Quinn lay tangled in her bed sheets, watching the sun give way to shadows on her bedroom floor. After their mind-blowing session in her living room chair, Luke had led her in here, letting her pause just long enough to throw on a tank top and a pair of boy shorts before pulling her beneath the covers and holding her close. She’d dozed for a little while—this morning’s fear-laced adrenaline rush might have been strong, but it had also paled temporarily in the face of both the preternaturally amazing sex she and Luke had shared and the comfort of his closeness afterward.

Quinn’s fear hadn’t remained at bay for long, though. Reality crept back in with the early evening shadows, turning her nerves ragged and reminding her that not even great sex could distract her forever.

Are you sure great sex is all it was?

Her heartbeat sped beneath the light gray cotton of her tank top, so quickly that if Luke were awake, he’d surely have felt it. Okay, so what they’d shared this afternoon had felt like more than sex, like maybe they’d been connected on a different level than before. The emotion in Luke’s eyes had been obvious, even though his words had been wicked and his actions even more so. There had been no mistaking the truth in his words.

I need you. Just you.

“You know, if your heart rate goes any higher, I might be forced to do an exam.”

Even though Luke’s voice was quiet, Quinn jumped all the same. “Maybe my heart is beating fast because you just scared the shit out of me,” she said, but of course, he was too smart to let such a lame answer squeak by.

“Or maybe you’ve got something on your mind that you need to talk about.” He shifted from beneath the covers, sitting up to look at her, and damn it. Damn it! How could he see so far into her with one little stare?

“I’m worried that Ice is going to hurt someone I care about,” Quinn said, because Luke wasn’t going to let her off the hook until she did. “But I don’t need to talk about it. I don’t even want to think about it. I’ll feel a whole lot better once I can just get back to work like normal.”

Unease built in her stomach, forming a hot, heavy ball. The longer they sat there in silence, the more tempted she was to fork over the truth, to admit that she wasn’t just worried but terrified, and that she didn’t know how to make the feeling go away.

Luke’s eyes remained steady even though his voice was soft enough to take another chunk out of her resolve. “What you’re feeling right now isn’t your normal. You’re trying to drown yourself in taking care of other people so you don’t focus on the fact that who you really need to be taking care of is you.”

Her heart slammed with how right he was, how much she wanted to tell him so, yet her defenses sank in with teeth and hooks. “Oh, really? And how do you know that?”

“Because I do the exact same thing, Quinn. I do it every. Single. Day.”

His undiluted honesty hit her like a wrecking ball, and Quinn had no choice. She pushed up from the bed, wrapping her arms around his shoulders.

“I’m just so scared,” she said, her words as rickety as an old staircase. “I thought by now I’d be able to shake it. For a while, I did. But then I saw Ice today, and it was like nothing had changed at all, and…God, I just don’t know how to make this fear stop. Every time I think I’m okay, it comes back like a boomerang. I don’t know how to make it go away.”

Luke’s arms tightened around her, his hands flattening over her shoulder blades, reminding her how to breathe. “I don’t either,” he admitted.

“You don’t?” she asked. His honesty took her by surprise, but rather than frustrating her—or worse, making her more frightened—the simple admission allowed her the chance to breathe.

“I don’t.” His fingers pressed into place. There. Breathe. “I can’t pretend to have all the answers, no matter how badly I want to. But I can promise I’ll be here to help you find them.”

The truth of it grounded her more than any nicety or pat “there there”-style answer, and she pulled back to look at him. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

“Because the week-old memory of being threatened at gunpoint still scares you? God.” His eyes widened. “Of course not.”

When he said it that way, her fear seemed a lot more logical than it felt. Still… “It’s just that you’re handling all of this so much better than I am. To be honest, I’m a little jealous.”

“You shouldn’t be. Believe me.” Luke blew out a breath. A flare of emotion moved over his face, a corresponding pang of shock moving through her when he didn’t blank it or cover it up. “You know a minute ago, when I said I bury myself in taking care of other people so I won’t have to look too hard at myself?”

Quinn turned toward him, her knees brushing over his bare legs beneath the bed sheets. “Yes,” she said. This was the point at which Luke usually clammed up or re-channeled the conversation.

Only this time, he didn’t.

“I wasn’t exaggerating. My mother was…killed in an accident when I was fourteen.” The words were rusty, as if they hadn’t been spoken in ages, and they stunned Quinn into momentary silence. “A gas main explosion destroyed the real estate office where she worked. No one inside the building survived.”

Quinn’s heart wrenched, and even though she knew from her own personal experience that no words existed to erase the ache, she said, “Oh, Luke. I’m so sorry.”

He nodded. “We were totally blindsided. Hayley was just shy of her seventh birthday, and I was in middle school. One minute, we were a normal family, going to work and school and having dinner together every night, and the next…everything was wrong.”

Tears burned behind her eyes. As much as she’d hated it, she’d had time to adjust to the thought of losing her father, and she’d been too young when her mother had died to really understand the loss. But this? God, no wonder Luke didn’t talk about it.

Except now, he was. “My grandmother, Momma Billie, came up from Asheville. She was devastated, too—my mother was her only child, and my grandfather died before I was born. But after the accident, it was my father who was completely non-functional.”

“Your father?” Quinn’s cheeks blazed with the heat of her graceless blurt, and she bit her lip hard in penance. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I assumed he wasn’t in the picture since you didn’t mention him, but I shouldn’t have—”

“No, you’re right,” Luke said, his mouth set in a hard line and his body rigid beside hers in the bed. “He’s not in the picture. He hasn’t been since the day my mother died.”

After a minute of silence, Quinn gave in to her confusion. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“My father spent two days locked in his room after the accident. He refused to see me or Hayley, or anyone. Then, the night before the funeral, he walked out of the house. He said…” Luke paused for a deep draw of breath, the look on his face making the hairs on the back of Quinn’s neck prickle even though she couldn’t pinpoint why. “He said he needed some air. So he walked to the park where he and my mother used to take me and Hayley all the time when we were little. Then he sat down under an old weeping willow tree and shot himself in the head.”

For an odd clip of a second, the combination of words was so strange, their meaning so utterly foreign, that Quinn was certain she’d misunderstood.

And then she realized she hadn’t.

Oh God. Oh God. “Luke,” she whispered, her heart bottoming out in her belly. But it was as if, now that he’d kicked the conversation into motion, he couldn’t stop it, and he kept going, the words pouring out.

“Some nearby neighbors heard the gunshot and called the police, but he’d planned it well. The wound was instantly fatal. We buried them together, then Momma Billie moved to Remington to raise me and Hayley. I found out later that he’d left a note asking her to look after us. But that was all it said.”

“I don’t…” Quinn’s throat closed, so she swallowed hard and said the only true thing she could think of. “I don’t know what to say. That must have been really awful for all of you.”

Luke made a sound that would have been a laugh, except there was no happiness in it. “It was surreal. Hayley was too young to understand a lot of what had happened. She kept asking where our mom was, and when our dad would be coming home.”

God, Quinn could relate. Every time her phone rang in that first year after her father died, she’d had an irrational pang of hope that it was him before remembering he couldn’t possibly be calling.

“Anyway,” Luke continued. “After two months, Momma Billie decided to sell the house. I think she knew it would be too hard for any of us to live there. So we moved to Mission Park.”

“That doesn’t sound like a bad decision,” Quinn ventured, and he nodded.

“It helped Hayley, and even though she never said so, I think it helped Momma Billie, too.”

Quinn whispered, “But not you?”

He lifted one shoulder halfway before letting it drop. “Not really. They were both sad, so the distance worked for them, but I wasn’t just sad. I was angry. I thought my father was selfish to leave us. A coward who took the easy way out while the rest of us were left to figure out the hard parts. Sometimes, on the really hard days, I’m still angry,” he said quietly. “But my mother was the love of his life, and we were such a happy family. I guess losing her just broke him. I don’t really know. Then Hayley got sick and lost her hearing, and suddenly, there were bigger things to worry over than not having parents. So I did the only thing I could do.”

Quinn recognized the look in his eyes like an old friend. Of course. “You took care of your family.”

“I threw myself into doing everything I could for my grandmother and my sister,” Luke agreed. “I took extra jobs after school to help pay Hayley’s medical bills. I learned sign language right along with her once we realized she wasn’t a candidate for hearing aids or surgery. I figured out how to make plans and fix things. Don’t get me wrong—there were a lot of rough moments. But eventually, we had a bunch of good ones, too. I still take care of them both the best I can.”

“That’s why you pick up all those extra shifts, isn’t it?” Quinn asked, realization sinking through her like a stone in still water. “And why you don’t hang out with everyone at Seventeen in your spare time?”

He hesitated. “That’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?”

Another hesitation, this one longer. “I’m, ah. Not so good at letting people in.”

His voice played back in her head from only a few minutes ago. You drown yourself in taking care of other people so you don’t focus on the fact that who you really need to be taking care of is you…I know because I do it every damn day…

“Getting close to people means you might lose them, and that scares you,” she said, the last piece to the puzzle falling into place with a startling snap. The way he’d always stayed one step outside of things at the fire house, how he subtly shifted the spotlight of each conversation off of himself, the calm, cool way he managed the emotions from the same situation that had threatened to upend her completely—God, all of it made so much sense.

Luke hadn’t been building distance. He’d been building armor.

And now he was taking it off to show her what was underneath.

“Yeah. I just…” His voice caught, and Quinn’s heart along with it. “I remember how much losing them hurt, you know? How scared I felt. How lost.”

“Oh, Luke.” Her chest ached, but she firmed up her words. She wasn’t foolish enough to think she could take away the pain of him losing his parents. But she could be here for him now. “Of course you felt scared and lost. You lost your mom and dad too early, and you loved them very much.”

“I did. I still do.” He released an unstable exhale, and she didn’t think. Just grabbed his hand and squeezed.

He squeezed back, holding her fingers tight as he continued. “I guess I just thought if I took care of other people but didn’t let them get too close, I’d be able to keep myself from ever feeling like that again.”

For a minute, Quinn sat there in the sunset shadows of her bedroom, trying to find the balance between her racing heart and her spinning thoughts. But Luke had trusted her with the truth. The least she could do was return the favor.

“I’m scared to lose the people I care about, too. But you’re funny, and smart, and probably the kindest person I’ve ever met. You deserve to share that. You deserve to be cared for, too.”

“We’re kind of a matched set, huh?” he asked, and the irony of it made Quinn laugh.

“I’ll tell you what. I promise to lean on you when I need help if you can promise me something in return.”

Luke’s dark brows went up. “And what’s that?”

She moved forward to put her forehead on his, stealing a kiss from his lips before she said what was in her heart. “You’ll let me help you, too. Ten years is a long time not to let anybody take care of you. I’m not saying you have to share everything, all the time,” she added, because while she wanted to be there for Luke whenever he needed her, she wasn’t about to force her way in. “But we’re partners. We’re supposed to hold each other up.”

“We are partners,” he said, brushing a return kiss over her mouth.

Quinn’s breath hitched, and God, she would never get enough of this man. “So does that mean we have a deal?”

Luke pulled her close, his smile growing as he kissed her more deeply.

“Yeah. We have a deal.”