather well deserved, to be honest.”

She stopped talking and just lay there, bones loose, face pale and streaked with tears, staring off into the distance. She had nothing left in her. He continued to stroke down her body, pushing her hair away from her face, holding her, loving her.

“I haven’t told anyone what happened,” she whispered, breaking into the silence surrounding them. “Well, my roommate guessed, of course, but she promised not to say anything. When I got here to Sawyer, I just told my mom about the baby and him being married, but nothing else. You know how Mom is.” She waved her hand in the air dismissively. “She would’ve wanted to file a police report and drag his ass into court and get him behind bars, but I know him. I know how charismatic and charming he can be, and it’d just be my word against his. So what if I had a few bruises on my body? I could be a clumsy person. I could’ve been robbed by a maniac on the street. How can I prove that it was him who did it to me? Plus…” She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “I was a wimp when he first showed up that night. I didn’t want to tell him and ruin the beautiful relationship that we had.”

She rolled her eyes at herself. “I had myself convinced that he was going to propose to me when he heard the news, but there was some deeper part of me that knew that this revelation would be destructive. So instead of just telling him the truth right away, we had sex first. I was the one who initiated it. I wanted to just forget everything for a minute. So yeah, we had consensual sex and then he beat on me. A defense lawyer could say that maybe I just liked things rough and it was part of our sexual relationship.” She shrugged. “So, he gets away with it.”

Adam knew that it was his job to listen and to console, not to try to solve the problem, if there even was a solution for it. Short of tracking the guy down and doing some dental work on him, it was too late to file a police report against him or press charges. Sure, it wasn’t too late under the law, but without pictures to prove injuries, it would be a horribly difficult case to prove at this point.

Despite knowing that, it was still unreasonably difficult to keep his anger in check. What if Norm was doing this to other women? Defenseless women who were smaller and weaker than him? He was a stereotypical bully – he’d never pick on someone who could actually put up a fair fight. That wouldn’t be any fun at all. But fun-sized Kylie…she made an easy target.

How many other Kylies were there out there?

Adam was sick at the thought.

“I’ll be leaving now,” she said dully. “I can pack up my stuff and be out by morning.” She swung her legs off the bed, trying to push herself upright. “My mom will help me move out, so you don’t need to let me use your truck again.”

Adam’s hand snaked out and grabbed Kylie’s arm. “What?” he asked, totally bewildered. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been sitting there, trying to think of how to tell me to get out of your life,” she said, her eyes dead, her voice wooden. “I’m trying to make it easy on you. Isn’t that what all men want? For the women in their lives to just shut up and go away and stop being so needy all the time?” She let out a short, humorless laugh. “Please take your clothes and get dressed elsewhere, though. I’d like to get dressed now, and I don’t want to do it in front of you.”

“Kylie, darlin’, we need to take a step back for just a moment,” Adam said, trying to maintain the calm demeanor he’d been using all along. It began to slip on him, though, when he faced the thought of losing her. “I haven’t been sitting here, trying to think of how to get rid of you. I’ve been sitting here, trying to understand how monsters like Norman still exist. There’s a large part of me that wants to track him down and do some dental work on him, but I know that—”

“Dental work?” she interrupted him, eyebrows creased, looking puzzled. It was the first time she looked anything but robotic since he forced this topic out into the open, and Adam clung to that small improvement like a lifeline tossed from the Titanic.

“Yeah. You know, rearrange his teeth a little. Punch him in the face. Show him what it feels like to be on the receiving end for once.”

She looked genuinely puzzled, as if Adam had begun speaking Swahili on her, and he reached out his hand to stroke her cheek, laughing a little as he did so. “Honey, falling in love with a charming, narcissistic asshole doesn’t mean that you deserve to be treated like shit. It just means that he was convincing and manipulative, and you, being the sweet person that you are, believed him. It’s a commentary on him, not on you.”

“Don’t call me ‘honey,’” she said quietly.

He cocked an eyebrow, waiting patiently for her to explain her request, because there was absolutely a story behind that one.

“It was his nickname for me. It’s common, of course, but I don’t think he called me Kylie but once or twice. It was always ‘honey.’ Now that I know the truth, I think he did it because it was easier for him to just call everyone ‘honey.’ What if he’d accidentally screwed up and called me by his wife’s name or something?”

“I imagine for a serial philanderer, it’s a difficult problem to manage,” Adam said with a small laugh. “I’d pretend to have sympathy for him, but I’m afraid I don’t have much at this point.”

“Yeah. Me either.” Kylie shot him a grimace that he guessed was supposed to be a smile, and then they sat in silence for a minute. Adam wanted to make sure she’d said all that she wanted to say. This was her time to get this shit off her chest, and he wasn’t going to interrupt her if she had anything left to spill.

When she didn’t say anything else, though, he reached out his hand and stroked it over her cheek, staring up into her red-rimmed eyes. “Darlin’, God only knows that this is easier said than done, but I’m telling you right now: Whatever bullshit that man told you, he was wrong. You need to not only know that, but believe that. With me, right here, right now, I want to start over.”

He drew in a deep breath for courage, and then plunged on.

“When I tell you that I love you, when I tell you that you’re the world to me, when I tell you that I’d give up almost anything to make you smile, I damn well mean it. I don’t play games. It isn’t in my DNA. My mother loved one man her whole life. She’ll be the first to say that she’s a ‘one man woman!’ and she shakes her finger in the air when she says it. I’m up to two, but yeah. I’m definitely my mother’s son.”

“Two?” Kylie asked, confused. “I thought you loved Wendy and Chloe before me.”

“Wendy – absolutely. Wholeheartedly. I loved her since I knew what love was. But Chloe…I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. I helped her give birth on the side of the road, in the middle of a blizzard, and then was a big part of her life for nine years. She friend-zoned me out of the gate, though, and I never really had a chance with her.

“To be honest, I think she was more attractive to me because of that. She was safe. We would never go anywhere as a couple, and after Wendy’s death, that’s actually what I wanted, even if I didn’t know it myself. I wasn’t ready to move on yet, so I put her up on this pedestal, a pedestal that no woman could actually live up to. If you never really get to know someone, then they can appear perfect. It was easy to retain that illusion from afar. But no one is truly perfect.”

“What?!” Kylie gasped in mock outrage, a bit of a laugh sneaking into her voice that had been missing since this whole awful discussion began. “Are you trying to imply, sir, that I am not perfect? Tell me, in which way do I fall short of perfection?”

“Well, speaking of being short, you obviously didn’t eat your Wheaties growing up, a terrible failure on your part.” He ignored her protests that being compared to a giant just wasn’t fair, and continued on. “Then there’s your insane predilection towards carrots instead of donuts, which is obviously a sign of some sort of mental defect—”

“Mental defect?!” she half yelled, half laughed. “Just because I think that eating healthy is—”

“And then, of course,” he continued on, bowling right over her, “you have this unhealthy obsession with mops and brooms and Windex. I mean, have you seen the floor of the clinic lately? I swear to God, you could eat off it. It just isn’t right.” He shook his head mournfully. “Oh, for the days of cobwebs and gray walls and dirt-encrusted everything. Don’t hate me too much, spiders – I wasn’t the one who took your home away.”

Kylie was laughing so hard, she couldn’t even protest anymore, but rather collapsed onto the bed, holding her sides as she roared with laughter.

“I don’t even know how it is,” he said softly, hovering over her with a gentle smile, “that I can put up with you.” He kissed her and she looked up at him, laughter and a bittersweet happiness in her pale green eyes. “Not with such a terrible list of flaws like you have,” he whispered.

“It is awfully kind of you,” she said solemnly. He could see that she was drifting in that in-between world, between laughter and crying, and just the slightest push could send her spinning back the other direction. She was fragile in that moment; far beyond the fragility of her small frame, but rather it was a deep fragility, a hairline crack running through her emotions that could be broken with just the slightest pressure. “Speaking of being kind,” she whispered, “would you be so kind as to just hold me for a minute?”

“Anytime,” he whispered, and pulled her against him, wrapping his arm tight around her waist, drifting through the summer evening with her in his arms.