Chapter 20

No man is worth losing a friend over. Unless she touched his beard, then it’s game on.

-Hennessy to Krisney

Hennessy

“Tell me something…”

His brows rose to his hairline, and he sat back and opened his arms. “Whatever you want to know.”

Seriously, it was like this man wasn’t willing to give me anything. He may act all nonchalant right now, but the minute I started digging too deep was the minute he’d take a step back.

“What was your home life like?”

He gave me a droll look.

“You know about my home life.”

I did, but I didn’t.

Everyone thought they knew, yet there wasn’t a single person in this town, I didn’t believe, that had the entire story.

“I don’t…”

“There’s nothing to know, Henn. You have the basics. My mother was gone most of the time. She was more of a roommate than a mother. I guess she loved me in her own way, but at this point in my life I haven’t figured out how that was.”

I sighed.

“What interests you?”

His mouth quirked.

“Pretty women that have daddy issues.”

I flushed from the roots of my hair to the tops of my knees.

“And what kind of woman is that?”

I was playing with fire.

This had gotten out of hand very quickly. Why did this man have the ability to do this to me? He always had.

“You,” he said. “Only ever you.”

Something warm started to fill my belly.

He’d been slowly filling it all night, but now I was filled to the brim, and it was about to spill over.

I’d been seconds away from giving in, from throwing myself into his arms and telling him that I was sorry for being such a jerk.

In a last ditch effort to keep him from getting too close, I’d told him I wanted to know more about him, knowing that he wouldn’t want to give me that information.

He never talked about himself. In fact, he went out of his way to not talk about himself. He didn’t like his mother. He wasn’t very close to his father. The minute any of them came up, he turned and walked away so he wouldn’t have to talk about them.

I’d seen him do it to no less than ten people in the last couple of weeks. And when I’d tried to broach that topic while he was seeing me strictly as a patient, he’d skirted the issue, and downright shut it down, unwilling to talk about it.

Now, though? He didn’t once hesitate to talk about it.

Dammit!

“Are you sure that you don’t want to ask about my sister? About my time in the Marines when I was deployed?” He paused. “Most of it you already know. When I was talking to you at your office in the beginning, I wasn’t doing it as your patient. I was doing it as the man who was falling in love with you. As the man who’s been in love with you since way before he ever should have had feelings for you.”

And the last of my misgivings melted away.

My eyes went to the corner of the room.

I looked at the innocent looking toy that I’d had for years.

Well, it wasn’t innocent to me.

My dad gave it to me as a reminder.

I was never smart enough to solve it, and when I got frustrated and tried to break it, my father had taken my birthday present back.

“My dad thought I was stupid.”

He didn’t say anything.

“If I give you my heart,” I said, walking over to the toy and picking it up. “You better take care of it.”

His eyes went to the toy that I’d dragged my finger across, then to me.

“He laughed at me when I couldn’t figure this out,” I said. “He gave it to me for my birthday. He’d said he’d ran out of time to get me a present, and had seen this at the dollar store.”

It still had the hundred-dollar bill in it.

Every once in a while, I picked it up and tried to solve it, but I never could.

“I try to solve this every couple of weeks. Have been steadily doing it since I got it from him,” I said, turning and handing it to him. “He laughed at me when he found out that I couldn’t do it.”

He took the innocent toy, looked at my face, and then down at the puzzle.

Then he stood up, dropped the toy to the floor, and slammed his booted foot down onto it.

The puzzle smashed into a hundred tiny pieces.

I gasped.

“Your father doesn’t have control of you anymore,” he said. “And I never had the patience for those, either.”

I started to laugh.

He watched me for a few long moments, and then took two long steps toward me.

The next thing I knew, I was on my back in the bed, all my carefully folded clothes scattering to the sides and the floor.

His mouth slammed down onto mine, and he growled.

“Your dad is a fucking asshole,” he said. “He probably laughed because he thought it was funny, but it wasn’t. It was a shit thing to do, and the moment that he saw that it was frustrating you, he should’ve done something to help, not made it worse by laughing.”

I agreed, wholeheartedly.

I was a psychologist. I knew that I should be practicing the same thing I preached.

But when it came to my father and all the crap he’d put me through over the years, it was hard to separate myself from the little girl I once used to be.

But before I could tell him anything more, he pushed my shirt up and over my head, and pressed a single chaste kiss to the base of my throat.

“I want to fuck you.”

My belly clenched.

“I want to show you that I’m not a bad guy.”

I closed my eyes.

Which meant I missed him when he stood up and pulled my shirt down as if he was never between my legs.

“But I’m going to give you tonight, and most of tomorrow to think about what we’ve talked about today.”

My eyes flashed open.

“And tomorrow when I come by, we’ll finish where we left off.”

Then he was gone, and I was left staring at what remained of the puzzle that I’d stared at for nearly half my life. Only this time its shattered remains didn’t fill me with a sense of unease.

And I found that by breaking that, Tate had somehow set something free inside of me, leaving me with hope that maybe he could set other things free, too.