CALLAN TURNED THE LIGHT on.
I looked around my shitty apartment, and it hit me like a freight train. Anger, fear, acute fear, resentment, panic, rage—all of it—all at once. The momentary peace I had felt on the plane, the safety, the contentment, it all vanished with a single illumination of one light. I was no longer curled up next to a god of a man on a luxurious private jet. I was a poor, failing student without a job who had been kidnapped by sex traffickers because I was naïve and stupid.
I wanted to rip the cupboard doors off and shatter every dish. I wanted to smash the TV and yank the curtains from the wall. I wanted to kick over every piece of furniture, and I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs.
Then I wanted to never, ever, come back here.
I was never going to be the girl who put on makeup to go to a club again. I was never going to spend hours on my hair and stare at my ass in the mirror in fifty outfits until I found just the right one. I was never going to dress myself up again for a rapist and a sex trafficker.
“Too much?” he asked.
His deep quiet voice wasn’t the soothing balm I needed, it was an anchor. An anchor for the lies I’d been feeding myself since I’d answered an ad for a babysitter out of desperation two years ago. I’d been drowning in schoolwork I hated, studying to become a nurse when I hated the sight of blood, but telling myself a nursing job would be one that was always in demand. I’d told myself a nursing job would support me my whole life. I’d convinced myself I’d never need a man or anyone else who could desert me or abandon me.
But I’d been lying to myself.
Everything in my life had been a fucking lie.
There wasn’t one thing I’d loved about it.
Except a little four-year-old boy.
I’d loved taking care of Ethan. I’d loved him like he was my own. I didn’t want to be single my whole life, taking care of other people. I wanted a husband and I wanted my own children. I wanted to love them and nurture them and never, ever, abandon them. I wanted to be everything to my own kids that I never had.
This apartment wasn’t too much.
It wasn’t enough.
“I hate it here.” I uttered the words I’d never allowed myself to say out loud.
With a single nod, Callan was moving. Graceful like a panther, he took two strides and picked up my empty backpack hanging from the stools I’d found on the side of the road. “Pack what you need.” He lifted a pile of schoolbooks and started to place them in the backpack.
“I don’t need those.” I was already struggling to keep up with schoolwork but the exam I’d missed wasn’t one I’d ever pass now. And I didn’t care. “I’m done with school.”
No judgment, he tipped his chin toward the bedroom. “You will need clothes.”
I didn’t want any of my clothes. I didn’t want this stupid shirt Phoebe had insisted I buy, knowing I hated it, but she claimed it showed off my boobs. And I didn’t want the other crap she’d stuffed in my bag. I didn’t want to fit in. I didn’t want to try so hard. I didn’t want any of it. I couldn’t be who I was anymore, I just couldn’t.
A rough, calloused hand grasped the back of my neck. “I cannot help if you do not tell me what is going on.”
I looked up into the bluest, most intense eyes I’d ever seen. “I can’t do this.” I fought tears. I wasn’t going to be that girl anymore. “I can’t be me. I can’t be the me who lived here. I don’t want to be a nurse. I don’t want to go to school, and I never want to sit in this shitty apartment again and think about the night I let you go so I could get dressed up like a Christmas present for a sex trafficker.”
He increased the pressure on my nape. “I will never let anything happen to you again.”
How could he promise me that? He couldn’t. I was the one who’d chosen clubbing over him. “I let you go,” I whispered, guilt and shame eating at me almost as much as regret.
“I am right here.”
Solid and safe and beautiful and forgiving, he was right here, and I wasn’t deserving of any of it. Not as the girl I was. “I can’t be her anymore. I can’t be the person who lived here.”
“Who do you want to be?”
I wanted to be his, just his. I wanted to belong to him so bad, it hurt to think about an alternative. A man I’d kissed once, a man I’d never slept with, a man I didn’t even know if I was compatible with—I just wanted to be his. More than anything I’d ever wanted in my whole life. More than even wanting to meet the sorry excuse of a man who’d never claimed his own daughter or bothered to meet her. But the old me wouldn’t let myself tell a man I wanted to be his. It wouldn’t let me utter traitorous words that stood against everything I’d fought for my whole life.
“I don’t know.” I muttered a partial truth. I didn’t know how to belong to this man. I didn’t know if he would even want a woman with no desire to be anything else than the woman by his side.
His lips gently touched my forehead. “I know what I want you to be.”
My aching muscles stiffened. In fear of what he’d say, fear of what he wouldn’t, fear that he would want me to be so much more than what I was capable of. But I didn’t want to live in fear anymore, and I never wanted to be a victim again. So I asked the question I didn’t know if I wanted the answer to because that’s what a strong person would do. “What?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Mine.”
Four letters. One word.
Nothing could have been more perfect.
And it hit me.
I loved him.
The thought, the feeling, it should’ve been a shock, but it wasn’t. It was already in the very fiber of my being, just like I was meant to be right here, in this very moment. Without reservation, without fear, my mind caught up to my heart, and I swelled with love for this incredibly strong, honorable, and resilient man standing in front of me. More, I understood his yearning, his need to have someone to belong to as much as I understood this force between us wasn’t something I could’ve ever controlled.
But I didn’t fall in love with him because he rescued me. This wasn’t about the past he’d come from, or the integrity he possessed. I wasn’t head over heels simply because he was the most alpha male I’d ever met. I was in love with him because of a single word.
Mine.
He chose me. He wanted me. He yearned for me.
And he gave me all of those emotions, and more, in a single-word response, capturing the brutal, majestic honesty that was all him.
It was the single most beautiful, humbling moment of my life, and I loved him for it.
I loved Callan Anders.
“I want to be yours,” I whispered. “More than anything.”